doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Double Rifles, Paradox Guns & Gauge Rifles @ doublegunshop.com 12 bore pinfire WR

Anyone have any experience with pinfire, bore rifles? I have a 12 bore Westley Richards pinfire that is in excellent shape, and I'd like to experience it. Finding info on loads for it is nearly impossible. While I haven't cast the chambers yet, it appears that the chamber is only about 1.6 inches long. Somebody out there is smart on this, and can put me on the right track.

Gramps,

No experience. However, this folks know a bit about it.

http://www.hammerdouble.com/load-data.htm

Gramps-

I seem to recall having seen you post about this WR pinfire rifle elsewhere.

I have two pinfire double rifles, I shoot them both.

You really need to cast those chambers.
My guess is that the rifle was set up for paper cases.

I strongly doubt that the thin walled brass cases offered by the company mentioned above will work with your rifle.

It's going to take some work for you to get it set up properly with just the right projectile (likely roundball) and the right charge and wad column.

I make my own cases from brass barstock. The case walls need to be thick to emulate the shape of the old paper cases. I'm working with reforming the rims on modern paper and plastic cases to get them set up to run in my rifles. The 209 primer pockets need work and I need to drill firing pin holes too...

It's a lot of fun, the rifles shoot well and have been quite a challenge, Very Rewarding!

So, back to my sense of remembering you having posted on this gun before, I don't recall you having gotten photos of it up on the web.
You really should either photograph it yourself or get someone to snap some images and get them up for us to see.
Include photos of the proof marks, the breech faces including the firing pin notches, the hammers, the locking system...

I want to see this thing!
There's another guy here on the site who shoots an old black powder cartridge bore rifle, I think his is a twenty bore. My rifles are both sixteen bore.

here's one of them in it's case



and the other one, it's first day at the bench



Now let's see your WR...


--Tinker

Tinker,
I did post somewhere and got ahold of you. The only one that's ever helped. Your second pic tells me a lot. I think mine will be set up like that. The brass case can only be about 1.6 inches long due to the chamber. I got some .690 and .715 balls in the mail today, so I will try to slug the bore as well. The cerrosafe just hasn't worked well for me when I try to cast the chambers. So your cartridges are a combination brass/paper? I'm ready to learn. This thing isn't cased, but it is gorgeous. WR sent me it's pedigree for the sum of 50 pounds. Sold April 13th, 1865 to Manton and Sons.

Gramps

Oh, hm.
Perhaps all of this holiday turkey and stuffing's working my long term memory a little too hard...

Good then, let's see what we can do to get your rifle going.
The cases you see above are short, like what you need for your rifle. That rifle likes two and a half drams of FFg Goex black powder, I have a fresh can of Swiss 1-1/2Fg that I'll be trying soon too.
I turned the cases from brass barstock to match my chamber casts, then hand fitted them to my chambers for a very snug fit.
I didn't run the walls as thick as a wax paper case, and neck them down very slightly to make up the difference. I wanted my cases to have a little bit of spring to them so as to provide a gas seal.
Over the powder, I run a little cup that I make out of milk carton material. I made a special punch and die to form them in. They resemble little paper water cups with very short walls.
I tamp the powder down with one of these, the cup facing the powder. Over that I set a 1/4" thick saddle felt donut wad that I soak with black powder lube -- essentially a paste that makes sure that the powder fouling remains soft from shot to shot.
I can easily fire a string of ten pairs of shots without having to clean or swab the barrels. The lube also renders the fouling relatively inert.
My firing pins are made of bronze alloy brazing rod material, and I use regular percussion caps for ignition. Black powder is easy to light, ignition's been very consistent.

If your gun is a twelve bore, the .690 balls are likely too small.
You'll want to run pure lead balls of groove diameter. Slugging the bores you might find that the barrels don't have the same diameters. Don't be suprised if that happens...

A tip on cerrosafe casting barrels--
Get two big soup pots of water boiling. Set the chamber ends of the barrels in one pot. That'll get them up to a temperature where the casting alloy won't flash freeze on the barrel metal.
Set up a double boiler in the other pot, I use a pyrex measuring cup to melt the alloy in. The handle and spout of the mesuring cup makes pouring the cerrosafe easy.
Plug the bores with cloth or paper napkins three quarters of an inch into the bores. That's enough to hold the cerrosafe back. Pour the cerrosafe into the chambers and short bit of the bores until it juuuuuust wells at the breech end of the barrels. Let stand to cool for about ten or fifteen minutes.
Then tap the casts out with a wooden dowel or cleaning rod.
Let them sit to cool for an hour and measure them.

You'll have chamber, bore, and groove dimensions of each barrel on each casting.

From there you can calculate what the wall thickness needs to be for your cases, and what your projectile diameter needs to be.

Hope that makes sense.


When I get a good repeatable method of modifying modern centerfire cases for pinfire use I'll explain it. At this point It's pretty much one-off modifications and experimentation.


And Gramps, post some images of that thing again. If I've seen them before, I've forgotten. I want to see it again!



--Tinker

The cerrosafe technique makes sense. you can get 2.5 drams in that little case with a ball? Do you crimp the ball, or seal it with bee's wax or something? i'll see if i can't get some better pics posted.

I saw hammer combination gun made by Ronge Fills in Belgium. Very high grade gun. Exellent piece! One barrel chambered 16/65 with straight rifling and the other one 12/40 (1.6") with twisted rifling. Both for centerfire ammo.

I designed my cases specifically to hold that much powder and the short wad column. There's no base wad, although the head of the cases are thicker than the case walls. I should note, I haven't noticed a need for a base wad and my fiddling with modern cases is showing that the typical modern base wad might take too much powder room for an appropriate black powder charge to fit in there with the wad column and ball.
I haven't needed to crimp or wax seal the roundball either. I size my case mouths a few thou small and let the spring of the case material do it's job.

Works great.
If I were to make a lot of ammunition up for a hunting trip I'd wax seal the mouths to keep moisture out.

Try that barrel warming trick today before the women take the kitchen over, let me know how it works for you. Make sure you give them a good oilrag rubdown afterwards, you'll notice they dry themselves very quickly as you get them out of the water, but the warm bath can take the normal thin film of oil off them and it's good to wipe them down with the oilrag while they're still warm.


--Tinker

I'll have to give it a try. I've been fighting a broken garbage disposal today that is so corroded, it simply will not come out of there. So you turn your own cases? We're starting to get into areas behind my abilities.

Tinker,
How do I post pics? I don't see that option here.

Gramps-

Tell me how you have your photos stored on your computer or what website they're stored on.
Later in the day I'll be able to give you a hand with getting them up on this site.


--Tinker

they are jpg's. just took some today. i could email them to you. i once had your email, but i can't find it now. heating up some cerrosafe now.

Tinker,
Success. Two good chamber casts. 1.6 inches from the rim of the cartridge until the chamber necks down. There is then a .2 inch smooth area until the rifling starts. The wall of the chamber is .78 inches in diameter. The .2 inch smooth area after the neck down, and prior to the start of the rifling is .72 inches in diameter. It has 8 lands and grooves. Groove to groove is .715 inches. Now what do I do?

Gramps

Wow Gramps, way to go!

What's the rim thickness and rim diameter?

Is the chamber tapered? I'm guessing it's bigger in diameter up by the rim (base dia) than at the case mouth.

For your photo posting excercise, we're going to have to get you set up with an account on a photo hosting website.
I use flickr.com and it's super easy.
just go with them or do a web search for free photo hosting and choose one.
The thing here is that it takes server memory space to show a photo on a therad like this. when you see an image here on the site, what's happening is essentially an elegant linkage of resource.

Start by getting set up on a photo hosting site. It's super quick and easy, the process will be explained at the website you choose.

Then I'll walk you through showing them off here...


--Tinker

Tinker,
Just thinking about it, half the diameter of a .715 ball is .3575. The chamber length plus the .2 inches of smooth wall prior to the rifling is 1.8 inches. 1.6 inches of chamber, plus .3575 inches of the forward half of the ball sticking out past the neck of the cartridge equals 1.9575. Since it's 1.8 inches to the start of the rifling, and the rifling gradually increases its purchase on the ball, and the ball is round, that should put the face of the ball sitting right on, or near, the start of the rifling which might add to the accuracy of these fine arms. So you're experimenting with modern, plastic hulls? I am considering cutting some high brass hulls to 1.6 inches, placing them in the chambers and marking the hole for the pin. What I don't know is how the cap goes inside the case. Do pinfire cases have some kind of anvil inside to rest the cap on? Does the pin rest inside the cup of the cap against the priming and the case wall acts as the anvil? I think I can figure this out. 20 years of shooting blackpowder, and another 15 of handloading should prove useful.

Gramps

Rim diameter and thickness...
Will a cutdown modern case chamber in this gun?
Typical pinfire cases have very thin and slight rims.

Also, you'll likely need to look at a few different modern hull designs to find one that'll hold enough powder, modern base wads are much taller than the old pinfire cases -- high brass just isn't necessary.
The closest thing I've seen to looking like it'll work is the Activ all-plastic one-piece hulls.
Not glamorous, but very strong and lots of powder room.

Oh, another thing.
Don't load these with the balls touching the rifling. Some jump is actually good. Double rifles typically perform best with some jump.
One thing to consider is how the 'second shot' barrel will do with the recoil. You don't want the second roundball sticking in the rifling before it's fired.
Also a little jump can help keep pressures down.



--Tinker

do you just slide the cap down the case and seat the pin in it? do you seal where the pin and case meet with some kind of cement to help prevent inadvertent firing? so many questions.

I set my brass cases up with central anvils for the caps, although I don't really think it's necessary.

For the firing pins, I use a tiny bit of thick crazy glue and set it with accelerator. Just enough to hold the pins while I finish loading the cases.
I think the tamped-down blackpowder does a good job of holding things together in there once all's done.
oh, and yes, I just slip the caps in there with long tweezers. nothing to it.


So rim thickness--
does this rifle need thin skinny little rims or will modern hull rim thickness work?


--Tinker

Central anvil? Remember, you've got to talk down to the Marine. I'm going to got down a shotshell to see if I can fit in in the chamber, and then I'll know about rim thickness.

Ok, you were right. I just spent an hour creating a beautiful case out of a high brass, 12 gauge shell. The rim is too thick so the action won't close. as well, the plastic walls are too thin to hold the ball, it just falls into the case. So i guess I need to have some cases custom turned.

Gramps-

Sounds so.
Thin little rims work fine for pinfire, the firing pin is the extractor.
With the more modern centerfire guns, the rims needed to be tougher and stronger to withstand being used against the extractors or ejectors.

Email me at
engineeringandclosure (which is my email ID on yahoo.com)
Just put the ID name and the yahoo part together with the symbol @ and fling me an email.
The reason I don't just spell that one out on this thread message is that there are special computer programs made by hackers (develish little critters like viruses) that scrub websites for spelled out email addresses, then litter those email addresses with spam emails. Nasty.

From there I'll drop you a couple of suggestions on getting yourself set up with brass for your WR.
The hammer double people have somehow gotten a patent together on the pinfire shell (can you freakin believe that?) and I don't know how that affects anyone else making custom made cases for your rifle. I wouldn't have an issue with them having a patent on pinfire hulls if they'd actually provide something that'd work for the rifles. The thin wall brass cases just won't cut it. Also, I have yet to hear an account from anyone who's actually using them with black powder, and frankly, I doubt thier plastic base wad will survive more than one firing with black powder.
I bet dollars to donuts that if they'd make paper cases with paper basewads, they'd sell. I'm not holding my breath though.


Now, as to those plastic cases you modified.
The plastic case walls can be sized down in diameter, but the rim feature of the brass is part of what's holding things together down at the base of the cartridge. It'd take some special tooling to resize the brass and still have enough of an internal crimp holding things together by the pinch created by the rim, yet still have a rim small enough to work out in the pinfire chamber.

Couple of things come up with the issue of using plastic cases and black powder together in the rifle.
One is that the black powder burn is hot enough for a long enough time in there (unlike smokeless which is really hot, but quick) to screw up the plastic cases, melting them.
That's not so bad though, cause plastic cases are cheap to start with so throwing them away after each shot's not such a shame -- but then there's the kind of work that'd be needed to get them to fit the rim recess of the pinfire gun...
Then there's the isue of plastic fouling at the leade of the rifling. I haven't worked on this issue enough to know if it's really an issue. But as you can imagine, if the black powder burn is enough to melt the cases, chances are that there's some distinct possibility that plastic fouling deposits could quickly accumulate in the bore near the chamber. With a rifle that could easily lead to pressure issues, bullet engraving issues, and without a doubt cleaning issues.


Now, for what I said about a central anvil.
Nothing special there, just an anvil in the center of the case head for the percussion cap.
I don't think it's necessary, as long as there's a sufficently thick case wall down near the rim to withstand the repeated hammering of a firing pin against a percussion cap.


You've come a long way in the past couple of days.
You have good chamber casts, you know what ball size to run, you know that modern cases won't chamber, and you'll soon know what to do about your brass situation.


--Tinker

Tinker,
Check email for pics.

Gramps

Tinker,
That's her! As fine an arm as I've ever held between my hands.

Gramps

That's a really sweet looking 12b SxS rifle.
I can't wait till you get it running and realize it's just not the thing for you -- and that you need to sell it to me

Really though, I'll be thilled to see it up on it's own and out hunting like it should be. That rifle will be great on deer!
With the short cases you'll be getting much more than plenty of velocity and energy to handle game you'd be able to keep in it's sights.

Are there any proof marks on those barrel flats or action flats?
Is that notch in the rib extension the only locking lug?


Get that thing together Gramps!
Let me know how you're doing on your brass efforts too.


--Tinker

I did a paper on loading homemade shotgun shells sever years ago. I still have it if you'd like a copy.
jas seakcharters@gmail.com