Coning: Inaccurate?

[thecapgunkid]

Be careful about this..."period correct"...stuff.  It has been my experience that people who maintain what..."they"...did and did not have are often just folks who got satisfied with their research, stopped,  and began to posture.

In order to state for certain that no one ever coned a barrel or used a short starter you'd have to have witnessed every piece used during that period.  Even the ones that succumbed to wear and are no longer with us.  I believe that's called proving a negative.

I always wondered whether a fellow short of resources would be willing to bang the butt of his knife on the round at the muzzle or the guy who shelled out a weeks wages for his Colt would drive wanted poster nails with it.

Maybe there's a journal from some sod buster Vinnie Boom-Botz that says...." Oh! That they would invent something to start my round ball"... but I haven't found it.

[Davemuzz]

Vinnie Boom-Botz that says...

Hey.....Hey....Hey!!!! Fugetaboutit.

[Bob Roller]

Be careful about this..."period correct"...stuff.  It has been my experience that people who maintain what..."they"...did and did not have are often just folks who got satisfied with their research, stopped,  and began to posture.

In order to state for certain that no one ever coned a barrel or used a short starter you'd have to have witnessed every piece used during that period.  Even the ones that succumbed to wear and are no longer with us.  I believe that's called proving a negative.

I always wondered whether a fellow short of resources would be willing to bang the butt of his knife on the round at the muzzle or the guy who shelled out a weeks wages for his Colt would drive wanted poster nails with it.

Maybe there's a journal from some sod buster Vinnie Boom-Botz that says...." Oh! That they would invent something to start my round ball"... but I haven't found it.

I have heard that "THEY" are the flight crew of a UFO and pay little attention to them
Are there any barrel makers that offer funneled or cone muzzles in new work?
If done on a lathe it may be OK.Uniform gas escape is usually the determining thing
to accuracy will ball or bullet,especially a bullet.Many years ago I read an article about
Harry Pope who said "A perfectly flat base bullet fired from a perfect 90 degree muzzle
is the key to accuracy.Maybe,maybe not.I had an 1863 Sharps rifle,not a carbine that
shot as well and anything on the range with that odd Sharps bullet that had a knob on
the base.If a barrel of any configuration is accurate and satisfactory then that's it.

Bob Roller

[Elnathan]

Be careful about this..."period correct"...stuff.  It has been my experience that people who maintain what..."they"...did and did not have are often just folks who got satisfied with their research, stopped,  and began to posture.

Well, thank you.

In order to state for certain that no one ever coned a barrel or used a short starter you'd have to have witnessed every piece used during that period.  Even the ones that succumbed to wear and are no longer with us.  I believe that's called proving a negative.

Which is why the burden of proof is usually on those who want to claim that something was used, not those claiming that it wasn't used. Otherwise, we'd have "longhunters" running around with katana and wakizashi thrust through their sashes samurai-style, 'cause there isn't any way to prove that they didn't....

Despite what people seem to think, the 18th century frontier is not exactly poor in primary sources*, and there are quite a number of period accounts that mention how rifles were loaded, either directly like Weld and Audubon, or indirectly such as the accounts of skirmishes in the Draper interviews. So far no one has managed to produce a reference for the use of a short starter for patched round ball earlier than 1780 in Germany or around 1810 or thereabouts (I think) for the US. If you've got a reference for their use earlier than that, I'd love to hear it.

(*I think we have as much or more written material for the settlement of the transappalachian frontier, a period of about fifty years, than we do for the whole of English history from 450 to 1050, and half of that is poetry. Heck, we have several period accounts of Indian warfare from the Indian side, but not one first-hand account of a Viking raid from either side...The evidence is there, people generally just don't know how to read it usefully.
/medievalist's rant)

[wattlebuster]

Be careful about this..."period correct"...stuff.  It has been my experience that people who maintain what..."they"...did and did not have are often just folks who got satisfied with their research, stopped,  and began to posture.

In order to state for certain that no one ever coned a barrel or used a short starter you'd have to have witnessed every piece used during that period.  Even the ones that succumbed to wear and are no longer with us.  I believe that's called proving a negative.

I always wondered whether a fellow short of resources would be willing to bang the butt of his knife on the round at the muzzle or the guy who shelled out a weeks wages for his Colt would drive wanted poster nails with it.

Maybe there's a journal from some sod buster Vinnie Boom-Botz that says...." Oh! That they would invent something to start my round ball"... but I haven't found it.

I have heard that "THEY" are the flight crew of a UFO and pay little attention to them
Are there any barrel makers that offer funneled or cone muzzles in new work?
If done on a lathe it may be OK.Uniform gas escape is usually the determining thing
to accuracy will ball or bullet,especially a bullet.Many years ago I read an article about
Harry Pope who said "A perfectly flat base bullet fired from a perfect 90 degree muzzle
is the key to accuracy.Maybe,maybe not.I had an 1863 Sharps rifle,not a carbine that
shot as well and anything on the range with that odd Sharps bullet that had a knob on
the base.If a barrel of any configuration is accurate and satisfactory then that's it.

Bob Roller

Charlie Burton will cone one of his new barrels for you. I think he uses a lathe but not sure. I have 3 of his coned barrels an love them. Mike Miller cones by hand with files I believe an I have seen targets shot by rifles he built using his coning method that were darn good groups.

[jerrywh]

 For the last 25 years I have coned the bore on every gun I built with no difference in accuracy. I have won a lot of first place awards in shooting plus killed a few deer that didn't think I could hit them from that far away.  Those who say it will ruin accuracy probably don't know how to cone one correctly. It should be done with a coning tool that has a pilot for the bore. My experience is most originals are not coned but I have seen some that are. My 58 cal. is coned and I won a long gong shoot with it off hand at 276 yards. That's when I was only 76 years old though.

[davec2]

Quite some time ago I read an article by Peter Alexander about coning a bore.  His article included a drawing of a reamer he made.  Having a fair felicity with machine tools, I didn't think that reamer was particularly good, although simple to make.  I had a tool grinder I use make up one of the simple reamers and one of my own design with a left hand twist, right hand cut.  Both have interchangeable pilots that I match machine to the bore diameter.  As expected, the simple reamer works but not nearly as cleanly or as fast as the spiral reamer.  It takes me about three minutes to cone a bore.  Just to check, I put a hand coned barrel back in the lathe and checked the running out of the coned surface with the bore.  Could not detect any runout.  Guns seem to shoot right where I point them, although I have now shifted over to Daryl and Taylor's muzzle "rounding" except I do it with a tool I made up.  Also takes about 3 minutes.

Reamers:



Muzzle tools:

I have always liked the way Daryl puts a nice large radius on his muzzles (as pictured near the end of this series of posts

    http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=12383.0 )

However, setting up to crown a muzzle like this in the lathe is always a pain.  So I made this hand tool to quickly put a clean, smooth radius on the edge of the muzzle.  Here is a picture of one of the barrels I have with the standard 45 degree chamfer as it comes from the manufacturer



Here is the tool showing the single radius cutter insert.  The nose / pilot of the tool is 0.0005 under bore size





Here is the tool in use



And here is how the crown looks after a few rotations of the tool.  Actually, this picture still looks like a chamfer and does not show how clean the radius is...I need to try to get a better picture...but the radius the tool makes matches the close up picture of the cutter insert and is not quite as large as it looks in the photo.

[Hungry Horse]

My logic on coned bores goes something like this. If there was no difference in accuracy you would see coned bores on antique target rifles. But, for the most part you see just the opposite. Many target rifles aren’t even really crowned, much less coned. Target shooting was a really big deal in the late eighteen hundreds, when muzzleloaders, were competing side by side with modern cartridge rifles. If there had been any advantage to a coned bore they would have used it, even it was only ease of loading.
 I think coned barrels became important when loading speed became important, for protection, or market hunting.


  Hungry Horse

[Acer Saccharum]

I understand that the cone will make it easier to load a patched ball. What I don't like about the cone is that the wide entrance gives the patch to wrap the ball unevenly, so that you could end up with slightly more patch compressed on one side than the other. The next time one loads, depending on the weave of the patch, you might get more patch in a different spot, or evenly placed.

I confess, I do like the "Daryl Muzzle". The only two things I'd add, DaveC, is that i'd polish the radius to reduce any friction, and to file to grooves deeper to organize the patch wrinkles as the ball enters the muzzle.

On target guns with false muzzles, you'll see cones or easy loading features built in, but before shooting the false muzzle is removed, leaving a sharp square muzzle end. The false muzzle also protects the muzzle from the ramrod during loading and cleaning.

[davec2]

Hungry,

This is just an academic exercise for me as I am not a competition shooter or market hunter and I rely on more modern firearms for protection.  But what I really do like is the ability to load, tight, wet lubed, patched round balls and fire round after round without spending most of a shooting day cleaning the bore.  Both the coned bores and the radius entry bores allow me to shoot (accurately) rather than clean.  I understand the ballistic advantage to a sharp edged bore precisely cut perpendicular to the bore axis, but without a false muzzle and a lot of paraphanelia taken afield, how exactly would you load a rifle like that with a patched round ball?  So, if I have to have a chamfer of some sort, like every barrel manufacturer I know of puts on their muzzles, whether it is long or short, round or straight seems a moot point to me.  Either you have some sort of muzzle treatment that allows you to load a patched round ball or you cut it off sharp and use a false muzzle.  And a poorly done chamfer of any type will effect accuracy.  So, for me, the trick is to do whatever you are going to do to the muzzle / bore edge precisely, but also make it "loadable" in the field.

[bgf]

DaveC2,

I like the Daryl tool for Darylling the muzzle!

[davec2]

bgf,

Me too.....Daryl's method of using a thumb and abrasive took me too long...and wore my thumb out....

And I like that description....."Darylling" a muzzle !   

[alacran]

Let me see. You are going to go to these woods walk how? Why worry about weather a short starter is period correct or not. Was coning a barrel period correct?
My experience has been that a load that can be started without a ball starter are not very accurate loads.

1st sentence: You are going to a woods walk how? I was asking if he was going to get there in a period correct manner. 2nd sentence is self explanatory. 3rd sentence: I don't know, I'm asking a question.
My statement about accurate loads has nothing to do with coning or not coning. You can have a tight patch ball combo with a coned muzzle. It just will not be as tight at the muzzle.

[smylee grouch]

Thats an interesting tool Dave C. I was going to make up one that functioned like the coning tools talked about but make it so it only cut the crown at say an 82* angle with a properly sized jag to keep it centered in the bore. Haven't done it yet but curious if any one else has done such a thing.

[Frank]

http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=41303.0


I have one in 40, 45, 50, 54, 58. and 62 calibers. Got most if not all of my bases covered.

[Smokey Plainsman]

Someone mentioned there are no references to patched ball loading with a short starter before 1810.

If so, what is the source in 1810 mentioning short starters for PRB loading?

I am basing my kit of a 1830s or 1840s late flintlock era gun. Would a starter be HC/PC by that time period and if so, what would it be like?

[Longknife]

Here is the method of using the coning tool that I developed quite a few years ago. I don't claim it to be PC but it does the job very nicely and can do all calibers from .32 to .75!

http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=4375.0

[Elnathan]

Someone mentioned there are no references to patched ball loading with a short starter before 1810.

If so, what is the source in 1810 mentioning short starters for PRB loading?

I am basing my kit of a 1830s or 1840s late flintlock era gun. Would a starter be HC/PC by that time period and if so, what would it be like?

It is a military drill manual for, IIRC, a New England militia unit of riflemen, and it describes the use of a mallet to start the ball followed by reversing the mallet and using the handle to push the ball down a short way into the barrel exactly the way we'd use a starter today. I might be off by a few years and I might have gotten the region wrong, but I'm pretty confident it is a military text from the first decade of the 19th century. Incidentally, I think the author brings it up as a fairly new idea, indicating that the practice wasn't common at the time, but I'd have to read it again.  By that time the Brits and the Austrians were issuing mallets/short starters to their military rifle units, but with the Brits they didn't issue them to every man and the design didn't allow for the handle to go down the bore.

My main area of focus is pre-1800, so I'm not sure when short starters became common among American civilian riflemen. I'd guess that they'd be quite acceptable for 1830-40, though. As for what they looked like, I left an example on the other forum but I'll link it here as well:

 https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/valley_forge/exb/Making_an_Army/Weapons/VAFO00001311_D_1.html

Ignore the dates - Neumann himself is careful not give a date in Collector's Encyclopedia, indicating that he was illustrating it as an example of what could have been used, not claiming that the specific artifact illustrated actually dated to the 18th century.

[Pukka Bundook]

Elnathan,

It may be that the 1810 drill with  mallet was a copy of the Baker rifle drill, where a mallet was carried by every other man and shared, But, Only if it was needed!

To me, a normally bored barrel and a slightly undersized ball has always seemed to work.
Have a .58 Getz barrel, and have always used a .562" in it and it has always shot extremely well.  If it 's off it's me, not rifles fault, and I start the ball with thumb.

[Turtle]

 I was in two woods walks where you had to load lying down and fire several timed shots while behind a barrier. No part of you body could show above the barrier. My coned rifle worked great for that. Also, when loading the 2nd shot after shooting at a deer, a patched ball pressed into the muzzle doesn't fall off.

[Smokey Plainsman]

Those seem like great reasons but I’m worried about wrecking the accuracy of the gun by coning.

[Pukka Bundook]

Smokey,

Try it on someone else's gun first!   

[Smokey Plainsman]

Smokey,

Try it on someone else's gun first!   

Yeah I’ll get right on that.

[Daryl]

After 19,200 kilometers, 4,200 liters of diesel and 2 months, we're home.
At some time I might just try a tool like Davec2 makes - on my .36 perhaps, maybe even the .50 Verner.
My .69 stays as-is - it is a tack driver with what I call a normal radiused smooth muzzle crown.

Hope you are not sick of these pictures - and yes - this crown is so easily applied with a lathe.
Here are a couple of mine and a couple of Taylor's, his done on a lathe.
We find these allow easy entry of the patched ball into the bore, shaped much as Corbin's case and/or bullet drawing dies
are shaped. According to Corbin (swage and drawing die maker), the quickly rounded smoothly polished edge shape makes the easiest forming surface for metals
whether drawing or forming.  When making my own drawing die, I found exactly this, the long taper increased friction and pressure needed for drawing.
Drawing is the action needed to get the patched ball into the muzzle.
I attempted to incorporate this into my muzzle shape - for us and many others, it works.
My only attempt at coning did not work for me, but I confess - I did not work long at working up an accurate load in the barrel I coned.
I gave up on it, perhaps too early. I did not find, however that the 1" cone I introduced, eased loading at all.






plot of the hangover

[Daryl]

Quite some time ago I read an article by Peter Alexander about coning a bore.  His article included a drawing of a reamer he made.  Having a fair felicity with machine tools, I didn't think that reamer was particularly good, although simple to make.  I had a tool grinder I use make up one of the simple reamers and one of my own design with a left hand twist, right hand cut.  Both have interchangeable pilots that I match machine to the bore diameter.  As expected, the simple reamer works but not nearly as cleanly or as fast as the spiral reamer.  It takes me about three minutes to cone a bore.  Just to check, I put a hand coned barrel back in the lathe and checked the running out of the coned surface with the bore.  Could not detect any runout.  Guns seem to shoot right where I point them, although I have now shifted over to Daryl and Taylor's muzzle "rounding" except I do it with a tool I made up.  Also takes about 3 minutes.

Reamers:



Muzzle tools:

I have always liked the way Daryl puts a nice large radius on his muzzles (as pictured near the end of this series of posts

    http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=12383.0 )

However, setting up to crown a muzzle like this in the lathe is always a pain.  So I made this hand tool to quickly put a clean, smooth radius on the edge of the muzzle.  Here is a picture of one of the barrels I have with the standard 45 degree chamfer as it comes from the manufacturer



Here is the tool showing the single radius cutter insert.  The nose / pilot of the tool is 0.0005 under bore size





Here is the tool in use



And here is how the crown looks after a few rotations of the tool.  Actually, this picture still looks like a chamfer and does not show how clean the radius is...I need to try to get a better picture...but the radius the tool makes matches the close up picture of the cutter insert and is not quite as large as it looks in the photo.

Looking at the 4th picture shows the cross section of what you are left with. This would need little if any polishing with crocus cloth afterwards, although a quick polish with the thumb  would not hurt.
Studying the post-worked crown and the tool shows simple perfection in it's design.