Priming first????!!!!!

[Hawken50]

  Watched an "expert"load and fire a flintlock with prepared cartridge on youtube the other day.Tore off end of paper cartridge primed the piece then loaded it.Now in the heat of battle in 1775 i can see a reason but not now.Just plain scary.

[mongrel]

This is one point where I would forego historical correctness in favor of safety. However, in fairness to reenactors using cartridges, if they don't prime first then they have to prime from a horn, which a soldier issued cartridges most likely wouldn't have had. It becomes a question of how closely the original process needs to be followed in a given event.

[beowulf]

some of the old muskets were basically self priming . touch hole was large enough that when the ball was rammed down the barrel it blew some of the charge into the flash pan .  of course this meant the frizzen had to be closed , once again not the safest thing in the world !

[pilgrim]

    as beowulf stated.   i have read in some recorded account on Buffalo hunting, where the rifle was loaded with the frizzen closed,  and when the lock was tapped it self primed.  The rider could never have primed the frizzen pan at a full gallop in amonst buffalo.  Powder would never have stayed in pan.

[mongrel]

Those guns, though, generally had worn-out touch holes. Some might have been reamed out for the purpose, but I would venture to guess most were eroded to the point described. On a military musket or rifle, deliberate modification would have been out of the question and a firearm with a worn-out touch hole would have been a hazard to whoever was standing due right of the shooter. In a formation line, doing volley fire, that would have been more than just "maybe under the right circumstances" a problem.

The fine line (sometimes not so fine) that we tread in trying to do things exactly as they were done, back in the day, is that back in the day safety often wasn't the priority we make it now. This might sound contrary to logic, being as how firearms were so much a part of everyday life for so many people, but we today are overall safer shooters than our forefathers were. I question whether they would have accepted our priorities and abhorrence of risk and potential injury -- in other words, it might be unfair to judge their practices when to do so we have to apply rules and ideas they would often have found ridiculous -- but by our standards we definitely play it safer than has been the case in the past. As a for instance, if safety had been held in the great esteem we place upon it, today, the matchlock might still have been invented and used, but the development of better systems would have been enthusiastically encouraged and matchlocks would have been phased out almost the instant a means had been found of eliminating smoldering matches in the vicinity of amounts of gunpowder ranging from individual firing charges to kegs or barrels full.

[texasranger]

Have the same problem at Civil war events. guys capping their guns before pouring down the charge. gives me the shivers. nobody in our unit is allowed to do it. talked to some of the guys that do it, they think they load faster that way.

[pathfinder]

Didn't watch the video,so I cant comment on it specificly,but when doing "Show and Tell" event's for the public,I ALWAY'S have a little speach that I give stating the saftey element's of what we are doing and some of the thing's that are being demonstrated are NOT the way we do thing's now. As long as the audience is told the difference between then and now,it's important to demonstrate how it was done then,no matter how un-safe it is to do today.

[mongrel]

The very best solution to what can be a tricky problem. I wrestled with the same basic issue when debating whether or not to demonstrate a simple matchlock during the historical muzzleloading portion of the Hunter's Safety Course (the four basic lock types are one of the questions on the test). Because the HSC isn't primarily a historical-education event, and the students are almost exclusively younger kids with an obviously avid interest in firearms -- and kids are notoriously poor listeners and eager experimenters -- I decided against the idea. A matchlock is too easy a mechanism for even a halfway handy kid to fabricate, and between the idea of actual flame being in the vicinity of black powder and the thought of what a kid might use for a gun barrel (gas pipe, anyone?) after being inspired by what I'd shown him, I reckoned a demo of a real-life firing piece would be tempting someone else's fate.

Obviously, though, if one is going about showing how things were actually done, back in the day, then they have to be done that way. If a plain, simple safety warning in the course of the demo doesn't get through, well -- Darwin wins again....