Mike/Tracy
Yep, solid shot of lead that weighs 20 oz with a very light patch unless I use a sabot. Charge is 100 grams of Goex 1f or my own brand that screens to about cannon grade. I favor a thin patch with a naked ball due to the rifling and the fact that the ball sometimes rolls forward after loading. With the sabot I used Gorilla glue to hold ball, sabot and powder together as a single unit.
Good guess on the distance, 185 yards according to Google Earth. First target was an old dead tree that doesn't show up in the clips. Second target was a large piece of white granite that is visible at 170 yards. The rock always wins, lead balls ain't no match against an armored target.
The gun is made from "Obtanium", defined as a collection of parts and pieces that when assembled will look like a cannon. The basis for the tube is a 47mm Jap Type 01 antitank gun. Rather than use a breech plug I used a breech cap of 41xx steel to beef up the area over the chamber. The carriage is Red and White Oak and the steel furniture is all made from bits of left over scrap. Last Winter I painted the carriage OD and refinished all metal. Wheels are Amish carriage wheels, not what I really wanted but available. The upside is that the Timken roller bearings are good to 60 MPH.
Length of bore is 29 inches, all up weight 365 lbs, OAL just shy of eight feet, width is 48 inches and wheel diameter is 38 inches. I had these dimensions in mind prior to building so the gun would just fit in a pickup truck bed.
Obviously the gun is not patterned after any particular original gun, but rather designed as a shooter.
Some other technical observations: Dispersion of shot seems more horizontal than vertical. Doing a frame by frame analysis of some of the video, the trail moves left/right during initial recoil as it travels over small pebbles on the ground. Next time I shoot video I'll use the Casio F1 high speed camera for a better look. Perhaps a small platform under the trail to arrest movement?
I also added a down spring from the cascabel to the carriage. Previous video showed some breech bounce before the ball exited the tube and that caused some verticle dispersion. The spring fixed that little annoyance.
Sighting is via a pin on the front and a simple vernier tang on the rear. Sight radius is exactly 36 inches (not by design but by luck).
We recovered three of the balls that had sabots attached and by gosh it looks like the glue stuck and stabalised the balls. Now wether that was a result of spin or just shuttlecocking I've yet to determine. The sabots were not recovered, that would have answered more questions.
Last year we fired the gun on a dry lake bed at 1,000 meters and a 60 gallon plastic drum was in grave danger at that distance. Once we burned up a whole bunch of ammo to get the range, fire for effect put 2 out of ten rounds in the drum. That was done with just a thin patch on the ball. We were not able to recover any of the balls, they followed the Energizer Rabbit.
Bill
