Be careful boys my son lost half of his hand with a black powder cannon !!! it was 50 years to the day when my grand father lost half his arm forth of July with a muzzle loader !! the the old timers said gramp could still out work any other man drunk or sober!
and my son went on to finish 3rd in the nationals that year in shotput .he has also gone on to be one of GE,s top engineers .world wide hunter fisherman and also gun collector at the at age of 40, including many savage 99s so not all bad
Indeed, black powder is not to be taken lightly. I served on several muzzle loading cannon crews earlier in my life - 12-pound Napolean gun and 3" Ordnance Rifle, Civil War, and 2-pound galloper, 6-pound battalion gun, and 3-pound grasshopper, Revolutionary War (British, 42nd Reg't of Foot - The Black Watch). At one point we had to complete the National Park Service artillery school in order to be allowed to discharge the beasts on Park property - a wonderful class to take (if they even still hold it). I have a lot of respect for black powder.
An older friend of mine, since deceased, was serving on a 12-pound Napolean gun at an early Civil War re-ennactment in the late 60's at Sharpsburg, MD, right down the road from where I grew up. He rammed a charge home without swabbing because his loader offered the charge at the muzzle out of sync with the drill, plus they were "in the heat of battle". He knew better than to ram a charge into a bore that hadn't been swabbed, but did it anyway and lost most of his right hand.
The worst mishap I personally witnessed as a re-ennactor was a blind (!!!) yo-yo who left his rammer down the bore of his Springfield and sent it twanging over the heads of a line of Confederate infantry. All the guy wanted to do was take part in one re-ennactment and his life would be complete, so we dressed him, put him in between two guys whose sole job was to lead him around and watch that he didn't do anything stupid. They weren't paying attention.... (It was an incident that lead directly to the Park Service banning ramrods on the "fields of battle". Thereafter all we could do was dump the contents of the blank cartridge down the musket barrel without ramming the paper/wadding on top of it, which made for a wimpy report - so we started using double charges in order to get a loud bang.)
Then there was the time our drummer boy fearfully pointed out the two neat round .58 caliber holes, in and out, in his drum after we were all done for the day. We never figured that one out, and of course every Confederate opposing us that day swore and declared he didn't screw up and load a live round instead of a blank....
Fun times.
