HC, info for the record.

[Tony Clark]

18th century German gunsmith talking with 18th century colonial American gunsmith:
" Why don't you put nice touch hole liner in dat gun your building like is proper procedure jawohl ?!"
American gunsmith... "touch hole liners..... we don't neeeed no stinking touch hole liners."

Forging with grass skirts was an interesting thought. Maybe it was just the thought of Hawaiian girls.

[Eric Kettenburg]

What kind of grass would be considered historically accurate grass?

RCA#43 has a very small gold liner, and it sure looks entirely original.

[rich pierce]

Good point.  I'd never say never or always,if I was smart.  Part of the interest in talking about touchhole liners is their nearly universal use now and relative scarcity, by available evidence, on original longrifles made here.

A thought about the specialization of Euro gunsmiths versus having to be able to do almost everything here- Albrecht was particularly well trained as a journeyman in Europe, including military work.  Maybe that was not unique.  And though high end, big contract shops certainly had specialists, maybe the local gunsmith in a village in Bavaria or wherever could do whatever was needed also.

[James Rogers]

There are 18th century English court records where provincial makers are accusing some London makers of doing no more than screwing parts together while the provincial maker states he makes everything about the gun.

[Joe S]

So to summarize the arguments for using coned vent liners:

1)  There is no historical justification for using a vent liner on a typical American long rifle.

2)  Larry Pletcher’s data show that coned vent liners have no statistically significant effect on ignition time.

3)  They are very ugly.

[Acer Saccharum]

So to summarize the arguments for using coned vent liners:

2)  Larry Pletcher’s data show that coned vent liners have no statistically significant effect on ignition time.

I have the experience of an UNLINED touch hole, a 1/16" hole thru a 5/16" barrel wall. I want to tell you there is a lot of wait time. There is a tremendous unreliability issue after the first shot. You think you got the touch hole clean and dry, but the durn thing hang fires almost every shot, or does not fire atall.

The reverse coned vent fixed that problem for me.

[Majorjoel]

I have an American longrifle that was built ca 1840 as a flintlock that has some interesting details to the touch hole area. The maker inletted brass into the barrel flat surrounding the TH which is coned on the outside if I remember right.  I know this is 60 years after the Revolution, but innovation is  the American way.

[Pete G.]

I have the experience of an UNLINED touch hole, a 1/16" hole thru a 5/16" barrel wall. I want to tell you there is a lot of wait time. There is a tremendous unreliability issue after the first shot. You think you got the touch hole clean and dry, but the durn thing hang fires almost every shot, or does not fire atall.

The reverse coned vent fixed that problem for me.

My experience also. 5/64" is only marginally better. If I had to guess I would say that Chambers' White Lightening liner is as much or more responsible for the resurgence in flintlock shooting than any other single factor.

[Dennis Glazener]

So to summarize the arguments for using coned vent liners:

2)  Larry Pletcher’s data show that coned vent liners have no statistically significant effect on ignition time.

I have the experience of an UNLINED touch hole, a 1/16" hole thru a 5/16" barrel wall. I want to tell you there is a lot of wait time. There is a tremendous unreliability issue after the first shot. You think you got the touch hole clean and dry, but the durn thing hang fires almost every shot, or does not fire atall.

The reverse coned vent fixed that problem for me.

I have had the same experience on at least two different rifles as described by Acer. In both cases installing a Chambers white lighting vent solved the problem. I don't like the looks of them but I do like the performance!

I am not sure if he still sells them but I bought a couple of Chambers liners made from regular barrel steel. Jim told me they would not last long but I figured they were easy to replace when worn out.
Dennis

[Joe S]

There is a tremendous unreliability issue after the first shot. You think you got the touch hole clean and dry, but the durn thing hang fires almost every shot, or does not fire atall.

I believe that.  Pletcher is scrupulous about cleaning between shots in his tests, and I don’t think his laboratory methods reproduce what we experience under normal continuous shooting conditions.  But he wasn’t testing for reliability, he was testing ignition time.

So, in all fairness, our arguments for using coned vent liners should read:

1)  There is no historical justification for using a vent liner on a typical American long rifle.
2)  Larry Pletcher’s data show that coned vent liners have no statistically significant effect on ignition time.
3)  They are very ugly.
4) They offer better reliability for target shooters.

My main interest in shooting flintlocks is for hunting.  I don’t miss, so I care very little about second shot reliability.

Question for you Acer – did you ever consider just drilling a larger hole?

[jerrywh]

 Ugly is a matter of opinion. I like them. They offer better performance to anybody who uses them
 In testing a half dozen tests do not disprove 200 years of shooting in the field experience.
 I don't recall Pletcher testing vent liners.  Besides that the subject at hand is not reliability. Read the original post.

[Acer Saccharum]

Question for you Acer – did you ever consider just drilling a larger hole?

Yes, I enlarged the hole to .08, and performance was just as miserable after the first fouling shot.

I wasn't going to go to 3/32, because I'd be blowing too much powder out the vent when I push the ball down. Closing the frizzen(self priming) is NOT an option if you're shooting at the range with other people in the vicinity.

[Acer Saccharum]

Yes, we are drifting of-topic. A new topic should be started to discuss ignition.

[jerrywh]

 Tony Clark.
   In your conversation the two gunmakers would both be German. The American gunmaker would be a German immigrant.
 

[Joe S]

Yes, we are drifting of-topic.

Well, I suppose there’s a first time for everything.

Jerry – To get back to your original post,

In testing a half dozen tests do not disprove 200 years of shooting in the field experience.

If vent liners truly offered an improvement, it seems to me that they would be common in American long rifles.  Consider only high end rifles, where the cost of adding a vent liner would have been trivial to the cost of the entire rifle.  I suppose then, as now, the people who bought high end rifles wanted only the best, and didn’t care what they cost.  But vent liners in high end rifles are somewhere between exceedingly rare and nonexistent.

Even in a common rifle, say one with little or no carving or inlays, the added cost of a vent liner is still small, and I would think well within the purchasing power of the average person. 

The 200 years of field experience you cite clearly shows a preference for no vent liner.

So why is that?  I could only guess, but Acers comment about self priming may point us in the right direction.

Once a flash hole gets large enough, it is going to perform a whole lot like a coned flash liner – that is, give good multiple shot ignition reliability.  Lets suppose the optimal flash hole diameter is near the point where self priming occurs.  Under modern shooting range conditions, that’s a problem as Acer pointed out. Under the conditions that existed in the Way Back Times, it may not have been a problem.

If you made a coned vent liner out of iron, it would wear out rapidly.  If you could get the same performance out of a larger hole, the economics would drive you toward a simple hole. Vents certainly enlarge with time, however, that didn’t seem to be much of an issue back then.  If it was a big problem, vent hole repairs would be common.  Judging by the rifles we have to study, vent hole repairs were done, but they were rare.

Back then, as now, people were interested in any technological change that improved performance.  Consider that it took what – maybe 5-10 years for percussion caps to nearly completely replace flintlocks.  Same with cartridge rifles.  Same with smokeless powder.

So I think the answer to your original question - why is it that American long rifles never had touch hole liners? - is that they didn’t need them – their need for reliable ignition was better served by simply drilling larger flash holes than we like to use.

[Sawatis]

You know, you just made me think of a little gadget that Lynton McKensie wrote about ...think it was in JHAT 5...will look when I get home...but it was a little tapered bur on an extended gear bar with a eggbeater type handle...that was used for relieving/coning the touchole from the inside of the barrel.  Looks like something anay good mechanic, lockmaker or clockmaker could whip out.
So maybe the real question we could ask (I hate to do this... ) : "how many of our old longrifles had coned touchholes?"
John

[JTR]

So maybe the real question we could ask (I hate to do this... ) : "how many of our old longrifles had coned touchholes?"
John

Hard to tell, as there's probably not one rifle in a hundred that is original flint with the original breech end of the barrel intact... There are however a good number of original flint pistols around.

John

[Joe S]

Dave Rase has one of those gadgets.  There is no question that some barrels had internal cones.  Some also had external cones.

[JTR]

I just decided to look through several of the closed out auctions in Hermann-Historica as they show lots of really high end German and French flintlock guns.  In three collections of around 70 or so guns I only found two one English ~ 1810 fowler and the other a German rifle which upon closer inspection looked to have gold inlaid in a circle around the touch hole. None of the ones where I could see the touchhole had vents visibly installed and over half of them were highly ornate guns and several target rifles. 

And if you take the above comment as a representative sampling, it looks like touch hole liners might not be common in euro guns either,,,
Maybe they're mostly a modern contraption?

John

[eddillon]

Some time back I recall a forum member offering tools for coning from the inside.  Can't find the post but I would like to buy and try.

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Some time back I recall a forum member offering tools for coning from the inside.  Can't find the post but I would like to buy and try.

They are fantastic. I have built three guns with internally coned touch holes using the tools made and sold by Tom Snyder; and they are every bit as fast and reliable as the ones I have made with Chambers White Lightning liners. The coning seems to be the critical factor.

[jerrywh]

This experiment has already been done. It was done by the English who shot flintlocks for 200 years and decided that the liners were superior.  Read W. Keith Neal’s book  the Mantons.
  But the facts might not fit everybody's agenda.
 Dr. Boone. I think Dave Race used to make those tools.

[Majorjoel]

Tom Snyder from this forum makes the coning tool.

[Dave B]

I read an account of a period gun smith doing repairs to a burned out touch hole by " bushing it". It came from a ledger that listed the things he was charging folks for in the normal course of business. I cant remember where the account was published but it was interesting reading.

[Dale Campbell]

Bushing was also done on cannon. Generally if the touch hole burned out. A tapered hole was created inside the bore and the bushing put in. Each round tightened the fit. Makes perfect sense that it was done on smaller firearms. I wonder if there are any rifles left with such a bushing? Many were probably converted.