Gun Porn
on 12/09/2008 at 01:49 PM
I was saying “oooohhh.... Preeetttyyy.....” right up until I say the pricetag.
Ouch!
saw. duh.
No, say it out loud. It hurts more that way!
But ... the wood alone is worth a thousand or two, uncarved. The checkering is done by an expert - that’s probably most of a week’s work you’re looking at. Same with the engraving. The color case hardening has to be done properly too, so that’s more work by experts. The original rifle, an antique, is also worth quite a pile. Now add in a brand new barrel, full “blueprinting” of the action, and all the polishing that gets done on such a piece. Cha-Ching!
So all in all, the price is reasonable. Besides, you didn’t really want that new car anyway did you?
Classy!
Oh, Sacred Excrement! That’s GORGEOUS! Shame about that price tag. I love that cartridge idea as well, it should have continued.
CM, about that cartridge:
The IDEA was good. It was the propellant that was wrong. Bottleneck cartridges work really well with smokeless powder. They don’t give you any benefit with black powder. They actually make things worse; black powder needs to be slightly compressed to ignite properly. With a straight walled, cylindrical cartridge all you need to do is push down on the powder with a wooden dowel and then seat the bullet. A bottleneck cartridge is wider inside than at the neck, so when you push down on the black powder with a dowel it only squeezes the powder in the middle. This makes for wasted effort, since the powder will mix up when the cartridge is shaken and the compressed part will become uncompressed. Which means it won’t light off as well, and will leave much more soot behind in the barrel.
The Army was right. The velocity of the straight walled .45-70-405 cartridge was about 1350 feet per second. With a 405 grain (nearly a full ounce) bullet, and 70 grains of black powder. The smaller .45-60 cartridge can push a 350 grain bullet to about 1350 feet per second using 60 grains of black powder. The .45-75 managed the same velocity but it had to use 75 grains of powder. Back in those days the Army actually pinched pennies, and rejected the .45-75 because it used an extra 5 - 15 grains of powder to get the same (or less) results than the other two.
If you look at all the really powerful black powder cartridges of the era, they will all be straight, and quite long. The .45-70 grew into the .45-90, the .45-110, and even the .45-120. They looked like brass cigars, but achieved velocities that put them on par with modern elephant guns. With black powder a long powder column works best.
Smokeless powder works the other way round. Bottleneck cartridges are the way to go; the steeper the shoulder angle and the shorter and fatter the cartridge body, the more efficient and accurate the cartridge is. Today’s crop of super cartridges - the Winchester Short Magnums et al - are all based on this concept. They are very efficient and very accurate. The accuracy part comes primarily because of consistency. Almost all the powder burns up inside the case instead of somewhere down the barrel, because the steep shoulder angle creates turbulence that keeps most of the burning granules inside. The wide and short powder column ignites faster and more evenly than a long thin powder column (eg a .30-06 cartridge). Straight walled cartridges that use smokeless powder are less efficient. Not only do they blow the powder out of the case on ignition (which leads to spotty burning), they also can’t keep the pressure high enough for long enough to get the most out of the power of the powder. Pistol cartridges remain straight walled because they operate at nearly black powder pressure levels anyway. Plus their bullets don’t stay in the barrels very long; your typical pistol has a 4” barrel vs a rifle’s 22” barrel.
If you could build a modern rifle and chamber it for the .45-75, and then load the cartridges with smokeless powder to modern pressure levels (more than double what black powder creates) it would work quite well. You’d wind up with a modern buffalo gun good for large elk, huge bears, giant hogs, Cape buffalo etc. An “almost elephant” gun very similar to the .458 Win. Mag. in performance. Just make sure that ammo never gets near one of these old rifles because that would make a fatally dangerous combination.
12/09/2008 at 06:39 PM
