Jeff in Ohio
First Sergeant
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2015
All the hunters up here in Alaska, as standard practice, put a piece of electrical tape or duct tape over the muzzle to keep debris out. It blows away easily and doesn't affect the accuracy to any meaningful degree. I would think a rather loose fitting cover would likewise blow off without blowing up the barrel.
a light cover or a loose cover, no problem. But a proper wooden tampion is a tight fitting solid plug of about two inches in length, and that's a different thing all together.Most of the Federal War Department contracts for Austrian weapons required that the contractor provide tompions among the required accessories. From that, I would infer that the Ordnance Office intended that they be used in the field.
Captain A. B. Dyer at Springfield Armory suspected that most of the weapons that were reported as having burst at the muzzle had failed because the soldiers had fired them with their tompions in place, which was clearly a soldier training failure. In April 1862 he reported that to test this theory he had loaded eight Springfield rifle musket barrels which were ready for proof with standard service cartridges and inserted tight fitting tompions into the barrels. Five of the eight barrels burst at the muzzle when they were fired. To check his findings, he loaded two barrels with 120 grains of gunpowder and one bullet, and two barrels with 192 grains of gunpowder and a bullet. One of the barrels loaded with 120 grains of powder failed, while the other three did not.
Regards,
Don Dixon
I do have a nice flintlock in original flint, never converted because the barrel is split open a crack between the lower - middle and the middle - top bands - no more than a quarter inch, but a good five inches long. The split has been there for a while, but when it happened or how, i sure don't know.