My father was trained as a sharp shooter, not quite a sniper but somewhere between that and a regular soldier. Exhibiting better than average shooting accuracy with a strong sense of fieldcraft (as he did) [more…]
Introduction During the first half of the 19th century great leaps forward were made in firearms technology and by the 1870s soldiers who 50 years earlier would have been supplied with flintlock, smoothbore muskets were [more…]
Introduction By the 1860s it had become obvious that the days of the muzzle loading firearm were numbered and that any government that failed to re-arm its troops with breechloaders would quickly be left behind [more…]
Introduction Sometime in mid-2017 I casually remarked to the chap shooting at the next bench to me that I had long been fascinated by the Westley Richards ‘Monkey Tail’ transitional rifle but had never actually [more…]
Introduction By inducing a projectile to spin around its own axis its flight is stabilised and accuracy and range are vastly improved. Rifling a barrel by cutting spiral grooves in a variety of forms and [more…]
Introduction Every month my gun club holds a guest day when members can bring along friends and family to ‘have a go’ with their firearms. Maybe it’s because we were raised on a diet of [more…]
Introduction Although the flintlock ignition system was technically advanced for its time, it wasn’t without its shortcomings. Flintlocks require careful setting-up and constant maintenance and adjustment to be reliable. They also have a relatively slow [more…]
In my introductory article we saw that by the beginning of the 19th century the flintlock was firmly established as the state-of-the-art means of ignition in military and sporting firearms. In this article, we will [more…]
Some weeks ago, and quite by chance, a friend offered to sell me a rare mid-19th century rifle, the design of which I had long found to be of interest. Although I was not at [more…]
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