Cool artible on rifle shooting from 1904

[TNBigBore]

http://archive.org/stream/gunsammunitio ... 6/mode/2up

A good read from Horace Kephart written in 1904. Page 144-45 has a neat old table with 38-40, 44-40 etc High Velocity load ballistics.

[JohndeFresno]

Thanks, TNBigBore.

That is a fascinating article. And I have found great stuff at that particular site before.

Also if you move around the link, you can download the whole book - even to Kindle, if you have one - for free:
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6945102M ... and_tackle

A great piece of Americana! Again, thank you for the find!

[JohndeFresno]

TNBigBore,

You have stumbled onto a real gem. Since this is a public domain book, I can pluck this interesting information from its pages, written about 108 years ago:

- - - Text follows - some editing due to flawed copy - - -

Pg. 126 Guns, Ammunition, and Tackle
Smokeless powder, formerly very bad, has at last been improved, until we have one or two brands that are as reliable as black gunpowder. Since smokeless powder has unquestionable advantages, I will here assume that black powder is obsolete.

Bullets for high-power rifles are not always what they should be. The shape and fit of mantled bullets are of the utmost concern to a marksman. Here we may lay down a few rules of thumb that will be found to work well in practice.

1. An ill-proportioned or misshapen bullet will be more erratic when flying at high velocity than when moving slowly.

2. Bullets with hollow points are likely to "corkscrew" (drift spirally), and have a tendency to tumble and "keyhole," unless they are long and have shallow holes.

3. Bullets with split points are liable to open prematurely and fly wild.

4. Accuracy at 200 yards and upwards is not to be expected of any bullets that are shorter than
3 times their caliber, for .25 caliber bullets,
2 times their caliber, for .30 to .35 caliber bullets.
2 times their caliber, for .40 to .45 caliber bullets, [if -?] times their caliber, for .50 caliber bullets. [flaw in translation - jdef]

5. A mantled bullet does not upset from the force of explosion; consequently it must be large enough to fill the grooves of the rifling completely, so that no gas can escape past it; otherwise its flight will be unsteady. So small a deficiency in diameter as a thousandth of an inch will work mischief, and will cause a good rifle to be condemned when the only fault is a loose bullet.

Since rifle barrels are not bored with absolute uniformity (differences of several thousandths of an inch being sometimes found in barrels that are supposedly of the same caliber), bullets should not be lighter than the following, unless used at shorter ranges than 200 yards: —
.25 caliber, 115 grains
.30 caliber, 160 grains
.32 caliber, 165 grains
.38 caliber, 250 grains
.40 caliber, 300 grains
.45 caliber, 350 grains
.50 caliber, 400 grains
In .25, .30, and .32 caliber the weight may well be greater, but in larger calibers it cannot be increased much without excessive recoil, if charges giving upwards of 1800 feet a second velocity are used.

Such cartridges as the .38-40-180, .44-40-200, and .50-110-300, which have bullets of only 1 to 1 calibers length, are not reliable beyond 150 yards. The .45-70-300 and .45-90-300, with bullets of 1 calibers length, are of doubtful accuracy beyond 200 yards, and the drift is quite noticeable; an extra 50 grains of lead improves them, but increases both pressure and recoil.

- - - End of Copied Text - - -

That is some pretty amazing knowledge for way back then!

[JohndeFresno]

Here is some more great stuff, from Pages 141-142, although the text is heavily scrambled and you have to work to read it correctly (at least in the Kindle version).
EDIT: However, the PDF version is quite readable. I have edited this post and will post a readable and searchable PDF version of the book shortly.


...text continues...
It will save a rifleman much trouble and chagrin if, when he buys ammunition, he will invariably give the full trade name of the cartridge wanted, and personally examine the label of every box that he buys, to make sure that the clerk has made no mistake. It will not do, for example, merely to say, "Give me some .32-40 Marlin smokeless cartridges." There are five diflferent .32-40 Marlin cartridges using smokeless powder, with velocities ranging from 1575 to over 2000 feet a second, — not to mention a dozen other .32-40 cartridges that can be used in the same gun.

[TNBigBore]

The author of this chapter, Horace Kephart, was an interesting fellow. He was a librarian in St. Louis who just pulled up stakes and moved to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and lived in a little cabin in the backcountry. He wrote a couple of interesting books: Camping and Woodcraft and Our Southern Highlanders. One of my favorite little trout streams in the Smokies, Kephart Prong is named after him.

[tman]

Thanks for the neat read. If this writer were alive today he would be burned at the stake for reccomending the 30 Army for grizzly bear

[JohndeFresno]

Here is the file, ready for download. If you download the file as sourced above, you cannot search it; so I re-imported the file into Adobe to make it searchable.

The Bad: The file is almost 20 Megabytes in size, a slow download
The Good: Unlike the PDF source version, you can jump to a section that interests you.

For instance, to get to some of the "good stuff" about levergun calibers, enter "30-" into the search box after you open up the document with your Adobe Acrobat reader. I noticed that even the online version ignored the "-" and gave you ever instance of "30" instead of "30-".

This will project you to the part of the book that discusses the various black powder and "new" smokeless caliber loads, a part of which is represented in this post (above).

File saved on my server as: GunsAmmunitionTackle_MoneyKephart.pdf
Click on the link below to download it to your computer. Please do not view it, or you will not allow others to access the file within a reasonable time.
Link: http://www.box.com/s/141d38bbc283b6306a63