.45 cal. longrange muzzleloader

[oldracer]

The main idea of a hooked breech as told to me was to allow the rifle to be broken down into a pair of much more easily handled sections. This is especially true if traveling and using an airline, ETC. So far I have 8 hooked breech rifles and have had no issues with any of them. I clean both parts very well after a shooting session and after reassembly I tamp the rifle butt on several layers of carpet to insure the barrel is well seated. At all the matches I have done we always get a change for several sighting in shots so if something has gone out of alignment it will show up right away.

I have noticed the Pedersoli breech plug with the hook and the tang portion are much heavier duty than those from ANY U.S. supplier I have seen so a better assembly is guaranteed for sure. I tried to buy some of these but so far even the U.S. distributor has been unable to get me any?

[ResearchPress]

Then William Ellis Metford established that with a hard cast bullet very shallow rifling would do just as well..... He used gain-twist rifling (which had long been known, and therefore wasn't patentable) with an angle proportional to pressure....

Metford's rifling was patented (No. 2488 in 1865). The abridgment reads: "Barrels - The rifling is made to vary in pitch, so that the same turning moment is obtained throughout the length of the barrel. The pitch may also be varied so as to fulfil any other requirement."

David

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Metford's rifling was patented (No. 2488 in 1865). The abridgment reads: "Barrels - The rifling is made to vary in pitch, so that the same turning moment is obtained throughout the length of the barrel. The pitch may also be varied so as to fulfil any other requirement."

David

He mentioned it, but gain-twist rifling wasn't established as his intellectual property by the patent. Others had done it before him, even though making it proportional to pressure was his idea and others had done it by guesswork. Probably his greatest innovation was rifling as shallow as we use today, and the discovery that even a moderately hard bullet would expand enough to grip and seal it. What he established by that patent was principally rounded bottoms to the grooves, not to be confused with his other type of rifling the grooves in the form of arcs of circles, which was used in the Lee-Metford. His early target barrels were mostly concentric five-groove rifling.

[Toymaker]

Whoa, Old Ironsights!!! My 54 caliber, 58 pound caplock heavy bench rifle made meat before it won its first championship at Friendship.

[ResearchPress]

He mentioned it, but gain-twist rifling wasn't established as his intellectual property by the patent.....

Yes, I misinterpreted your original message and thought you were saying his rifling wasn't patented. Metford writes about it in a memorandum, stating "The law which should govern the rotation of the bullet must be this, that the growth of the rotating or tortional movement should be exactly proportional to the growth of the linear movement of the bullet." Merits he notes are the "greatest economy of force, applied with the least possible barrel disturbance as well as the reduction of the stripping intention to its smallest amount."

Interestingly he also notes the shearing action on the paper patch being "just enough to slit into five lines, leaving only a trifling print on the hardened metal [of the bullet]. I do not scruple to say that if there was no other value to be got out of this system, I should still be tempted to use it to get this very result."

David

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Yes, that is true about the patch stripping, letting the shooter around a lot of the careful technique and choice of materials which usually does achieve satisfactory patch stripping in a constant twist rifle. Also the fictional heat generated by velocity is an important element in stripping bullets, and bullets by their nature start out slow. Others got good results with constant-twist rifling, which offers less chance of something going wrong in the rifling process.