What got you into cap and ball? This statement was made to an inquiry on another thread...
This got me to wondering if that's true? Me, I had only one mentor and he wasn't much of a mentor, but a room mate in College who had a ROA. I never saw the thing fired, just admired it. I only had a .22 revolver and a .22 pistol at the time for handguns. This was in 1974. I found a brass Navy at a LGS for 50 bucks, bought it, and I've been hooked since! I GUESS that SORTA follows the above quote, but I literally figured out how to load and fire that thing and all the intricacies of it on my own, never went to the range with ol' Bob as he wasn't a member. He went home to shoot, and home for him was about 50 miles, so that was every weekend.
Anyway, did someone get YOU into cap and ball? Did you just pick it up from a gun you saw or a friend who had one, or did you see one shoot first, get mentored to it? Some might be old enough to have fought in the Civil war if you listen to 'em on this board.......but I seriously doubt it. It's odd that cap and ball lasted only from the late 1840s to 1873 and there were many converted to .44 Henry or some such after the war, but yet they have such a following and interest some 140 odd years later. I mean, it was a transitional era from single shot weapons until the contained cartridge came along, didn't last long at all, yet there's an industry in the billions of dollars even today grown up around cap and ball replicas and, in two of my own guns, modern designed cap and ball. It doesn't make any logical sense, but for the FUN these guns are to load and shoot. They're oddities to others at the range, too. Always cool to be different, I guess.
"Obviously, we all enjoy it otherwise we would not be on this forum. But most of us can trace our interest back to an incident where a friend let us shoot one of their blackpowder guns."
This got me to wondering if that's true? Me, I had only one mentor and he wasn't much of a mentor, but a room mate in College who had a ROA. I never saw the thing fired, just admired it. I only had a .22 revolver and a .22 pistol at the time for handguns. This was in 1974. I found a brass Navy at a LGS for 50 bucks, bought it, and I've been hooked since! I GUESS that SORTA follows the above quote, but I literally figured out how to load and fire that thing and all the intricacies of it on my own, never went to the range with ol' Bob as he wasn't a member. He went home to shoot, and home for him was about 50 miles, so that was every weekend.
Anyway, did someone get YOU into cap and ball? Did you just pick it up from a gun you saw or a friend who had one, or did you see one shoot first, get mentored to it? Some might be old enough to have fought in the Civil war if you listen to 'em on this board.......but I seriously doubt it. It's odd that cap and ball lasted only from the late 1840s to 1873 and there were many converted to .44 Henry or some such after the war, but yet they have such a following and interest some 140 odd years later. I mean, it was a transitional era from single shot weapons until the contained cartridge came along, didn't last long at all, yet there's an industry in the billions of dollars even today grown up around cap and ball replicas and, in two of my own guns, modern designed cap and ball. It doesn't make any logical sense, but for the FUN these guns are to load and shoot. They're oddities to others at the range, too. Always cool to be different, I guess.