Making Percussion Caps

[Music] hey everybody and welcome back to hoffman reproductions thank you all again for tuning in with us today taking a little break this time around from our series on flintlock shooting weather hasn't been very nice for getting out in the woods so doing this segment of the video inside this is in response to a question that a subscriber posted a while back about is it possible to make uh percussion caps homemade percussion caps and indeed it is it's somewhat of a tedious boring process but it can indeed be done and add yet another layer of self-sufficiency to black powder enthusiasts so you do need to get a few things if you're going to do this uh first thing you need to get is a little tool similar to this for cutting out the percussion caps the company that made this particular model i bought this probably oh 20 25 years ago they're no longer in business but a company that is producing one that is similar to this uh is a company you can find it on the internet at 22 lreloader.com and they make this little die for cutting out the percussion caps that i'll demonstrate here it retails for 49.95 and uh of course it's an investment and once you get it you're off to the races you really don't need a whole lot more but you will need that some scrap aluminum pop can pieces any kind of work your preferred drink um you will need some paper roll toy caps get these at uh most places that sell capped guns a little harder to find nowadays than when i was a kid but you can find them online of course they're very cheap a hammer small wooden stick with a rounded end for pushing the cut caps down in the percussion caps shells that we're going to make and a paper punch as far as the effectiveness of these caps when you're shooting them i'd say you can expect about 95 percent fire rate occasionally you will get a misfire but it's fairly rare as i'll demonstrate later on in our video actually we're gonna go out on the range and fire a few live rounds but i'd say about 95 percent efficiency on the effectiveness of these and even with commercial caps i occasionally have gotten misfires and you can use these in all standard number 11 size nipples on your rifles uh muskets civil war muskets obviously these aren't going to fit your adilect there but these will also fit on black powder cap and ball revolvers i had an 1860 army colt revolver that i used to make these for and use and work very well so before we head down to the shooting range i'll go ahead and demonstrate quickly here how to go about making these so this little cutter head comes out of this die there's a little slot right here with the colored side facing up a piece of the aluminum strip from our pop can goes in there stick the cutter head in there take your hammer a couple of swats and out pops our little percussion cap shell you can use real thin brass or copper if you want a little more period correct look but this is the cheapest way to do it of course if you get scrap cans it won't cost you anything so once you have those you're going to take a paper punch and they make different sizes some guys like different heads some prefer they say there's a cutter that you can get that punches out a little star and that works really good in these this is the one that i have my little holder just fell off there but uh it's just a round cutter so you just center it right over the cap punch it out didn't quite punch out all the way there we got them and as close you can to the center and you're gonna do this three times for each cap that's what the directions the old directions that i recall said to use three uh trying to cut out more say four or five and jam them in there it doesn't work it doesn't produce a hotter cap it will just clog up your nipple with paper and they won't all ignite so once you have that done and you may want to hold this with a little set of pliers because jamming these around in there these little toy caps are somewhat sensitive they can pop on you which can give you a little burn so i just lick the end of that stick holding it off the area where the priming is okay so i've got the one push down in there you're going to repeat that with the two other sections that we cut out for a grand total of three and some people claim that uh you know this is so tedious why bother doing it uh again yes it is tedious but percussion caps kind of sometimes they're easy to get they kind of fluctuate sometimes they're easy to get readily available other times not sometimes they're cheap sometimes they're not and it kind of ebbs and flows with what's going on in the world and the shooting and reloading world so again this is just another facet if you want to be more selfish sufficient in black powder shooting sports this is another avenue you can try and you'd be surprised how many of these once you kind of get a feel for it you can knock out in an evening it's a kind of a fun little project to do in the cold winter months if you sit down and do you know a couple dozen per night you can come up with a pretty good little load they do have a bit of a shelf life you don't want to make them up years in advance some of the ones that we're going to go here and fire i've had for probably 10 or 15 years and that's kind of outdated so they're going to lose some of their potency best too if you want to make them to use make up however many you want maybe a little extra use them and then make them as you need them so that the caps stay good and hot and don't deteriorate so we'll conclude for now and we'll head on down to the shooting range and we'll give a few of these homemade caps a test we're down here at the range with one of my few percussion guns this is a little 45 caliber kentucky rifle that was made by cva and this is the very first muzzleloader that i ever bought when i believe i was around 13 years old so we're going to go ahead and give our homemade percussion caps a try on this rifle i'm shooting 55 grains of 2f homemade black powder pillow ticking patch and a .443 round ball so we got a target out at about 30 yards we'll see what happens okay that was pretty good no hesitation at all gun went right off we'll load up for shot number two okay number two all right no prob okay number three [Applause] okay number three fell off let me go for number four only works if the caps actually on the gun [Applause] all right so just in case you were wondering if the homemade percussion caps had any result on accuracy one way or another again i was shooting at about 30 yards and the three shots there on the blue x were the ones that i fired today the large holes were from a musket that i test fired the other day and for me that's pretty good that's about a three and a half inch group and um given the fact i'm a little bit weak and shaky because my children shared their uh strep throat with me there last week so i'm a little bit weak and shaky but i am recovering anyhow uh acura's accuracy is pretty good and i took a shot at a 50-yard target our swinging board that's up there that's about six inches by eight and managed to hit it too so accuracy is pretty good with these uh homemade percussion caps okay so we fired six rounds out of this rifle i fired a few of them off camera just for fun at a long range target to see how it would do and to be fair i did get a misfire on one of those and i will say that these particular homemade caps that i made here they're probably 15 years old i just haven't gotten this rifle out and that amount of time to shoot so the longer they set it seems the less effective they are so if you do make them it's not a bad idea to shoot them up within a year or two of making because they do seem to diminish the longer they are on the shelf as it were so make sure you use fresh caps if you want consistent ignition but generally pretty good no delays they were all going off except for the one there and i would say for plinking target shooting reenacting would be a great choice if you were on you know the big game hunt of a lifetime you might want to go with the latest and greatest commercially made percussion cap but casting your own round balls cutting your own patching making your own black powder and stepping it up a notch making your own percussion caps that's about as self-sufficient of a avenue as you can go when it comes to traditional black powder shooting and you can remove yourself from a lot of these things that are in somewhat of uproar right now within the shooting community and do it yourself so uh that's gonna conclude this video here today thank you all for tuning in and subscribing we really appreciate it and please have a very merry christmas until next time [Music] you

Channel: Hoffman Reproductions

Views: 223,757

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Id: UJELSURQEO0

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 22 2021