The following safe shooting procedure presumes the crew is firing projectiles with a muzzleloading artillery piece made (or altered) to modern safety standards. (If firing blanks skip Step VII and see Safety Rule 9.) The bore should be lined with seamless steel tubing with a minimum 3/8-inch wall thickness and a yield strength of 85,000 psi or greater. The breechplug should be threaded and pinned; welded and pinned breechplugs can be equally strong but require expert installation by competent manufacturers. Sand cored bores are not recommended for shooting. The vent should be drilled in a threaded copper bolt similar to original cannon vent liners of the 1840-1865 period) in order to provide an unbroken passage through the casting and the liner, into the bore.

What are the differences between Guns, Howitzers, Mortars, and Columbiads?

A gun, the most common type of artillery, fires projectiles in a flat and horizontal trajectory at high speed. Guns were used to deliver long and accurate fire on enemy positions, fortifications such as walls, and enemy artillery units. Guns came with smoothbore and rifled bores.

My last two Present Arms installments covered Enfields, so this time a close relative of the Enfield will Present Arms, the U.S. Special Model Rifle-Musket. This is a peculiar weapon, part US M-1861 Springfield and part English P-53 Enfield. It came into being through a series of events beginning several years before the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence.

Here is a combination report on what I did and a general how-to-do what I did. Please don't think that what I accomplished is impossible for the average shooter to do. The only real complication was doing it for five different guns and duplicating each step as I went. Believe it or not, the worst part was buying adequate quantities of caps, powder, and lube ALL OF THE SAME LOT! Later on you will see why this is so important.

Each year as new members join, we see more questions and comments on bullet casting. This is not really surprising, as casting bullets isn't generally considered as being necessary to a well-rounded education these days. I'd like to take this opportunity to dispel some popular myths about bullet casting and pass along some of the things I've learned about it in the last 30+ years. Let's start with some of the myths.

Anyone that has participated in our hobby for more than a couple of events has had an experience similar to the following. Somewhere out a couple of hundred yards, an enemy trooper will pop up from behind a fence and snap off a round. Almost immediately an irritated voice will float from across the field "I GOT YOU REB (or YANK)!", closely followed by some choice mutterings on the subject of bomb proof troops. During the war, marksmanship almost never approached that sort of high standard. This is not to say that the weapons were not capable of such feats of accuracy. Your author has on several occasions hit 4 or 5 two liter soda bottles in a row at 100 yards with original muskets and carbines. One lucky day, 3 one gallon milk jugs fell in four shots from 250 yards, to a Parker Snow contract '61 Springfield. However, shooting on a range is nothing like firing in battle.

Christopher Miner Spencer, inventor, manufacturer and salesman extraordinaire, was aptly described by John Hay, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary, as a "splendid little Yankee." Spencer, a Connecticut native, embodied all the best aspects of 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism.

Christopher Spencer's success in the repeating rifle field proved his own undoing. In the years following the American Civil War, the world firearms market was flooded with guns. This led to the curious situation of the Spencer company competing with itself, as efforts to sell new guns were undermined by the availability of cheap surplus Spencers. Other competition, from the more streamlined, large capacity magazine Winchester, hastened the end of Spencer production. Although some Regular Army cavalry units were issued Spencers following the war, the repeaters were turned in for single shot carbines with the advent of the Model 1873 .45-70 Springfield.