automatic muzzle loader

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zimmerstutzen

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Just had a thought concerning the possibility of an auto firing muzzleloader. I have a heavy steel flywheel from an industrial machine. About 30 inches in diameter and 8 inches thick. If I would drill a series of smooth bores at an angle and put percussion nipples on the back side, could the recoil cause the flywheel to turn to the next firing position where a simple spring loaded slapping hammer strikes the next nipple in the series and then cause the wheel to spin all the way round until the "giant pepper box" is empty? It doesn't take but a few pounds of effort to turn the flywheel on it's axle. I figure I could get about 90 50 caliber bores drilled around the thing
 
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probably doable. math is isn't too bad to determine the minimum angle needed to cause rotation.

Could put multiple circles of shots and get a really long reload time :)

Issues:
rate of fire would increase as more shots fired. The rotation speed of the wheel would keep increasing. Would want some kind of brake that kicked at at some RPM or you would get too fast for the hammer to drop.
Accuracy would not be all that swift but I doubt that is a concern.

ETA: sounds like a fun project to make a useless toy.
 
A regulator like on a steam engine to check the RPM perhaps?
You're gonna fling bullets everywhere with that contraption, no need for a sight :p

You might fit a simple hammer to every nipple, something like a door jamb gun, and just have a horizontal bar trip them down as the Wheel-of-doom rotates

This sounds very steam punk
 
With a bunch or replaceable pre-loaded wheels, you'd have something like an updated Puckle Gun.
 
There was a video on You Tube I saw about a breech loaded flintlock gun that used a rotary back block with compartments that allowed loading first a ball then a measured charge of powder all with a single turn of a crank handle. It even set the cock at the right time in the cycle to give the flintlock shooter a way of fairly rapidly loading his gun and be ready for a second shot in far less time than loading from the muzzle.

But my You Tube Fu is weak. I can't seem to find the right key words to search for it.

But if you could arrange for this rotary gun to pick up the balls and set a load of powder behind them and then reach a point where there's a blowlamp or other form of ignition then I don't see why you could not achieve a gatling like machine gun that shoots ball loads provided by separate ball and powder magazines.
 
That's something like an internal combustion engine, with exhaust-propelled projectiles. Instead of blackpowder, which would get all fouled up after a few shots, a fuel-injected combustion chamber using propane and a piezo-electric spark plug would work better. Kind of like a "potato gun", with an automatic potato feed mechanism.
 
How are you cocking the hammer too? It seems to me you'd need to rig it as a giant auto-revolver with the wheel rigged to a horizontal axle that has a stud in it riding on a ball bearing in the "receiver". This rolls back and turns the wheel with recoil and cocks the piece.

Can't see it going very fast. You'd do better with foot pedals. Maybe attach it to a pennyfarthing.
 
BCRider said:
There was a video on You Tube I saw about a breech loaded flintlock gun that used a rotary back block with compartments that allowed loading first a ball then a measured charge of powder all with a single turn of a crank handle. It even set the cock at the right time in the cycle to give the flintlock shooter a way of fairly rapidly loading his gun and be ready for a second shot in far less time than loading from the muzzle.

But my You Tube Fu is weak. I can't seem to find the right key words to search for it.

But if you could arrange for this rotary gun to pick up the balls and set a load of powder behind them and then reach a point where there's a blowlamp or other form of ignition then I don't see why you could not achieve a gatling like machine gun that shoots ball loads provided by separate ball and powder magazines.
Click to expand...
Are you thinking of this rifle?

http://johno.myiglou.com/ferguson.htm
 
IIRC, the Cominazzo family made them. Lorenzoni, too, I think. I've read about them...they had a cylindrical breech with the axis perpindicular to the bore. You turned it one direction, picked up a powder charge, turned it the other, picked up a bullet, and brought the whole load in line with the bore.

It took very, very fine tolerances to keep this from turning into a bomb.
 
With precision machining, the Lorenzoni can be safer than it was back in the 1700s. Getting it to work automatically is another issue. Gas piston perhaps and how long before fouling stops it?
 
YES! Thanks Mike! It was the Lorenzoni. The missing keywords in my search of You Tube were "repeating flintlock".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_hnC6x036Q



With those new search terms a few wild and crazy ideas came up.

Check out this one; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ExwYmBadXw

Talk about the last load of the string being "compressed"! ! ! ! ! Apparently the same idea was used on a 12 shot repeating rifle. The current owner mentions the risk of such a long string of superposed loads compressing during the first shots fired and how easy it would be to end up with an issue.
 
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