In a message dated 6/16/2004 6:28:33 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
patriot014@... writes:
> I think this is a diagram of one of the rifles we talked
> about (the one that
> fires Minie balls, I think).
It's some sort of muzzle-loader, but I can't tell from that pic if it is one that would have fired the minie bullet or not. Try looking for a British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled musket online. My book says that this was a very influential Minie type that was widely copied. It was probably this gun or a variation on it that would have been used in the Boshin and Southwestern Wars.
The way a Minie works is this: The bullet is small enough to be pushed down even a very dirty barrel. The originals had an iron cup fitted into a hollow in the base. This cup slammed into the hollow when the powder exploded, causing the skirt of the bullet (or base portion) into the rifling grooves. So the ease and speed of loading of the old smoothbore musket was combined with the accuracy of a rifle.
Something that a lot of you may not know: ANY gun that uses black powder (such as the Minie rifle) stinks!!! I know this because I've been around a muzzle-loader when it was fired. The reason is that one of the main ingredients in black gunpowder is sulphur which, as anyone who has taken chemistry knows, smells pretty much like rotten eggs. It wasn't until the 1880s that a new "smokeless" kind of gunpowder was invented, which also happened to be a lot safer when stored in bulk.
Information from : Weapons: An International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. by The Diagram Group, St. Martin's Press (1990), ISBN# 0-312-03950-6
(The book is a little dated, but it's not like these guns are changing design or anything, ne?)