Mle. 1866 Chassepot Cartridge Construction - DIY Insanity!

[Racing]

Did this go anywhere?

[Bigslug]

Haven't touched it since, unfortunately. Too much real life and other, more practical loading projects. Currently working on non lead casting alloys to hunt in California.

[Racing]

Sry to hear.
As you can read in the other thread we pushed forward,and it seems we found just the ticket.

The Chassepot used by us now has as much "sniper accuracy" as we could ever ask. Took a bit of thinking but..we got there in the end.

This thread is about historically correct and thus i kind of wonder how the two could be put together for an accurate,historical,load.?

[hpbear101]

I have been playing with the Chassepot for a year now. I have a successful paper cartridge but they take a lot of time and effort so I wanted something simple and fast to load, Jumbo straw cartridges (thanks to Racing for the idea). One caveat I spent a lot of frustrating time making cartridges with inconsistent ignition, the answer was that CCI caps just wont work (for me) I switched to RWS musket caps and my problems went away. The RWS caps are brass and the priming compound goes off every time, they also have 4 slits down the side which aid in ignition. CCI caps are a copper cup and the needle would often as not penetrate through the copper without igniting.

Jumbo straws .47"/12mm from amazon cut to 2 1/4"

Components

Mandrel to fit inside diameter of straw 2 1/8' to shouleder (gives very consistent case length when formed) straw is cut to 2 1/4" and flange formed in die heated to 350-400f.

Push the straw into the die to form the flange (literally takes a second or two per case).

Formed case

Place musket cap glued to thin card wad in the base of the cartridge, drop tube 70grs of FFG

Set a cork wad (from Ace Hardware) on top of powder. I use the cork wad as it has a little give to it, as your chamber fouls you can still seat a cartridge with the bolt as the cork will compress.

Milk carton wad over the cork (probably not necessary).

Lightly compress in a hollow die same diameter as outside of straw.

Compressed powder and wads ready to flare.

Flare with a punch or whatever so the bullet will fit.

Finished cartridge.

Since the cases are only 12mm I will add a small rubber band forward of the base to hold the cartridge centered in the chamber. They work fine without the rubber band, but I want to carry it hunting and not sure it would stay centered up while packing it around. Also in theory should help with accuracy keeping everything in line. These cases seem to be pretty robust and you should be able to pack a bunch around in a shirt pocket without them coming apart.

My son and I shot 18 rounds yesterday after a dozen rounds or so I did brush the chamber but I think we could have gotten them all chambered without brushing. Once in a while there will be a little piece of plastic lying in the chamber but it doesn't stick and you can simply blow it out of the way.

My rifle needs a cartridge of 73mm to reliably fire, you can vary cartridge length with compression, or more or less powder etc. It takes me longer to cut the straws than it does to form the case. We have a paper cutter at work so I am going to cut a bunch of cases on my lunch break to speed things up.