After my last cannon outing resulted in a You tube movie Suicide with a cannon I want to try again and aim to be socially acceptable. Peer pressure is a terrible thing 
The planned load is 2lbs of porridge oats over half a pound of black, suitable below the original 1800 service charge (6lbs over 2lbs). Have to make some allowance for it's years.
I took some bird scarers, (a 5/8 inch diameter smouldering rope with a firework attached every 4") removed the pyrotechnics, found it didn't burn very well so I added nitrate and lead acetate, probably a bit too much.
Need to make a linstock. Last time I was so busy unspiking the blooming thing I didn't have time to make one. I want a simple design with a good grip, what have you got?
Planning on two shots about an hour apart so it has plenty of time to cool down. Foil wrapped powder, polystyrene foam wad, thought I might wrap the porridge in a brown paper canister.
Your English chum
Squire Robin
I have found the following recipe printed in a 2002 issue of The Artilleryman makes perfect slow match every time:
How To Make Good Slow Match; No More Embarrassing FailuresThe Workshop - By Wm. R. Anderson
Fall 2002
After 23 years of producing and using slow match, I had a bad batch. Total embarrassment. In the middle of an artillery demo I had to beg for match. Previously we had been the unit others came to when their slow match failed. Tony Meyers, former staffer from Fort Wayne in Ft. Wayne, Ind., rescued us by giving us match and his formula.
Back home, I felt I could no longer trust my decades old oft-renewed urine-colored mixture that I had so many times recharged by “guesstimation.” With my old mixture gone the way of the “Tidy Bowl Man,” I washed lengths of #8 100 percent cotton sash cord on gentle cycle in a mild mixture of laundry detergent and bleach. This operation removes the starch-like sizing from the cord for better nitrate absorption.
Next, the cord is air dried, naturally, as machine-drying will fluff the fibers, thus increasing the diameter while decreasing the length of the cord.
Using Tony Meyers’s recommended ratio of 6 parts water to 1 part potassium nitrate, I immersed the cord in a closable, non-metallic container. Because of the wash/dry procedure, a 24-hour total immersion is more than adequate. Supersaturating is not necessary.
Place the match, coiled flat, to air dry on a non-metal surface (a cafeteria tray is ideal), although this lengthens the drying time considerably. The match loses almost none of the nitrate and retains a consistent amount of the chemical throughout its length.
To assure a consistent mixture in the chemical bath, a specific gravity battery tester (see illustration) is not costly and worked quite well for our purposes. The $0.99 to $1.99 “float-the-little balls” testers cannot be trusted for accuracy.
The 6 parts water to 1 part potassium nitrate will have a specific gravity of 1.150 on the battery tester. Note that the tester must be held upright as shown by the vertical indicator. With this method, the chemical mixture can be renewed indefinitely and accurately.
In this age of synthetics it is often hard to locate 100 percent cotton cord with no synthetic fiber mixed in, either in the braid or in the core. If you haven’t experienced it already, the plastic will melt, then char and harden into a heat blocking ash that may or may not continue to burn. In my case, the 1-inch test burn was good but the cord failed in the field. This was a factor in my situation. Now nothing is left to chance.
At the risk of sounding like an “ad man” I recommend #8 100 percent cotton sash cord from Samsel Supply Co., 1285 Old River Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113. Samsel is a long-time supplier of marine, building trades, industrial products and gear and their 100 percent cotton sash cord is used by certain masonry contractors for specialized applications. The sash cord is available in different diameters, in hanks of 100 feet or in any specified length from 25 feet to 1500 feet from bulk, and is always in stock.
If I were in a real battle rather than an artillery demonstration, the day my match failed I would have died—for real! The choice is yours. Might-be-good-match or known good match. You know now what my choice is. My gun’s gonna fire. Regardless.
(About the Author: William R. Anderson from Ohio is a longtime occasional contributor to The Artilleryman. He is a lieutenant with the 7th Company, 3rd Regiment, 1st Continental Artillery, 1780.)
