Sorry for the late report on this year 's shoot, but we had a lot of driving to do before I could get back home.
Well we got our butts beat by Roy Holbrook of MN. He out shot us at both 400 & 600 yds. targets.
He is shooting a 1/2 scale sea coast mortar he is shooting zinc balls weighting 22lbs. he made this mortar him self, it is all steel.
We wre chasing a demon both days but sunday was the worst. the mortar on sat. morning at 400 yds. it was taking 2oz.of ffa and 85 grs. of ffg to hit the target, in 5 rounds we hit the target 3 times other 2 were long.
here is a shot going off, you can see both the 400 & 600 yds. targets.
here is the same shot, but I marked the ball going, also look at how much recoil we were having.
we found out that the more bungees we added to reduce recoil the further the ball would go. also on sunday shooting the 600yds target we started out at 3oz.of ffa and 105grs. of ffg, after shooting 2 rounds of 5 shots per round our load was 2.5 oz. ffa and no ffg, we were still over shooting the target, some of the balls went over the hill! we found them over 700 yds. away, we think that the heat build up and the recoil system were the cause of our problems, We did take 2nd place.
here are some other pic. of the match
This is Bill & Dan Steinke 40 mm cannons dan took 2nd & bill ended up 3rd. Scott Harris was first in rifled cannon. Bills shot Tom Lashley's new cannon , It's is a 3/4 carriage & a 11/16 scale barrel, Dan's is a 5/8 scale
here is a rifled bore shot by Paul Gifford (REDDOT) of WASH. on their last shot they missed their target but hit a steel turkey in the neck to the left of their target!
here is a cannon from CO. it's a 3in. parrot rifled. sorry I don't know who 's the owner.
here is some of the firing line.
I'm sorry we didn't get more pic. but we were short staffed and no time to waste. Here is a tip for you guys to find your balls, I put my video camera on a tripod and recoded the shots then we played them back on a tv. to be able to mark the impacts, we lost only 2 balls out of 27 shots.
Gerald
