Spark ignited muzzleloader design idea...

[Johnnycash635]

Have any of you used nitrocellulose cotton gun cotton instead of powder? And if so what were the results

[Good Cheer]

Is this is going to be a steampunk muzzleloader, like maybe with a small generator hand crank on the offside of the butt stock to charge up the spark capacitor?
That could be more fun than the double screen sparking fly swatter got for my last birthday.

[Johnnycash635]

No I was thinking more on the lines of one that has a crank on the side that when you crank it so far it has a donkey leg come out of the stock and kick you over and for the sights two hands with the middle finger sticking right up

[waksupi]

No I was thinking more on the lines of one that has a crank on the side that when you crank it so far it has a donkey leg come out of the stock and kick you over and for the sights two hands with the middle finger sticking right up

This may have already been invented. It sounds very similar to the Polish .38-45-500 Short Magnum eleven shot revolver.

[Johnnycash635]

[OverMax]

Always nice to hear about new improvising technology. I say >go for it.

[Whizzer]

I have a CVA Electra (they were all .50's) with a stainless Bergara barrel. It was a marketing flop and could be had for a song until the back stock was finally sold.

I'd say you should try to source one on Armslist or Gunbroker and see if it trips your trigger. Then take it apart and see that there was SIGNIFICANT engineering involved. Many many trial and error improvements were made. I saw a video on the subject somewhere. It was interesting and shows that making a reliable spark to ignite BP was much harder than anticipated. But it might just make you a fun shooter!

I absolutely LOVE mine and wouldn't sell it for any price....but it isn't 'traditional' , AT ALL. I've got other guns that scratch that itch. And if it breaks, fixing it will NOT BE easy. If mine breaks, I'd buy another one first.

When caps were really hard to find a while back, I shot mine a lot. Lock time is scary fast and it is a neat feeling for a homebrew powdermaker and boolit caster (I am both) to be able to bypass the firearm manufacturing supply chain if need be. But I still have to have a 9 volt battery if I wanna put meat on the table for a few months after a possible SHTF scenario. On the other hand the hissboomer could be even more useful in that role.

When you "touch" the Electra's trigger break point, that pill is just gone!...... You'd be surprised how fast it feels.

But yeah, it can be done. It already has.

[NavyVet1959]

I had pondered the idea of a solenoid powered firing pin for a rifle at one time. Since your trigger could be nothing more than a simple momentary contact pushbutton switch, it would be extremely light. Or for a bit more safety, you could have one switch up on the forearm area that you must also depress to complete the circuit. Of course, it would be more of a range toy, not something to actually carry in the field while hunting.

[Johnnycash635]

I was thinking of using a rechargeable flashlight taser as the electronic device and just running wires from the tasers electrodes to a spark plug. I already have a 6mm and a 9 mm muzzleloader I use radio controlled car glow plugs and a D cell battery to ignite but they look a little Frankenstein ish

[Jpholla]

I've always wondered about the Diesel-effect lock mechanism that was demonstrated to Napoleon. It might not be able to ignite smokeless, but it would eliminate primers, caps, batteries, generators, flints. True, Napoleon rejected it, but then again he also rejected the gun from the same gunsmith that fired fixed-cased ammunition as being too impractical for warfare...

[Whizzer]

Johnnycash635, Hook it up and give it a try! You seem driven.

I used to have a pocket sized Hotshot for cattle that I used for a football "touchdown cannon". The cannon was 5 1/2" drill casing on a towable trailer ball caisson. (still have it) It was designed for acetylene and oxygen, but it worked just as well on propane and oxygen. The spark was supplied by a spark plug energized by the Hotshot remotely, through high voltage wire used for neon signage. Worked Ike a champ, but it isn't black powder. I remember from the video I referred to, the design parameters turned out to be harder than anticipated. BP ignites harder than one might think by electricity alone. There must be heat as I recall.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Forget the gyrojet, it was literally a rocket that was spin stabilized by the valves on the end of the case. You are talking closer to the original Volcanic using primer material as the charge in the base of the bullet. Back then materials science and chemical science weren't where they are now.

This idea, along with caseless ammo, have a long history of failure. Good ideas in principle but we are simply not where we need to be yet in terms of phisio-chemical science

It was indeed a rocket, but the Volcanic wasn't. The powder charge was indeed inside the bullet, but unlike the Gyrojet it built up pressure in a normal rifled barrel. The trouble was that you couldn't put enough powder in it unless you made the bullet too big, and the skirt so thin it was liable to tear off in the bore.

The Volcanic was nonetheless of great importance in firearms history. The impossibility of making it into a really practical firearm made Smith and Wesson (a) go for revolvers instead, and (b) sell the Volcanic company to one of their shareholders, Oliver Winchester, who thereby got the rights to an excellent toggle-joint breech mechanism, the use of future Smith and Wesson developments, and the Volcanic foreman, B. Tyler Henry, who turned their .22 Short into the .44 Henry rimfire.

The Gyrojet had some things going for it. It could be built light and slim with almost no recoil and little noise. It produced high velocity, but it didn't produce it at the muzzle, since a rocket starts slow and accelerates in flight. Some accounts said 20ft./sec. at the muzzle, others more, but nobody said it was anything like a firearm. It was also inaccurate, accounts again varying from quite bad to very bad, and it had a considerable misfire rate, without permitting you to try another quick as thought, as a revolver does.

What is the use of an inaccurate pistol? Self-defence, but for that you need dependability and impact at range zero, and you don't need to explain in court or to somebody's unfortunate conscript why it impacted with burning fuel left.

Electric ignition has been a seductive prospect in firearms for a long time. It offers the possibility of as light a trigger pull, with as slight a movement, as you like. WW Greener illustrates a gun which a French nobleman had made in Prague "forty years ago", and I don't know whether that meant his best-known edition of 1910, o another as early as 1881. Even the latter isn't totally impossible.

It had plenty of disadvantages. At the time it required a wet dichromate cell, filled by a cap in the buttplate, and an induction coil which vibrated unpleasantly unless it was sedated by a magnet. I don't think you could be sure it was in good order except by trying a shot. Nowadays you could have better batteries, a capacitor and a circuit and battery power check light.

Pieper in Belgium, much later, invented an electrically ignited cartridge, which had the electrodes to make the spark inside each cartridge. It worked, but like the others if you have a flat battery, it is going to be on the shot of a lifetime. It also added considerably to the cost of ammunition, and if the supply of 5mm. Remington Rimfire died, why couldn't that? No electrically ignited firearm has ever been a success on the civilian market. Ignition would certainly be powder-to-powder, which is acceptable in a black powder gun (or there would never have been any flintlocks), but is very unlikely to give consistent ignition with smokeless, of which much needs to be ignited at once by the conventional primer.

It could be done with a muzzle-loader, but I don't think an ordinary sparking-plug is the way to do it. It is likely to give different quality of ignition according to whether the gap is bridged with powder or not. It could easily work with one grain size but not another. Power is easily ignited by static electricity when you don't want it to be, but perhaps not when you do. I have experimented with the piezo-electric device from a defunct blowtorch, and could make tiny sparks (weaker, admittedly, than an automotive one) leap to a coarse powder grain with no effect whatever in dozens of attempts. Whatever you use would also have to be easily removable for cleaning.

Most importantly, a firearm gives much greater pressure than a car engine, and you don't really want a porcelain breech block pointing at your cheekbone. I think specialized technology would have to be developed.

[bob208]

this is not new it was tried 30 years ago. they had wires running back to the battery in the car. it soon fell out of use.

[Squeeze]

check the links on post 3, they show a taser charge not igniting BP, and a few methods that do

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I had pondered the idea of a solenoid powered firing pin for a rifle at one time. Since your trigger could be nothing more than a simple momentary contact pushbutton switch, it would be extremely light. Or for a bit more safety, you could have one switch up on the forearm area that you must also depress to complete the circuit. Of course, it would be more of a range toy, not something to actually carry in the field while hunting.

Apart from size and weight, there would be the question whether it would support the firing-pin adequately immediately after ignition, when there is a risk of a blown primer.

With any of these devices a capacitor could be charged by turning a crank, like the clockwork radios used in the Third World. Professor Boys did just that with an "electrical machine" in the 1890s, in the corridors of Imperial College, to take pictures of the air disturbancs around bullets in flight which transformed our understanding. But his "capacitor" had to be a sheet of plate glass with tinfoil on both sides. Somebody had to do it!



The inventor of pneumatic ignition, and the centrefire cartridge (before the percussion cap!) was Pauly the Swiss. Napoleon didn't even want rifles, although he was personally interested in science, and probably planned some peacetime development work when he got back from Russia. What he got was a report in 1813 that the British Rifle Brigade had killed five hundred officers and eight generals in five bad weeks in Spain, but Napoleon was fighting for his life by that time.

Pauly's cartridges were turned from solid brass and non-expansive. Both they and the weapons would have been very expensive, and couldn't have been mass-produced in France, which hadn't yet undergone the Industrial Revolution. For a few shots in succession with a single-barreled pistol they would have been superb, but a duelist didn't need that. In a musket with military powder they would have fouled very quickly, and smoothbore musketry required a lot of missing for every hit. The Emperor's decision wasn't a bad one at the time, but I wouldn't have been surprised to find a Pauly prototype under his pillow.