Black Powder Rifles

Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois

Black Powder Rifles
Mike Reynolds Technical Presentation
SCRA Meeting 6/1/09
July 2009 GunNews

Reynolds said this is a rifle copied off the Tennessee Poor Boy or Mountain Rifle. It was made by Jack Karner of Tennessee Valley Manufacturing down in Corinth, Mississippi. Reynolds had this gun specially built for him. Asked if he wanted a lot of dressy stuff on it, Reynolds said no, he wanted a working man's gun. There were a lot of these that way. They didn't have all the frills, brass, wire, inletting, etc.

Black Powder Rifles

This is .45 caliber Flint, 42 inch barrel and it reaches out. Reynolds said with it he has consistently hit a hundred yard target that he could barely see. He more or less pointed at it.

He has had a lot of fun with it. It is a nice smooth shooter and it doesn't kick or anything like that. It uses triple F black powder with a 4F priming powder. Reynolds has never had it misfire on him but one time. You load powder, patch and ball. For some reason he went ball, patch and powder. It won't work that way!

The ball didn't get all the way down to cover that touch hole out and he took the touch hole liner out and put 4F powder in there and closed her up. Downrange somewhere he touched it off again and it moved forward a little bit. Then he put some more 4F in there, pushed the ball back down and usually on the second one it comes out.

There's a couple of other ways using a screw. Screw into the ball and pull it out. They've gotten fancy now. You can get a CO2 like for a bicycle, where you have a touch hole or a nipple and it will punch it right out.

Be careful when you put the powder in there, you're downrange and in a safe direction because it can come out.

He did one in his percussion that way and he hit a target 45 yards away and he wasn't even aiming at it. He was just holding it and "bing".

Reynolds had this rifle made for him in 1991. He paid $850 for it. To get all the fancy stuff on it it would have been around $1500 or maybe a little less he estimates. If he sold this one today it would be double that.

The stock on it is what they call the premium. They are about a hundred bucks now. Some of them are going higher than that due to that fact that you can get more of the tiger stripe in it. When Reynolds picked this gun up he went down to Fort Dishard and Jack was there. Jack said, "By God, I'm glad you got here to get this gun. I had it sold eight times!"

When Reynolds saw the gun, he knew he had made the perfect match for it and he's really had fun.

This is what Reynolds classifies as an "assault weapon." This is an 1800 18th Century Charlottesville, French. This is what the American soldier at that time was carrying. The British were carrying the Brown Bess. This is .69 caliber. The Brown Bess was .75.

This one is a reproduction but Reynolds has enjoyed shooting target with it at the rendezvous he has gone to. It's smooth bore. At some of the smooth bore shoots they set up a trap and he's shot trap out of this powdered and they shine. You actually build a shotgun shell inside here. You put the powder, a wad, shot on top of that and then what they call a shot card slides down on top of that. Then you have a shotgun shell. They're a lot of fun.

Reynolds passed around a .69 caliber bullet and a .45. Imagine the volley of fire the colonials did, a row kneeling and a row standing and fifty yards away was your opponent. Imagine the wall of lead that was going down through there.

When Reynolds puts the powder in he uses .90 grain. He puts in about an ounce and a half of number six shot.

The German Von Stuben they brought over here to train the American soldiers, they used a paper cartridge and had them put about twenty in a cartrige box hanging on their side. They would have the ball in there and the powder. They would pull it out, tear the end of it off, primer the primer, then pour the rest of the powder down. It they were in a hurry they would put the paper and all down there and ram it down and it kind of served as a patch. He trained them to get four shots off in a minute.

Reynolds watched the movie "Gettysburg" and he read the book "Killer Angel". Then he went to Gettysburg. He walked out on Little Round Top and lost it. He had to go back down to his car until he could get it back together again to go on with the tour. The realization hits you when you walk out there and think, "The South was dumb, coming up a damn hill like this." It's a high place, it's not a little low place. Out from Little Round Top it's just nice flat ground. And they climbed that hill up there and the Union just slaughtered them.

If you can make it to Gettysburg, take the tour. You can take it with a tour guide or you can drive yourself. They've got it well documented everywhere you go. But it was at what they call the "Core of Trees" when Lee said, "I want that hill." about the third day of the battle. That's when the artillery on the backside of that hill wiped out everybody coming across the wheat field. There was no shelter of any kind or anything to hide behind, just a stone fence which was already in range of the guys on the hill and that's why they got wiped out like they did.

If you've read the book "Killer Angel", Mike Shroud talks about, imagine soldiers walking full length across that wheat field, when the artillery went out it would take out ten to eleven guys and they would just close the line up. Another shelling would take them out again and they would just kept closing the line up. They literally walked on bodies crossing the fence.

Reynolds has been to some other battlefields, Dover, Tennessee, Chicamauga, but that one at Gettysburg got to him more than anything.

The only civilian casualty at Gettysburg was a lady. She was in her house, standing at her table, making bread. The Union soldiers would come out and wait around her house to get that homemade bread. They say from a hotel that's down in Gettysburg, up in the second story window, a confederate soldier shot over there towards one of those union soldiers and missed, hitting her in the back. They say that was over five-hundred yards that the shot was made. The house is still there and the door of this house still has the bullet hole in it. To get upstairs or go to the basement you have to go outside. There was another family in there with her and she was pregnant, due any time. But by the time they got the lady who was shot in the back down to the basement she had died. A day or so after that they received a letter that her husband had been killed in action on the same day.

Gettysburg is a place everybody should go to. Go through the cemetery. There are stones after stones, "Unknown, Unknown, Unknown." Fifty-eight thousand both sides. There were a lot of men killed in that war.

Reynolds has really enjoyed black powder shooting. He has done a lot of archery and bow hunting. He has always said that when he smelled the smoke from these barrel burners here, there's always a big cloud of smoke right in front of you, he got addicted to that smell.

This rifle is probably what some of the minute men carried to start out with. These are wicked. A rifle shot and you can shoot pin holes. Reynolds believes it is one of the most accurate guns there is.

Reynolds had a piece of 4 x 4 set up on a stone or something and apparently he had it set up just right because when he hit it with that .45 it split the 4 x 4 in half.

The worst thing about this powder is you've got to clean them but it's really easy. Run hot water through them or hot soapy water and then run your Hoppy's Nine or some type of black powder cleaner. Run a couple of pads through there and use a white pad until it becomes white. Then take a couple of dry pads and run them through there to dry it out. Reynolds usually takes a couple one or two inch pads oiled up and swabs it out and he's done. It doesn't matter if you only shoot it once. Black powder is very corrosive and it will eat right into this metal.

Reynolds found that out the hard way. Around the lock on his gun, there are a bunch of little pits, ate right into it.

Reynolds shot a deer with his .50 caliber Hawken at between 50 and 60 yards and it blew the heart into three pieces. That was using a maxiball. It only went about 150 yards and dropped.

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