Alright, it's time to do a little bit of shooting with the Chassepot. So, a hand-rolled paper cartridge here.
This should pretty well prevent gas from leaking out, but still wearing eye protection. So.
(There we go.) As you shoot these soot accumulates in the chamber of course,
and the bolt gets tighter and tighter to run, until at some point
if you have a combination of a very sooty chamber and a slightly over-length cartridge,
you just kind of won't be able to close the action, and then you'll have to clean the gun.
But we haven't gotten to that point yet.
This is actually a very pleasant gun to shoot.
Recoil's not that bad at all. ... I believe this is loaded with a 405 grain bullet [spec was 386], all black powder.
... Important thing to remember is you actually have to cock the action first,
then open the bolt. The two are not connected to each other.
After firing there's going to be a little bit of residue in here, which I can show you.
And stuff in another cartridge and you're ready to go. Because these are paper and caseless
there's nothing that has to come out, which is kind of disconcerting to people sometimes.
It's something that you don't necessarily think about, kind of like 1910s electric cars,
like, wow, they had caseless ammo in 1866. Well, yes. Yes they did.
So there's some of the residue still stuck to the front of the firing pin.
Knock that off.
Alright, so there's the firing pin exposed all the way through as if it were actually fired.
That's the depth that it goes into the cartridge.
And the amount of soot and residue on this is from, I believe, 6 shots at this point.
This gun was bright shiny clean when we started and 6 cartridges later
(yeah, there you go, you can see it down under there),
6 cartridges later that's what it looks like.
So I think we can get a few more through it before it's too gunked up to continue working.
- So you went and put the bayonet on there, didn't you? - I did.
- Because it wasn't long enough to begin with, huh? - No, not at all.
- Look at that,
... part of the paper case
got stuck to the spine of the bayonet there. - Nice.
So, yes, people will ask what happens to the cartridge case, the paper.
And the answer is most of it gets blown out the muzzle.
Argh, there we go.
So there is a question as to how many rounds you can fire through a Chassepot
before there gets to be enough fouling in it that you just can't cram another cartridge in.
So this is actually the 20th round that we have fired in this range session
so far today without any real cleaning. We've wiped off the little needle housing here a little bit, but.
Almost.
There we go, 20 rounds even that's...
That's pretty substantial because the length of a stand up battle where you actually had
20 rounds of fire without a chance to clean something is, I think, not all that common in this time period.
Normally you'd have a couple of rounds back and forth and then something else would happen.
Still working. Yeah, there we go.