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Thanks Corbin!

Thanks to you too Sarg - with the photo, I tend to try to work with natural light as much as possible.

On loading for any breech-loading gun or rifle from this transitional period, it can be dead easy or it can be tricky.
The bulk of the work involved in getting a pinfire gun or rifle running is getting your cartridge cases together.
The first stop after a good look-see to make sure whatever you're looking at is safe to run is to do a chamber casting and bore slugging.
I slug from both ends, also I like to slug the chamber throats.
It's important to see clearly the relationship between the chamber walls and the bore/groove dimensions.
Note also that the rims of pinfire shotgun and bore rifle chambers are more petite than their central fire counterparts.
Almost every pinfire rifle and gun (not counting the crap handguns and revolving rifles) I've seen, handled, or heard of has taken the paper walled case.
I've seen the old catalog drawings of (later period) thin walled metallic cases, but I've only ever seen one example of a SxS pinfire anything that was actually
set up for thin cases.

And you're looking at it.

These chambers had me scratching my head, as I hadn't heard of extruded brass cartridge cases as early as 1862, the year this rifle was completed
- to the contrary I've had a short few guys in the know tell me straight out that it wasn't happening in 1862 and what I've seen in texts specific to Purdey's
history show bore rifles using paper cases - not thin metal - later down the road in 1865 and on.

The earliest coiled brass cases I've seen were of funky looking Boxer design kind of like the early Martini Henry stuff, but straight walled.

Here's the earliest piece I've seen, an Eley 450 1.33(?)" cartridge from 1865.
This photo poached from a cartridge collecting site (I forget exactly where) some time back.

Purdey had a very short 360 1-1/2" coiled foil Black Powder rifle cartridge, I'm just not sure when they first offered it. Mr David Maynard of Purdey's doesn't have any comments on these chambers either, besides the comment
"...there is no reliable literature on pin fire
cartridges of this period & few if any cartridges have survived..."
Still, I haven't ever seen or heard of coiled brass or foil pinfire anything, but I have seen catalog drawings from the transitional period and references in textbooks I have here of thin metallic pinfire cases,
but I don't know how early they appeared on the market.

Some sources say that Purdey purchased the Eley cartridge company right around 1830, if so there is a margin of 'anything's possible'.
To nudge that a little further, note the two cartridge cases in the photograph of the rifle.
They're made of titanium!
How's that for 'anything goes'!

I have a machine shop on the same lot as my home. That few hundred square feet of detached work space makes all the difference in the world.
Having the ability and resource to get into a fabrication job and leave it to sit and wait mid job-stream really makes this kind of thing possible.
The outer walls of those cases are tapered, and hand-fit for the chambers of the rifle. I hadn't called it 'mine' until after I fired it, and I didn't want there to be any possibility of my material choice contributing to a popped barrel if that were to happen -- and as you can see it didn't.

The balls in the photograph were thrown from a mould made since I took possession of the rifle too.
Couldn't find proper sized balls to save my life and I wanted the first couple of shots to be proper sized pure lead roundball.

If the 16b rifle you speak of somehow magically ends up taking easily sourced components you're in luck.
If not, you'll do well to go straight to the drawing board and build your components soup to nuts.

Once you have cases and bullets that fit the rifle, loading is easy. All you need to do then is drop a cap in there, set the firing pin, dump some powder - a card - some wads and lube - then a bullet and it's time to shoot.

--Tinker

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Edited to reflect the uncertainty of the Eley/Purdey deal circa 1830 -- thanks S.H.!
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--Self-Appointed Colonel, DRSS--

"It IS a dangerous game, and so named for a reason, and you can't play from the keyboard. " --Some Old Texan...

Edited by tinker (30/08/08 10:50 AM)

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