It's not until you start trying to make old cartridges that you see the cross over between ammuntion and fireworks. Needle gun cartridges for the Dreyse and Chassepot are all based on the paper, glue and string methods that have been used by firework makers for centuries. It is not until the mid 19th C when mass production metal forming technology appears do things change..
Chap I love your esoteric video subject matter. I find it so interesting and captivating. It’s always a great day when we get a long video like your deep dive on the Milbank-Amsler and making it’s ammunition. Love it all! Keep up the great work.
Morning my Dear Chap.. I also have had all sorts of problems getting the Langblei bullet to stabilise.. I use paper strip sabots formed in a press in the way described by the Wests. Even with slitting the sabot the performance is very variable with significant numbers of "brummers" (tumbling bullets). Getting sabots to separate cleanly has always been an issue with sabot ammunition, and it took years to get APDS and APFSDS to work properly. A couple of things I have been trying: 1. Varnishing the inside and front end of the sabot. There is evidence that this was done with Prussian ammunition, presumably to stop the glue in the sabot sticking to the bullet. Results have been "variable", but I really need to do some more extensive firing trials. 2. Blocking the path between the primer and the base of the bullet. As my sabots are rolled, you get a hole down the centre of the sabot which will allow gas to get from the pierced primer to the base of the bullet at the point of ignition. I have a suspicion that this can cause the bullet to become unseated from the sabot in the barrel. I have been blocking the hole with resin putty (Acraglas gel) which seems to improve the performace. I notice that you have a hole down the centre of your plastic sabots which may be an issue! I have been tempted by the German plastic sabots, however these are for the M47 "Acorn" bullet rather than the M55 Langblei "egg" bullet. Having spent good money on an M55 mould, I really want to get these to work properly. The M47 sabots look like they are injection moulded, so are not easy to do on a small scale. Perhaps 3D printing is a solution, but I am not convinced the plastic would survive long enough...! The M47 bullet is also full calibre unlike the M55 which does not touch the rifling. I think this keeps the bullet well seated on the sabot despite any back pressure from the primer cavity... I have had good results with the M41 round ball bullets which I make from .615 balls that I use in my Ferguson Carbine. I also use paper strip sabots with these and have shot well out to 200m. I cannot hit anything much with the M55.. so far!
There is no issue with gas blow-by through the sabot. The hole in my Delrin sabot is simply for knocking out the primer as its recessed and a very tight fit in the pocket. The primer is a Berdan primer so the needle doesn't pierce it when firing (in fact it bends the needle a bit, need to trim it back). The M47 sabots are indeed injection moulded but I think I could easily cut a groove in the bases of mine to emulate the skirt principle. I just nee to see what shape they have.
@@thebotrchap I keep forgetting you are in the land of Berdan! That makes more sense! I have some but they are jealously hoarded for recapping ancient cases on high days and holidays! They are like rocking horse poo in UK! I use top hat percussion caps with the skirt cut off.. the metal is very thin and the needles penetrate every time.. I have a holder for the lathe and I can turn them off with surprising ease.. I look forward to hearing about your sabot skirting in due course! Thank you for the drawing of the M-A ramrod.. I am in mid production!
CM measurements like you've given are incredibly easy to quickly ballpark to inches. 2.54cm to the inch. So 15.5cm is roughly 6". 12.6cm is roughly 5". It's quarters of 100mm - if you want to convert navel cannons quickly. 4" ~ 100mm |8" ~ 200mm| 12" ~ 300mm| 16" ~ 400mm. I know there's a bit of spare change not included there, but it's a quick way to do it. In the world of diagnostic x-ray 40" is approximately 100cm (even though we know it's 101.6cm).
I know but I can't be bothered and its a jibe at the non-metrics. It's your choice to still use weird feet, pounds, palms, squids or whatever, convert them yourselves 😉
@@thebotrchap Some of us 'ancient brits' learnt to use both in school, but I fully get where you are coming from. When making RU-vid videos, I think it is far better for you to leave some trivial work to the audience, rather than adding it to your workload and risking making silly errors with it.
@@myparceltape1169 I give the quarters of 100mm for a reason. People get so salty when discussing navel cannons "WHY IS THIS IN INCHES!?". It's an easy conversion. On the other hand... converting from lb weight to inches and mm is a giant pain in the ass. 6 lber is 57mm? 17lber is 76.2 mm?
@@SlavicCelery I have spent years knowing and using conversions and doing it without thinking. Now and again I realised I was not sure of a volume however and the easiest way was to go via weight. After I had the volume I would then use the SG. As for a 6pdr projectile, that's not what I work with but I do know it would be possible to put 6pounds of iron through a 1 inch hole. Possible. Thanks for the illumination of your thinking.
I think in Sweden a needle gun doesn't technically get considered a gun, so think the requirements for owning one is the same as and airrifle, be over 18. Is that the reason for the Dreyse competitions in Germany or do people just enjoy them?
My money would be on a printable nylon, rather than the usual PLA/PET(G)/ASA/ABS... but you'd have to try it and risk a mess if it left plastic residue in the bore or broke off.
Have you tried just using a round wood base and then a wax mold to seat the bullet. Take one of your MDF sabots. file of 2~4mm at the base. Take some hot glue and make a mold out of that. Then take wax/candle-wax and make the bullet holder. In the bottom 2~4mm you will still need wood to be the explosion plug, but that should be just enough to push the wax forward. Of course, i don't know how horrible your rifling will be, but this was one solution we had for our Belgian Revolution reproduction weapons (smooth bore) that actually worked nicely.
3D printed sabots come to mind as a possible quick and easy solution. You could try a whole variety of plastics easily and they cost next to nothing to produce with minimal effort. I also had an idea involving paper mache pressed in a machined form, but that sounds like more trouble than it's worth frankly.
My only concern with both MDF and or PVC if you were to move on to try that, is that I don't know if the black powder burns hot enough cause them to decompose into toxic, and corrosive breakdown products
I will use neither now since the Delrin ones work. Actually the sabot is exposed only for a faction of a second to high temp. The base of the Delrin ones recovered is completely unblemished. I was very careful when machining the MDF ones though with direct air extraction at the point of machining so minimize fumes and fibre spread.
@@wierdalien1 more likely HCl gas... but the amount would be very small, and forcefully diluted by the propellant gases anyway. You'd soon tell, PVC goes a sort of dark reddish brown colour when it decomposes.
My instinct is that some sort of moulded paper maché (papier maché? Well you know what I mean) might be a winner here. You could machine a set of moulds, add a known amount of finely shredded paper and water/glue, compress them in a batch, and let them dry for a couple of days. If cardboard worked for the original, it ought to be OK.
The issue is that you need repeatability. Different paper or paper/water mix will give different shrinkage when drying, also warpage can occur. I have done a few tests using paper clay, essentially pre-mixed papier mâché and the resulting sabot was not great.
@@thebotrchap Hmm that's a good point re shrinkage. I suspect it's one of those things that could work but might not be worth the method development unless you're making a lot. I did think about 3D printed sabots, or some sort of mouldable resin... but none of the commonly available materials strikes me as ideal.
An easy aid to the conversion of mm to inches if you know what the size of a pack of 100mm cigarettes looks like; They're 3.94 in. long, (roughly 4") so about 2 in. for 50mm, 1 in. for 25mm etc. Close enough for watching videos. It's very useful for naval guns to get an idea of the bore size, i.e. a 300mm bore is a roughly 12" gun or 3 packs end to end as a visualization. Having a dimension in your usual units makes it much easier to visualize.
Given modern manufacturing you could 3d print the sabot as well. They probably wouldn't survive, but given their low cost as easy of production, it could be an interesting alternative.
Great video Chap, this must have taken a great deal of time and experimentation for the results and explanation. I for one appreciate your time and effort, even thought I do not own a Dreyse.
Interesting as always Le Chap. Would splitting the delrin sabot length-wise help? Don't know if that is done with 'modern' black powder rifles. One of these years I've got to find out the arms used by the Kingdom of Saxony in the 1800s. That's where my paternal line comes from.
Definitely not boring. As a matter of fact, interesting enough to watch a second time at 2 AM. I didn't hear the caliber mentioned. I assume, as you didn't mention trying them, the sabots for modern shotgun slugs either don't fit or offer support at the base due to the shape of the bullet. How about 3d printing (just a thought from someone who knows nothing about antique rifles). Good luck, if I had a beautiful old rifle, I'd want to shoot it too. Just a thought, have you contacted Jeff from the taofledermaus RU-vid channel? They test custom small batch shotgun slugs.
that would be even later the Dreyse rifle used paper cartridges with an embedded percussion cap, which made it the first standard military rifle to fire a unitary cartridge for the first using a metallic cartridge, that would be either the Springfield '66 in 50-70, or the Swiss Vetterli 1867 in 10.4mm (which was also the first military magazine rifle), depending on what you would count as "standard"
@@allangibson8494 yes, and the Treuille 1812 was a limited adoption rifle for the imperial guard that also fired from a metallic cartridge, but i wouldn't count unadopted designs and weapons only equipping special troops as "standard"
@@brasstard7.627 the question was about a standard issue rifle and afaik, the Spencer carbine was only issued in relative limited numbers, and only to cavalry, same for the miller, it was an infantry rifle, but only 2000 made and maybe a hundred saw use by militias and idk about pinfire rifles or carbines used by militaries in large number, the only i'm aware of was the French Treuille de Beaulieu of 1854, which was only made in 150 ex for the emperor personal guard
A maxi ball would be better, you need a flat surface at the rear of the bullet to mount the primer. There is a mould maker in Germany that makes a Maxiball mould for Dreyse rifles. Anyway I refuse to shoot a projectile which is not historically correct for this rifle.
Being a nerdy nerd, I have doodled up an idea for a blackpowder rifle with a Nagant-style cylinder, spark plug ignition and an...Acog 😀 hopelessly unrealistic, I'm sure
Interesting :) Have you thought of 3D printing the sabots to perfectly fit the base of the bullet? I'd have thought that a resin 3D printer using an ABS type plastic would be ideal.
@@thebotrchap Absolutely. The outlay is not bad these days and a quality 3D resin printer can be had for under £200. A million and one uses when you have one :)
@@thebotrchap I'm sure the 7.62mm four petal sabots for 5.56mm bullets are injection moulded. My experience of those is that they work well enough for shots out to 100m. The four petal design causes the sabot to break up after exit from the muzzle, with broken pieces travelling about 10m downrange. In my time with two stage light gas guns, we used to machine polycarbonate (aka lexan) to make sabots and low mass projeciles. Some folk said they were best annealed by immersion in boiling water, but we did not always do that.
@@thebotrchap Sickening isn't it? Mind you, us Brits tried out these new-fangled German style bolt action rifles in 1850 (see ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-N6rTBAzKH50.html ) and decided against their adoption.
I do wonder if a compressed cardboard sabot would work? No idea how to make one but i imagine a press and mould would be needed. Add some wax coating at the end.
Will you also try the M47 bullet ? Wolfgang Finze is the author of books about the the Dreyse. He is also an expert shot. 90 / 50 m / Offhand with a Dreyse.
No smoke with round ball, lots with the other ammo. Presumably the wind changed or did the propellant too? There is something that mimics blackpowder but isn't. Nice group with the last ammo.
Have you considered UHMW PE or HDPE? You can also get Phenolic rod. If these work, you might also try compression forming. A heated die, some plastic pellets and an arduino controller. Then you could have all the sabots you need.
@@thebotrchap There are many polymers that can handle that easily. Modern sabots are made of polymer already anyway. Shotgun wads and shot cups, Remington Accelerator sabots, .50 BMG SLAP rounds, etc., Most ordinary desktop printers can print ASA and certain nylon alloys. Printing a sabot that can survive these conditions should be pretty easy. Also repeatable, consistent, and way less work than making them one at a time by hand. There's really nothing technically tricky involved in doing this.
Dirty but clean after 3-4 wet moose milk patches. No brush necessary. Paper sabot can give good results but each batch will give different results due to slight changes in materials and manufacturing technique.
The paper wrap? Essentially a long paper strip lightly glued and wrapped to form a cylinder. The cylinder was then run through successive dies to reduce it to the required diameter. The info I am missing is at what time the bullet cavity was formed.
I meant in terms of rhe whole rou ds construction my German is appalling and all I have e is diagrams on hand and Iv a friend whose very much a historic crafter who has a few ideas on how you'd form it and what I would take to do easily and accurately to make those things quick and in bulk both in a modern context and the original designs.
Measurement conversion to the imperial using folks! Round ball group, 15,5 cm converts to 6.1 inches. MDF group, 24,5 cm converts to 9.6 inches. Derlin group, 12,63 cn converts to 4,97 ~ 5 inches.
@@dp-sr1fd Because (as stated clearly in the vid) I am respecting the dimensions and composition of the M55 cartridge. Using a minié would not make it an M55 cartridge now would it. The material of the sabot is of little consequence as long as it does its job. If the challenge was "producing the most accurate modern cartridge for the Dreyse" perhaps the minié could be an option.
I've just came to an unrelated yet interesting conclusion that no matter what I try, under the current circumstances I will never be given the chance to even handle a firearm, which is fine, it's just that it did not hit me before, the fact that It's pointless aspiring to do something that I'll never be given the chance to do, those who have a chance to practise and/or shoot recreationally should consider themselves lucky or successful. Signing off.
Could somebody French (who’s probably watching the French language version so not here………I didn’t think this through) comment on the chaps accent while speaking French. As an Englishman I can’t even detect a hint that he wasn’t born and bred somewhere in south east England, I’d love to know where he sounds like he’s from when speaking French.
How do you have a perfect English and French accent, that's amazing in itself, I have a perfect accent in what you would call American English and Canadian French, but I was surprised with you because true French and English accents are harder to pronounce.
Try soaking toilet paper and compress into shape,taofledermauss channel find it useful in their application.out of interest how many rounds before needle need’s changing?
I have only changed once in 10 years of needle gun ownership, not because it broke, but because I made some new ones so that I could finally retire the original prussian marked one. Same with the Chassepot, never had one fail. This is of course will careful maintenance in a range environment. It doesn't reflect longevity in field conditions however I'm sure they survived longer than modern authors like to think.
Wierd... The second kind flew flatter... As you say... Which is usually the opposite of a lob.. or an arch sort of shape... But it seems it is more flat.. but compared to the first one.. which was also flat.. but up... Or something. Lol You said you had a bottom of the target hold. So something like 6 o'clock on 1... But that doesn't mean it didn't shoot flat, right??? It just went up... Compared to where u were aiming. More than the second one did. Or no?? I'm confused.. lol
Not that I don’t trust you n stuff but I check out the pronunciation of sabot- I dint know if you were using the proper pronunciation or Johnny Foreigner speak. No surprises, French and English French the way I’ve been pronouncing it since reading an obscure article in an obscure gun magazine r-something years ago. Where I first read about a future British bullpup being built but no decisions then whether .223 or .17 inch- they were testing it against steel helmets. Anywho, Say-Bo, Sa-b’h, but there were some fools insisting it was Say-Bot.
You could try moulding the sabot out of paper pulp (like an egg carton). Adding a little potassium nitrate or ammonium nitrate to the mix might even give it a bit of a kick.
But, but... spending hours cutting out long pieces of card, and then rolling them and glueing them to make Dreyse sabot is all part of the 'fun' isn't it?....
@@jimmyrustler8983 The issue is consistency with the card ones. I had once batch that gave great results and I thought I had finally nailed it, the next batch made with the same card shotgunned. No idea why.
Doesn't work as well as you'd think. There is shrinkage and warpage to take into account plus consistency in the source materials. The original ones are rolled paper compressed through successive dies. I tried it once using till roll paper, it took 3m of paper to get to the correct diameter.
