6 pounder Cannon--REPORT!

[getitdone1]

Here's a video of an 1841, 6 pounder cannon shooting at a target. 1/2 pound of powder. Like used in Civil War.

Oh that black powder makes a neat sound!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHYWcBIL ... re=related

I keep saying it: Wonderful YouTube!

Back to add this one: Nice music too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHVOHAfS ... re=related

Don

[JReed]

Ahh the big guns One of these days I will get a mini one that fires a 50cal ball that way I can transport it in the trunk of my car.

[Pitchy]

Cool, almost built a cannon couple years ago but changed my mind.
Fun to watch for sure.

[rossim92]

very nice shooting! was shocked as to how accurate the cannons can be with sights on them. Good job!

[AJMD429]

very nice shooting! was shocked as to how accurate the cannons can be with sights on them. Good job!

Well, they're really just BIG blackpowder rifles, and unless onboard a ship, were fired from the ultimate 'rest' - a heavy carriage resting on the ground.

I want one...

[getitdone1]

I've watched these videos several times and I discovered them today!

Can you imagine charging toward one of these--with ball or grape shot coming your way?

Don

[Pitchy]

I seen a double barrel cannon on TV once, the barrels were angled out slightly from each other. The cannon balls had a chain attached to them and when fired it cut anything in its path in half.

[Ysabel Kid]

Ahh the big guns One of these days I will get a mini one that fires a 50cal ball that way I can transport it in the trunk of my car.

I made something like that when I was a kid out of an old piece of iron pipe. Worked pretty well too!

[Old No7]

"I seen a double barrel cannon on TV once, the barrels were angled out slightly from each other. The cannon balls had a chain attached to them and when fired it cut anything in its path in half."

Ah yes, "Chain Shot"...

Designed to take down masts & rigging -- and anybody standing in the way...

Old No7

[Pitchy]

These were civil war cannons, big barrels, used to shoot across fields into men.
The balls would pull the chain tight because they were angled away from each other slightly.

Here`s a link about one.

http://www.athensclarkecounty.com/index.aspx?NID=86

[kimwcook]

Cool.

[AJMD429]

Here`s a link about one - http://www.athensclarkecounty.com/index.aspx?NID=86

The article says the cannon was 'a failure', but then goes on to say

• "A contemporary who witnessed the firing reported that the projectile "had a kind of circular motion, plowed up an acre of ground, tore up a cornfield, and mowed down saplings. The chain broke, the two balls going in opposite directions; one of the balls killed a cow in a distant field, while the other knocked down the chimney from a log cabin. The observers scattered as though the entire Yankee Army had been turned loose in that vicinity"

I'd say that's a pretty good 'weapon of mass-destruction' - not a 'failure' . . .

[1894c]

thank you for sharing--really cool--

[Gobblerforge]

They tried that with two cannon but found out early that they could not get two cannon to go off at the same time.
Gobbler

[Cimarron]

I was at a small civil war reenactment east of Tulsa two weeks ago. There were two 6 pounders there that they shot several times. I went up and talked to the gun crews. They were from Texarkana. They told me about a cannon shoot at Ft. Sill in the spring of the year where they compete with solid shot. I think I will try to go next spring if I can find out exactly when it is.

[getitdone1]

In the second video you can actually see the cannon ball going through the air toward the barrels.

What was the muzzle velocity of the 6 pounder? Muzzle energy would also be interesting.

Don

[Pitchy]

You can see the ball in the first video too.

[getitdone1]

Found some specs about the 6 pounder. Some are approx. numbers but close.

3.5" bore
1450 fps MV
1500 yards plus range (close to a mile)
1780 lbs--gun plus carriage

In the first video they were using 1/2 lb of black powder but I read they also used 1-1 1/2 lbs of powder. I assume the lighter load was used to be on the safe side--maybe not.

They had a kind of "swab" soaked with water they ran down the bore after shooting and before loading again. They said it's purpose was to put-out any possible fire remaining from the patch of the previous fired load.

Can you imagine, in the heat of war, failing to use this and ram the load and ball down onto a spark or flame? Wonder if any hands were lost doing this? Also, how many men "went deaf" being around these cannons?

Don

[Blaine]

In the second video you can actually see the cannon ball going through the air toward the barrels.

What was the muzzle velocity of the 6 pounder? Muzzle energy would also be interesting.

Don

6 pounds, X 7000gr per pound = 42,000 grain bullet Plug in a FPS guess...holy stuff.

[bdhold]

and who says shooting paper targets is boring?

[Ben_Rumson]

That really looks like fun...I’d like to have a little Whitworth...
One of the worst things I’ve read about the chain shot idea was that they feared if one projectile exited the bore while the other lagged behind but was still in the bore of the other barrel the chain of the proj that had exited theoretically could swing the proj back around, break and let the proj go toward the rear of the gun!.
A very expensive experimental gun with a common powder chamber (a casting masterpiece of the day BTW) was made in an effort overcome the problems created when both shot didn’t exit the bores simultaneously .. It didn’t cure the problem either... Further experimentation was too costly and the double barrel cannon idea was dropped and all but forgotten...It was found that merely shooting the chain shot down a single barrel gun worked OK ...also canister or grape shot was working plenty good anyway...

[Nath]

Bueatiful, those guy's could take a deer with that gun if the stop shouting so much

N.

[getitdone1]

Ahh the big guns One of these days I will get a mini one that fires a 50cal ball that way I can transport it in the trunk of my car.

I made something like that when I was a kid out of an old piece of iron pipe. Worked pretty well too!

Ysabel Kid,

You're reminding me of when my brother and I put a corn cob in one end of a long pipe and a firecracker in the other. I don't recall but suppose we blocked the firecracker end, maybe with a board. Home made slingshots too.

Don

[w30wcf]

getitdone1,
Thank you for the link. Neat!

Check this out. Cannon competition at camp Grayling using service charges of 1# powder firing at 1,200 yards.
End shows impact at the target.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL13quhcUMw

w30wcf

[getitdone1]

Here's some more cannons. Add this link and be back with another.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMDtKQIF ... re=related

They call the above cannon a 3" Ordanance Rifle. Uses a unique bullet rather than a ball. Nice details shown about how they load, etc.

The next link gets a little off subject with loading and firing a muzzle loading rifle but this is followed with a nicely detailed demonstration of the men involved with one cannon. What each does and how.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK5GcG_Q ... re=related

Don

[FWiedner]

I saw a video a while back of a fellow hunting white-tail deer with a cannon using grape-shot.

He used a 12-pounder. It worked.

The guy still has a web-site:

http://www.buckstix.com/howitzer.htm

[pokey]

want one?

http://www.dixiegunworks.com/advanced_s ... on&x=8&y=9

lots o' cannon stuff.

[kaschi]

I thought that scenery looked familiar and the accent of some of the folks there sounded familiar as well. Then I heard "Susquehanna" and I knew it was home turf: Pennsylvania. Not to mention, the one older gentleman wearing the green jacket was Charlie Smithgall (pretty sure anyway!). He's used to be the Mayor of Lancaster, PA and has a farm where he shoots and collects Gatling guns and cannons.

Maybe some of you other guys from Central PA made similar observations.

[getitdone1]

I saw a video a while back of a fellow hunting white-tail deer with a cannon using grape-shot.

He used a 12-pounder. It worked.

The guy still has a web-site:

http://www.buckstix.com/howitzer.htm

FWiedner,

Very interesting website. I read most of the instructions on how to build a Mountain Howitzer. A lot of work there I would not feel adequate to do and he made a great looking gun. One thing I did notice is one of the welds had a crater (a concave depression) where the welder stopped welding but failed to fill-in the crater while it was very hot. A crater can sometimes lead to a crack developing and once a crack starts it can eventually go through the whole weld. They did pre-heat the metal to 600 degrees F so that probably would keep the weld from cracking, even with the crater. Fast cooling of a weld can lead to a crack and pre-heating prevents this. Thick metal "sucks" heat fast from the weld area which can lead to a crack and why thick metal (roughly 3/4" on up) is pre-heated.

Sounding like a "know-it-all" perhaps but important to know when welding heavy metal. Also important to have the correct welding wire or rods for the specific metal being welded.

Not likely, but someone in this group might want to build a cannon and welding correctly is one of the most important aspects of making a safe cannon. A true professional welder doing the welding is a very good idea. Too, as was stated at the website, properly constructed pipe with the proper metal is also very important. No guessing about this.

Don

[AJMD429]

Hope they don't pull the trigger when he's doing this...

Ready to Fire....JPG

...although there wasn't as much visible recoil as I'd suspected.

Pretty cool stuff...!

[olyinaz]

Very nice! Here's a link to a 32 pounder being worked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuaZrByG ... re=related

Fun stuff!

Oly

[olyinaz]

And in case you were wondering:

"The English word howitzer originates ultimately from the Czech word houfnice. Czech houfnice is derived, through the addition of the suffix -nice, from the word houf, "crowd", suggesting the cannon's use against massed enemies, and houf is in turn a borrowing from the Middle High German word Hūfe or Houfe (modern German Haufen), meaning "heap". Haufen, sometimes in the compound Gewalthaufen, also designated a pike square formation in German. In the Hussite Wars of the 1420s and 1430s, the Czechs used short barreled houfnice cannons to fire at short distances into such crowds of infantry, or into charging heavy cavalry, to make horses shy away. The word was rendered into German as aufeniz in the earliest attested use in a document dating from 1440; later German renderings include Haussnitz and, eventually Haubitze, from which derive the Scandinavian haubits, Finnish haupitsi, Polish haubica, Russian gaubitsa, Italian obice, Spanish obús, Portuguese obus, French obusier and the Dutch word houwitser, which led to the English word howitzer.

Since the First World War, the word howitzer has been increasingly used to describe artillery pieces that, strictly speaking, belong to the category of gun-howitzer - relatively long barrels and high muzzle velocity combined with multiple propelling charges and high maximum elevation. This is particularly true in the armed forces of the United States, where gun-howitzers have been officially described as "howitzers" for more than sixty years. Because of this practice, the word "howitzer" is used in some armies as a generic term for any kind of artillery piece that is designed to attack targets using indirect fire. Thus, artillery pieces that bear little resemblance to howitzers of earlier eras are now described as howitzers, although the British call them guns. Most other armies in the world still reserve the word howitzer for guns with barrel length 15 to 25 times its caliber, longer-barreled guns being cannons.

The British had a further method of nomenclature that they adopted in the 19th century. Guns were categorized by projectile weight in pounds while howitzers were categorized by caliber in inches. This system broke down in the 1930s with the introduction of gun-howitzers."

(Wikipedia, so that could all be made up. )

Oly

[olyinaz]

Which, I might add, begs the question if Clausewitz was a fan of the haussnitz.



Oly

[pdentrem]

They had a kind of "swab" soaked with water they ran down the bore after shooting and before loading again. They said it's purpose was to put-out any possible fire remaining from the patch of the previous fired load.

Can you imagine, in the heat of war, failing to use this and ram the load and ball down onto a spark or flame? Wonder if any hands were lost doing this? Also, how many men "went deaf" being around these cannons?

Don

This actually happened in 1978 to a summer student at the local fortification. The crew was doing a demo of rapid fire with blank 6-8 oz charges. As the student was doing the swab and ram position, he was setting the second charge down to the breech end and it detonated. It blew out the rammer which he was holding on to with his hand. As you can guess he lost the hand and has eye and hearing issues for the rest of his life. The following year the program had 2 professional soldiers in charge of the Blackpowder Program as the previous leadership was a bit of a hot dog.

What we were taught to do was not hold on to the rammer when setting the charge but to kind of go through a tossing motion, that would set the charge but move your hand and face clear of the muzzle in case of a premature discharge. This was taken from the training manual of the British Army dated from around 1800. The position you would end up in, is with your back to the muzzle and your face looking back towards the breech, with your body behind the face of the muzzle.

In the real world, under fire who knows what would really happen, but with proper training one would / should still do it the same way, as it is the only way one was taught. I still hold a huge respect for BP and hope to never have to go through that again. Never found the rammer, but only bits of bone and meat. Sad day.

[AJMD429]

What we were taught to do was not hold on to the rammer when setting the charge but to kind of go through a tossing motion, that would set the charge but move your hand and face clear of the muzzle in case of a premature discharge.

I even do that with my "6/100ths-pounder" (.50 cal muzzleloader)...

[pdentrem]

I do the same with my Navy Arms .75 caliber Shortland smoothbore. I just drop the ramrod down the barrel with the muzzle pointed away towards the butts down range.

[Thunder50]

At the Tulsa gun show. They had a replica 6 pounder. IIRC, it was around $4,500.