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earlyagain
Posts: 7,928 Senior Member
For Louis L'amour fans
earlyagain
Posts: 7,928 Senior Member
I'm an avid consumer of his fiction. His stories are the only place I've ever incountered reference to this gun.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ew9xCtb0aU
I didn't even know they were real until just now. Not a practical design. But the intricate machining is spectacular.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ew9xCtb0aUI didn't even know they were real until just now. Not a practical design. But the intricate machining is spectacular.
Replies
ECHO...ECHO....echo...
Ah......One savors the hypocrisy!
Karma.........It’s a bitch.
A good friend of mine 30 years ago read a lot of Louis L'amour and gave me books after he'd read them. He was then about my age now. I read a number of the books because I felt obliged to since he wanted to talk about them. After a few books, I realized L'amour was writing to a formula. He was a good formula writer, but told the same story with every book I read. Which is what formula books do, and a helluva lot of modern movies. Since I'm not a Western fan, I looked at reading them as a chore that took up my reading time for books I wanted to read more. He did research for his books, I believe. Those books were the only Westerns I've read. I can see them as interesting if you're interested in that genre. My reading interest when I was young was WW2 books and I read every one I could get my hands on.
Left the Dusty Fog, Mark Counter characters of JT Edson in the dust . Though I will admit to an imagined affinity with the Ysabel Kid for some unfathomable reason.
Reuters, Dec 2020.
Some western writers have created much more complexed and enveloping stories. None that I'm aware of have been as prolific. His stories are the only ones I can remember or am aware of that mention this particular gun. I'd venture a guess that he saw an example in a museum or private collection and it left an impression.
I have almost every book he wrote. Haven't read one in years
I think it's the Cody museum that has a rifle or musket that uses that multi-load concept. It had a moveable flintlock that you'd slide backwards from flash hole to flash hole. I don't recall if there were multiple flash pans, or if on-the-fly priming was part of the process you were still stuck with.
The thought of dealing with the gunk of black powder in a complex system like that gives me the shivers, but I guess it's a "practical" gun in that for it to be a problem for you, you must first be ALIVE at the end of the day. Back then, capacity wasn't about delaying a magazine change; it was about staving off the knife fight, so in that context, I can see the appeal.
Still, I think that's going to be something of a gun that belongs to the rare nerdy guy that actually reads the owner's manual. Anybody else, it's gonna quit running in short order.
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee
Its my understanding that a tallow wad between the powder and ball was common pocedure. Old photographs of Kansas Missouri border fighters show loaded chambers without grease. I'm thinking that the chance of the first charge lighting off the back charge was small. I see a bigger problem with that front charge failing to ignite.
I'm 99.9% sure that the wad of Crisco (or whatever) smeared on the front of the cylinder to prevent chain-firing is purely a modern technique used by guys whose plan is to drive to the range on Saturday, play around without blowing themselves up, and drive home to clean guns and have dinner. In the field, it's gonna be a horrible mess of lint, sand, and goo, and when you're 200 yards away from 10,000 guys whose sole purpose for being there is to blow you up, a chain-firing revolver is VERY far down on your list of things to be concerned about.
As for how it applies to the gun of the OP; what often separates the good ones from the bad ones is how fussy they are. Spacing out the loads correctly when you might have to substitute coarser rifle or cannon powder that compresses differently; when you have to improvise wadding from. . . whatever; when your special powder measure got lost in a hectic night river crossing; when your new batch of percussion caps works in everyone else's Colts and Remingtons, but won't throw a spark all the way to the front charge; when you say "NUTS!" to loading the front of the chamber and choose to only run six shots in the back, but still have to work around the hardware for firing the front shot you're not loading.
A really cool example of human ingenuity that's totally incompatible with the end-user environment.
"Nothing is safe from stupid." - Zee