Miasmatic Review

Shorted rounds and Cleaning firearms.

It was a long weekend for me. I’m having issues at work, so last Friday I had the day off. A little “vacation” if you will. It was nice because I was able to stay out late Thursday night to catch the New England/Raiders game and not have to worry about getting up for work the next day. Ironically, I was up at the same time as if I was going to work due to my truck blocking my wife’s van in the driveway. Once I was up, I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

Friday was spent with me running around running some errands I’ve been putting off. I finally picked up my new modem as well as a package from a shooting supply house. On Sept 2nd I had ordered 100 .710 caliber and 100 .730 caliber round ball for my musket. I have a shoot on September 23, 24 and 25th here in Rockford. When I picked up the package, it only had the .710 round ball in it to my annoyance. When I got home I quickly fired off an e-mail to the supply house inquiring as to where the .730 round ball is and if it is on back order, why didn’t they bother to tell me that when I ordered it. I’m still waiting on their response. Unfortunately, I have limited places to order that caliber of round ball from or I would have ordered from somewhere else.

Friday night I finished making my bullet bag. I cheated a little and used one of nature’s natural creations as the base of the bag, a bull scrotum. That’s right my ball bag is a “ball bag”. I hand sewed a drawstring leather cap onto it and it was ready for use. Maybe later I’ll post a picture of it for you all to see. I thought I did a fine job on it.

Saturday it was time to dismantle my black powder firearms and give them a thorough cleaning. The locks on both my Blunderbuss and Brown Bess (musket) where rather rusty due to the high humidity. My Brown Bess needed a good cleaning since I do most of my black powder shooting with it and there was a lot of black powder residue stick in the hard to get to parts. The lock came apart with relative ease, however I ran into a snag putting it back together.

Last week Clone, being his curious self, got his hands on my Bess and knocked it over. Initially when I inspected it, I didn’t find anything wrong. While reattaching the frizzen spring it snapped. (For those of you that don't know, a Frizzen spring is what is used to hold the Frizzen closed on a flintlock. The Frizzen is the metal part that covers the pan that holds black powder in place. When the hammer comes forward, the flint strikes the frizzen causing a spark and flipping the frizzen open to ignite the powder.) Upon closer inspection, I could see this was not a stress fracture. When Clone knocked it over it must have landed just right and put a crack into it. It’s the only way to explain how it broke. Last October I had the main spring on my musket snap because of a weakness of the spring, the fractures look nothing alike. Stress fractures tend to be more smooth and straight where this one was jagged and crooked. That meant I had to order yet another part for my Bess. At least I know I will have the part by Friday at the latest.

Other then that incident everything went well. I was able to finish my cleaning with out a problem. Normally I do the cleaning the weekend or week before a re-enactment. Next weekend I’m heading to Green Bay for the Packer/Browns game, so I did it a weekend early. This saved me from having to discover the broken spring too late to be able to get a replacement part.