Thank you....but I'm gonna ride with Ole Ned on this one!
An extraction:
In the early days of the nation, target shooting was almost exclusively for hunting training. With the demands of colonial and frontier life, there was little time for the average person to shoot without an apparent purpose. "Shooting at the mark", which was a charred board with a piece of white paper fastened in the middle, was used initially to train people to shoot. Of course, the competitive nature comes out and people were soon doing "turkey shoots" or even "beef shoots". (Footnote ii) Somewhere between 1790 and 1800, the "match rifle" or "turkey rifle" was produced, with a heavy, full octagon barrel between 38" and 40" long, full stocked, double set triggers and a "tube sight". A tube sight is simply a tube with cross hairs mounted in it, with no lenses. With most target sights, such as the "globe sight"(Footnote iii), the object is to keep shadows and glare off the sights to aid the shooter. The rifling twist was slow, probably between 1:60 and 1:70, as it shot a linen-patched round ball. This seems to be the best spin for a round ball. The primer cap made its debut around 1815, which made things easier for the shooter.
The next development was in the ammunition, i.e. the bullet that the rifle shot. In 1835, match rifles began to shoot the "picket" or "sugarloaf" bullet, a conical shaped round that gave slightly better range than the round ball. It, too, used a linen patch. Because of its shape, it was difficult to get started down the barrel accurately. If the nose of that style bullet is not in alignment with the axis of the bore, one side of the base of the bullet will exit the muzzle sooner than the other, giving an erratic spin to the bullet, thus decreasing accuracy. In order to counter this, the "straight starter" was introduced. The barrel of the rifle was turned down to round for the first 1-1 1/2 inches. Sometimes a shallow depression, the size of the patch, was turned into the end of the muzzle. The bullet and patch were place on the muzzle, over the bore. The starter was machined to fit perfectly over the muzzle, and, on the end of the push rod, was machined to fit the bullet perfectly, so that the bullet was not damaged while being started. With one strike by the ball of the fist, the bullet was rammed about 4-6 inches into the bore. A ramrod finished the job.
The match rifles themselves still weighed in the 9-15 lb. range. They were generally around .45 caliber. The rifling twist had increased to 1:30, sometimes with a "gain twist", starting out with a slower twist, and getting tighter as the rifling neared the muzzle. The faster rate of twist was due to the longer bullet needing the faster rate of spin to stabilize. In 1840 the next significant development was the "false muzzle". This was a piece approximately 1 1/2 to 2" long, which had been cut off the end of the barrel during manufacture, after the bore had been cut, but before the rifling had been cut. Prior to being cut, four equidistant holes were drilled along the long axis of the barrel, from the muzzle end. After being cut, four pins were placed in the holes. The false muzzle was attached to the barrel, then the rifling was cut in both. The bore was reamed smooth at the other end to provide a "funnel" for the bullet being loaded. The false muzzle was placed on the end of the rifle, the base of the straight starter went on over that (with the patch and round placed on it), and finally the straight starter itself. All of this insured that the bullet would go into the rifle as straight as possible, and also protected the all-important rifling at the true muzzle. By this time, paper patches were being used for accuracy, in place of the linen patches. Paper patches are either cross or strip patches. Cross-style is cut with a special cross-shaped cutter, giving an "X" shaped piece of paper. Strip style is several narrow strips of paper, overlaid to give an "X" pattern or, with three strips, an asterisk (*) shaped six-point pattern. The paper was oiled with sperm whale oil (hardly available now!). The base of the straight starter generally had slots cut into it to place the patches in the proper orientation, with the bullet placed on the patch strips. The paper strips were found to be more accurate than the linen, as the bullet could be made to fit the bore more closely.
False Muzzle by
Rick Mulhern, on Flickr
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