Yesterday's Weapons Forums

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It's 5 o'clock and it's watermelon time.....................
because you can't drink beer & load rockets - TXPete

Can't give you much info but thoughtthis thread was vaguely related to your pistol

Thanks for all the replies!

Yep, all those pics are Adams guns. Mine is exactly the same as the one Mad Dog Morgan is holding in the death photo that Amatikulu posted. It is also exactly like the one in the link gschwertley posted to the Hants.gov.

I have posted a couple of pics here but I will take a couple of my gun today and post them as well. The top pic i posted is the same model but a later version with a loading lever attached.

Another question....does anyone know how many grains of powder these things took?? It is about the same size as a modern S & W Model 29 with an 8 inch barrel ( Dirty Harry Revolver ) and darn heavy!

Thanks again

MIke



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very neet looking revolver , looking forward to the photos - and welcome

I don't know what the exact charge of black powder is for the Adams, but with the typical US muzzle-loading revolvers, some recommendations for starting charges are 12 grains for .36 caliber, and around 20 grains for .44 caliber. You want to use FFFg grain size black powder.

My experience with cap & ball revolvers is very long in the past, but it seems to me that when I was doing it with my buddies, we didn't actually measure charges by weight. We just kind of eyeballed the chambers and filled them to within about three-eigths inch of the forward end of the chamber. With compression, this left enough space for the ball and a bit of Crisco or Beare Grease to prevent possible chain fire ignition of adjacent chambers due to an out-of-round ball (or chamber). We may have been idiots for doing this, but we never had a blow-up. Of course, you can vary the amount of the charges more readily if you are weighing. This way, you can tailor your loads for greater accuracy.

The old timers used to tell us that it's impossible to overload revolver chambers with black powder; they aren't large enough to hold too much powder and the ball as well. THIS CERTAINLY ISN'T TRUE OF BLACK POWDER, MUZZLE-LOADING RIFLES, simply because it's possible to fill the barrel all the way out to the end of the muzzle and create a bomb with it. Unlike with revolvers, you can't tell where the charge ends in the M.L. rifle barrel so you need to measure the charge some way.

I hope some more experienced muzzle loaders will hop in here and tell me if I'm wrong about this. The most important thing is to be safe.

I only found this forum by googling 1851 Adams 38 bore. What I typed in took me directly to here. I registered simply to answer some of your questions.
I have both an 1851 Adams Dragoon and a 4th Model Tranter Dragoon, that is .38 bore.
I also have smaller 54 bore Adams and Tranters, two being a firearms with proven New Zealand history.
Now the .38 bore Tranter comes in its original case. Many years ago somewhere back in the dawn of time its owner had pencilled onto the Trade label the details. These specifications will be for both Adams and Tranter 38 bore guns.
'Bullet = 235 gns'
The flask has three calibrations and they are listed on the lid
3/8 dram = 11 grains
1/2 dram = 13 grains
5/8 dram = 15 grains
The first two loads are very light so the owner must have been a cautious fellow and the heaviest load of 15 grains is equivalent to the load for the .450 Adams revolver. I think that to make the most of the fact that these guns were Dragoon pistols it would have been better to have used around 18 to 20 grains of powder - the early Webley .45 cartridge pistol bullets took 20 grains black powder and the .476 eley Cartirdges took 18 grains.
In other words there was some room for variables - plinking loads and blasting the enemy loads! Hope this made it worthme registering...now to see what other topics I can find now that I am here.