I remembered a very old story about muzzle loaders.....

[oldracer]

Opps, forgot what part of the forum I was in......old age is setting in I guess! Sorry.

Back in 1973 I was stationed in upstate New York at the Knolles Atomic Power Lab helping to train Navy nucs. Did a LOT of drinking and partying and on one Saturday afternoon one of the party animals mentioned he had just finished a muzzle loading rifle and wanted to do a test fire. We had finished off a couple cases of beer so said "hell yes", of course! He said the instructions said to do a proof load of 150% of the normal load which was 100gn of BP so he could not find a measure that read in grains so we did some "nuclear math" and made a measure and loaded it up. We did decide none of us should hold it so it was lashed to his railing that ran around his mobile home with a bunch of rope. We were about 5 miles from the nearest house so we all got behind the railing area, opened a fresh beer all around and waited. I remember he put on a percussion cap, cocked the gun and got back about 10 feet. He pulled the string on the trigger and KA BOOM! What a blast, huge cloud of smoke and the whole porch, rail and supports went flying backwards! His wife was in the trailer and it seemed he had forgot to tell her the test was at hand and boy did she scream! We were laughing so hard that it was hard to stand up and we spent the rest of the day putting his trailer back together!

I am happy to say this really does prove that alcohol and BP do not mix..........

[johnson1942]

did the gun blow up?

[mdevlin53]

When I lived in Balston Spa in 1975 and worked at the prototype site i remember seeing signs on apartments for rent that said "NO Navy" Your story might just explain that.

[ACrowe25]

Yeah, many things wrong with that action. Under the influence and shooting a weapon that can kill someone... Defiantly broken a few rules there.

[johnson1942]

i am an old retired registered nurse and one of my patients in my early years as a nurse was a very elderly man from minn. he would be over 120 years old to day if he was alive. he told me he and his brother asked their dad for a new stevens falling block .22. but their dad refused and said the muzzle loader that they had was good enough for getting the meat. so they went to a remote part of the pasture, tied it to a fence post. they filled the barrel with powder and packed several bullets on top of that and tied a real long string to the trigger. it blew into a million pieces and they got a new gun. im still amused when i think back on that patient and that story. us old retired nurses have a million stories and that is just one of them

[oldracer]

Hummmm, lots of things wrong with what we did but then we were a lot younger then! I was at the power site from 73 to the end of 75 at the D1G "ball" on one of the rotating crews. Made chief while I was there, had a 3 day long initiation that even now I can only remember a few parts of it!

People worry about nuclear power, well the sub plant was shutdown for a very long time so the powers that be decided to hook up a bunch of test equipment to everything on the reactor control panels and simulate starting up the reactor and using outside steam would run the engine! Of course the big issue when Washington found out was there was no way to tell what the actual reactor was doing as everything was bypassed! That could have been a lot worse than the muzzle loader!!!