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and if so, how did they do it. Gain twist rifling would seem to pose additional problems. If you rifled the entire barrel and then cut off a chunk wouldn't you have a problem sychronizing the lands and grooves. And if you tried to rifle the false muzzle later you have similar problems. Anyone know.
I'm pretty sure they were, but have no idea how it was done.
Phil
The false muzzle was built as part of the barrel and rifled with the barrel. Bore, ream, and then rifle with the false muzzle in place.
See Ned Roberts "The Muzzleloading Cap Lock Rifle"
Yes they are rifled. As noted above they started as part of the barrel then are drilled for 3 to 4 pins and then several inches are cut off insuring that no burrs or rough areas exist. The pins are added along with a "scarecrow" or piece of rod to stick up in your line of sight. That is to remind you to pull the false muzzle off after loading so you do not shoot it 50 feet or so down range. I have two muzzle loaders with false muzzles and both do not have a crown on the existing barrel but do have one on the false muzzle. The joint on both my barrels with the false muzzle on is not visible with my bore scope.
John
Any more you get an extra long barrel blank and make the false muzzle out of the end you cut off.
As stated, piece cut off the bar stock and re-fitted with unevenly spaced pins (so it can only go back on in one position), clamped solidly in place, then the boring and rifling took place right on up through the false muzzle so there was no loss in continuity. To cut a piece off a finished barrel and attempt to get it in perfect alignment is a fretful job that no sane man would want to try (although some have). Trying to get everything in perfect alignment, with a perfectly seamless continuation of the rifling, would be a Herculean task because you have to compensate for the loss of metal accrued in the act of cutting and then truing the mating surfaces- you can't just stick it back on in the position it came off.
You have to drill and ream the pin holes before you cut the barrel off.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just pre rifle a heap of bullets off in an off cut. pushing them though with the short starter then finger seating them in the muzzle when needed?
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It's not about ease - false muzzles came about so formal target shooters could start the projectiles perfectly straight into the bore, in the search for better accuracy.
That’s exactly what I was thinking - similar idea to swaging or casting Whitworth boolits to fit your barrel.Quote:
Originally Posted by barrabruce
I’m not into Schutzen but many British long range match rifles were also fit with false muzzles which were not rifled - there would be no point as the projectiles are bore diameter.
So in that case they are just for alignment purposes.
Knowing nothing about false muzzles,, I'm a little confused.
If their completely rifled and not counterbored, how do they assist with starting the bullet strait any different then something not having a false muzzle ?
Didn't the cleaning black powder in the bore as the bullet was pushed down play a part as well?
Phil
I made a false muzzle once, out of a barrel that had some “issues” at the muzzle end. Some kind of weird green deposit that wouldn’t clean out.
I put a polished steel rod, with a jag end, into the barrel, and poured a couple inches of molten Babbitt metal into the muzzle and bore. Pushing the rod forward slightly, I trimmed off the sprue at the end, and pulled the casting a few inches back into the bore. I drew a line, in Magic Marker, along the barrel a few inches.
I set the barrel up in a lathe in the machine shop class, indicated bore and chamber to zero (I’d made a “spider” for the hole in the other end of the headstock), and parted off 1-1/2” of barrel at the muzzle end. I pushed the casting out of the new muzzle slightly and faced muzzle and casting off flat and smooth. Since there was no discontinuity, there was no (or at least a minimal) burr on the end of the bore, and the surfaces of both muzzle and casting were normal to the bore.
I replaced the barrel with the chunk of barrel in the lathe, parted end out, indicated everything in as before, and faced the cut part smooth and normal to the bore. I did have to deburr the hole this time, but I only took off a thousandth or so with the lathe tool.
I set the piece of muzzle on a rotary table on a vertical mill, checked everything for vertical, and indicated the center of the bore to zero. Then I went out a half inch or so, and drilled four holes, turning the table slightly less, then slightly more, then a different amount less, and a different amount more, than 90 degrees, so the muzzle would fit on the barrel only one way. I forget what size the holes were, but they were number drill holes, and the one I picked had the next number only a couple thousandths more and the previous one a few thousandths less. I snuck up on the size, using smaller drills to start to get a smooth hole. IIRC, there was some gauge pin stock of that size I’d found somewhere; managed to scrounge four of them. They were a drive fit in the holes I’d made in the muzzle. Back to the lathe, I rounded the ends of the four gauge pins. I made a bushing the size of the muzzle holes, with the inner diameter that of the next smallest number drill.
I pushed the Babbitt casting an inch or so out of the front of the barrel, and carefully slid the false muzzle down the rifling spiral till it bottomed against the barrel end. The line I’d drawn was now skewed a few degrees, and the sight dovetail likewise, but the line I’d drawn ensured that I’d started the muzzle at the right point of the rifling, with the only difference being the missing length of barrel that I’d parted and faced. No daylight showed between false muzzle and real one; I guessed I’d gotten that right.
Now I found there was no way I could set the barrel for drilling the end, vertically or horizontally, on any machine in the Shop class without messing things up for the day classes. So I took the assembly home, clamped everything eight ways from Sunday, inserted the bushing in one hole after another, and drilled the undersized holes in the barrel by hand with a power drill, with the false muzzle as a drill guide. Then I took the bushing out and drilled the holes full diameter and depth. It was 105 degrees in my garage, but I would have sweated away a pound or so of body fat even if it hadn’t been. The only people good with hand tools that I’d ever heard of were 75-year old men who’d apprenticed at Purdey’s when they were 12 and had worked there ever since. But I’d set my life upon a cast, and would stand the hazard of the die.
Back to the Shop class, which had reamers of the drill sizes, a luxury I’ve never been able to afford. I removed the false muzzle, reamed the holes in the barrel by hand to the next drill size up, and pressed the four gauge pins into the false muzzle using a milling machine vise. I pulled the Babbitt casting down into the barrel again, and tried the muzzle for fit. It slid in with a sort of hydraulic smoothness, and bottomed out with no daylight showing. A look in the barrel showed the rifling spiral was continuous and it wasn’t easy to see the joint where the false muzzle started. When I pulled the false muzzle off, there was a champagne-cork *pop!* just the way the books say there’s supposed to be.
I couldn’t believe it. The chemistry professor who first broke me in on mill and lathe operation came in one day with a plate with five polished rods, each a foot long, sticking out of it, and another plate with five holes in it, irregularly spaced in a circle. He had me push the plate down the rods, and it had that same hydraulic feel, all the way to the bottom. I was too green and dumb back then to realize what a job that must have been to do. Maybe I’d learned something in the interval. Anyway, somehow I’d pulled it off. Not bad for somebody whose primary and secondary education was all “College Prep.”
Not done yet. Muzzle loading target rifles need to be “freed up behind the muzzle,” as the old books put it, meaning the bore must be choked somehow. I pushed the Babbitt casting out again as far as I could, coated it with Clover 320, pulled it back, wiped off the barrel, inserted the false muzzle, making sure it was all the way down, clamped everything again with vises, blocks, stops, etc, and lapped the barrel 100 strokes or so, with extra attention paid to the barrel length behind the muzzle, and what felt like a couple tight spots in the barrel. I removed the Babbitt lap, melted it down for boolit metal, cleaned everything up, and set the false muzzle up in the lathe again, reaming the front just enough so a boolit could be started squarely. This took care of the green deposit, and left enough of the rifling to start the boolit into the barrel.
Then I had to make the starter and plunger out of brass, make a loading rod, and modify the dovetail on the false muzzle for a blinder pin.
It was easy and fun! :roll:
One big problem if you rifle before you cut the muzzle off and that is that the width of kerf of the saw cut will throw the timing of the rifling off when you try to mate it back on..
You must do everything to mount the False Muzzle before you rifle the barrel or there is no good way to retime the rifling in the barrel to the Muzzle. If it is OFF any amount it defeats the purpose of the False Muzzle which is to seamlessly start the bullet into the rifling.
I personally don't see why they want to rifle the false muzzle at all. It seems like it would work better if it was reamed to groove dia. so the bullet would be perfectly aligned with the bore before the rifling cut the grooves in the bullet. Until this thread I always thought that the false muzzle was done without rifling. If it is rifled then you must immediately start the bullet into a rifled section which seems like it would be hard to get it perfectly square to the bore?
Randy
The (rifled) false muzzle is reamed to give the muzzle end a narrow conical shape, like the start of an Ideal boolit sizing die. The tip of the starter fits the nose of the boolit and it and the starter bore keep the boolit in alignment.
Part of the function of the false muzzle is to protect the real muzzle during loading. A straight hole would have the actual barrel shear off lead as the boolit hits the rifling lands instead of swaging down gradually, and getting the grooves swaged in smoothly in the false muzzle. When the boolit enters the actual muzzle, it is already sized and rifled and no possibility of wear or damage to the end of the bore of the real muzzle exists.
It’s more straightforward using a drilling machine and a rifling bench than doing it the way I did it. But I didn’t have such tooling available.
The problem with this approach is to re-align the rifling of the cut-off piece to that of the barrel itself. If you bored a barrel end for alignment pins then cut off a piece for a false muzzle there will be some misalignment of the rifle due to the material removed in cutting. Not much misalignment but some and since the whole point of the false muzzle is precision any misalignment spoils the project.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nobade
Now if you can cut that piece off then ream out the lands without enlarging beyond groove diameter that would work fine.
Add a permanent disk to the false muzzle to compensate for the material removed by cutting (and lathe trimming). Measure the barrel length before cutting!
Some false muzzles (FM) are rifled and some are smooth bored.
The rifled ones are generally rifled at the same time as the rest of the bbl for precision.
The unrifled FM are usually found on the LongRange Brit type Ml'dr rifles. A tool to aid in loading and protect the muzzle from damage.
Trying to hammer long, bore dia paper patched heavy bullets into the muzzle w/o damage is quite a trick. The FM makes it quite easy.
The rifled FM is usually thought of as a heavy Bench Target Gun accessory. But you can find them both ways.
The entire idea is precision and accuracy. These are used with conical bullets that are often paper patched. Sometimes the bullet is roll patched. Often the
patch is a cross pattern pre-cut and lubed.
These cross pattern patches lay in a very shallow cut in the facing of the false starter betw the bbl and FM.
The bore of the FM is slightly taper bored when made so the bullet is an easy but precise fit. All to help keep positive allaignment with the bore.
The Starter Plunger is machined at the tip to fit the bullet nose so no damage is done to the bullet and also the starter plunger dia is a very precise fit to the land dia of the rifling in the FM and bore.
That insures no damage to the rifling of either in the loading process.
The FM starter will easily 'start' the bullet into the rifling of the FM which matches that of the bore. It will engrave the lands/grooves nicely into the bullet and if the cross patch is used the bullet will be pushed perfectly into the center of that patch in it's trip down the FM and into the bore so that the patch folds up right around the bullet the same way each time.
The FM & starter plunger will leave the now engraved bullet down the bore a few inches past the actual muzzle of the bbl.
Next a loading rod is to seat the bullet. The loading rod nose fits the bullet nose. A muzzle protector is often an additional accessory attached to the loading rod and fits over the muzzle so the rod slides through the protector and doesn't rub against the rifling during seating of the bullet.
It's all about accuracy.
Even into the cartridge era, Target single shot rifles were still loaded by many from the muzzle and FM's were used to do this.
It was the idea that the bullet pre loaded from the muzzle was much more accurate.
A 'stop' on the loading rod placed the bullet just into a precise position in in the bore. Predetermined by the shooter to be the best for accuracy, the shooter then loaded the rifle by inserting a primed and loaded case into the rifle.
The powder usually held in place with a simple over powder wad (even that was usually selected after much experimentation of variables.)
The shooters would often reload the same case at the range or 'shoot' for use over and over to to avoid variables in brass.
Even going to the point of marking the case with a witness mark to indicate positioning it at a certain timing point when chambered (such as a 12 oclock position).
get a copy of pope's book. false muzzles are covered. the muzzle ]s drilled for pins then the muzzle is put back on and a clamant is made. you solve the powder sticking in bore by using a bore length funnel to get powder to the bottom of the bore
What is a clamant?Quote:
Originally Posted by bob208
spell check. it is clamp
A gunsmith of much experience in my neighborhood had a few 50 caliber cut-offs from 4 foot muzzleloader barrels. Most folks wanted a 40 inch barrel. Being possessed of a lathe, and much patience, he indexed the rifling, and the octagon barrel flats. He then silver soldered the three pieces together for a 24 inch m.l. carbine barrel. Made a nice deer gun. Yes, it was shot repeatedly, and worked fine.