With storm clouds looming, my match was shot this morning in the pecan orchard next to our house.
Here is the course:
First lesson, I should have put the pin out in the grass. If I had put it in the grass, I would have scored better. More on that later.
Here is the mortar, dirty after firing the match. The shooting platform is a piece of ½" plywood:
And here is the result, I put the pin in the clearing so I could get a good photo:
Not the pretty picture I had envisioned. The reason I said before that I should have shot into the grass is that the bare ground is very inconsistent, because of the rains the ground is very soft out in the middle and gets harder the closer to the tree you get.
Everything that fell way short stuck like glue, anything that fell closer rolled. Which made it frustratingly difficult to get anything close to the pin.
But once the pin was set and the match started no changes could be made. To reset the pin and start over would have been cheating.
Second lesson, my powder chamber is too large for shooting at this range. Ignition was inconsistent, enough so that you could hear the difference between some shots. I was shooting Fg in the hope that I could use more for the same range, but that proved not to be the case. I could tell no difference in the amount of powder required. And the Fg was, if anything, more inconsistent than the FFg used in practice (of which there was precious little).
And the final lesson is that it's very hard to aim a mortar! Aiming my cannon is a piece of cake, it's higher off the ground and has a nice long tube to sight down. I imagine that this piece would be much more consistent at a longer range, but aiming at, say, 100 yards would be even more difficult.
So here is my score, most humbly submitted:
I threw out 194" and 175"
The counted shots are 78", 83", 97" 152", and 159"
Total = 569"
I have walked the walk, even if I did stumble a little.
[
Edited for math error.]
