69 cal rifle

[PA Rifleman]

Been waiting forever for this one to arrive.

Well, it arrived and I must say it's nice. It looks like they made an effort to put the correct VP and proof marks, and even the Federal Eagle on the lockplate. It was worth the wait. There aren't a lot of pictures of these, so feast your eyes:






And for the bigger-is-better crowd, the smaller bullet is a 58 caliber Minie. This musket fires the larger one.

[Emptymag]

I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but it does look nice. Regarding that hole on the end that gets pointed at the target (man or beast) ... HOLY CRAP!

A lead projectile bigger than a paintball(68 cal)???
Ouch.

[PA Rifleman]

Thanks for your kind words.

About the size of a 16 gauge (shotgun chart) rifled slug, but apparently with some accuracy potential. Yes, rifled with 3 grooves & lands. Sights are graduated to 800 or 900 yards. I haven't read about anyone using these for sharpshooting during the civil war, most of what I read indicates the Whitworth and Berdan rifles were used most often. Maybe one of the serious re-enactors can shed some insight into this aspect, and why the 1842 rifled musket fell out of favor for the 58 cal Springfield pattern.

I doubt it'll make shots as far as 800-900 yards, as the target would need to be laying flat (facing up) to meet the falling bullet and thus would be hard to see end-on.

Unless they're referring to indirect fire...

[Guy Fawkes]

Nice looking musket, I think originally the 1842 was a smoothbore, while the 1861 springfields were rifled muskets, from the source below.

http://www.iusb.edu/~journal/2000/stanage.html

"
The Model 1842 Musket (fig. 2) was another example of a smoothbore weapon that was used during the Civil War. Over 250,000 of them were produced and many of these ended up in the hands of state militias. These, too, were used extensively during the opening two years of the war. Indeed ``many volunteer regiments from both the North and the South still carried this weapon into battle at Gettysburg in 1863'' (Earl 10).

Figure 2. Model 1842 Musket. Length: 57.75" Weight: about 9lbs. Caliber: .69 (Earl 10).
The rifle-musket was the primary arm of the Civil War infantry soldier, the most famous of which is the Model 1861 Springfield.

The Model 1861 rifle musket was the classic arm of the Civil War infantry soldier. During the war, it was the standard against which all other Civil War shoulder arms were judged. (Earl 16) "

The long range sights were for volley fire by company. The british were very good at this during the beginning of WWI, some german units thought they were being fired upon by machine guns, when in fact it was just well trained platoon rifle fire.

Enjoy the smoke!!!