Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders What bullet and propellant for elk in Hawken 50 traditional.

Don't you know cameras, along with conicals, weren't invented yet?

naa he takes photos with a Ni�pce camera
so what is that camera you ask ?
Well Nic�phore Ni�pce is the Thomas Edison of photography .
Thus the first actual photograph �as we think of them today � was taken in 1817 .
Problem was he didn�t have good film and the photos disappeared not long after they were taken . But he shortly got that figured out and by 1827 he was getting permanent photos .
If one would like , they could go back even farther to the pin hole cameras of the 16th century .

So when did the eastern elk become extinct ?


Seems those dates for all but the very eastern locations would put them well after Niepce�s cameras.


. Well lets see ,,,,Claude-�tienne Mini� designed his minie ball in 1849
Then you have Henri-Gustave Delvigne who invented a bullet in 1826. But in reality that was reall still a ball
But Greener Himself designed a flat based ball in 1836 .

The above though is old knowledge . Today we now know that at least in some cases , French sharpshooters were using elongated projectiles and it would appear also some colonial sharpshooters since they were found during a recent dig at the battle of Monmouth




So now did conical projectiles exist prior to the extinction of the eastern sub species of elk by 1860 ?

No

The Rifle-Musket and the Mini� Ball
by Allan W. Howey

In 1836, a London gunsmith named William Greener found a way to improve Norton's design for expansion of the bullet base. He inserted into the hollow area a wooden plug that would push forward when the gun was fired and force the bullet's base outward. The result was that the bullet fit more uniformly inside the barrel, producing more reliable and accurate fire.

Norton's bullet with Greener's refinement eventually came before the British army for approval for use in the field, but the army's old-school officers rejected it. It was an overly conservative decision that squandered the opportunity to develop this innovative design into a truly remarkable weapon.

Several years after Norton had begun developing his hollow-base bullet, French weapons experts began working on a similar design. Eventually, three French army officers would share the credit for what would become the mini� bullet: Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne, Colonel Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, and Captain Claude-Etienne Mini�.

Delvigne led the way when he designed a muzzleloading rifle to fire a new type of bullet. In 1826, Delvigne built a unique rifle barrel with an independent gunpowder chamber at its breech. This chamber was separated from the rest of the barrel by a strong lip, beyond which the powder could pass, but not the bullet. In the earliest models, after the chamber was filled with gunpowder, Delvigne rammed a standard soft, round lead ball down the barrel and pounded it against the lip with the ramrod until it flattened just enough to grip the rifling grooves. He soon discovered, however, that the pounding disfigured the ball and greatly reduced its accuracy, so he designed an elongated, cylindrical bullet with a flat base that would expand more evenly under the ramrod blows. In 1840, Delvigne even received a patent for an explosive bullet of this general design. (Imagine pounding that down a rifle barrel!) In time, Delvigne's design proved unsuitable for general military use; the powder chamber quickly became clogged, and the bullet still ended up too deformed for accurate flight.

In 1828, Thouvenin modified and improved upon Delvigne's gun design. He replaced the lip and powder chamber inside the barrel with a hard metal post that screwed into the gun's breech. After loading, the flat base of the elongated, cylindrical lead bullet rested upon the post in a position to be easily and uniformly forced into the rifling grooves when compressed by the ramrod. The Thouvenin design was a moderate improvement over Delvigne's, and the French army selected it for trials in 1846. The gun and bullet combination was still not practical for widespread military use; the rifle breech was very difficult to clean, and the metal post was prone to breaking.

Delvigne's developments inspired Mini�, who had served with the French Chasseurs in several African campaigns, to do further work toward making an efficient, effective bullet. In 1849, he came up with one that more closely resembled Norton's than Delvigne's. Like Norton's bullet, Mini�'s had a hollow cylindrical base and a rounded conical nose. Mini� also incorporated a plug in the bullet's hollow base to assist expansion, just as Greener had done to Norton's design. Instead of a wooden plug, however, Mini� used an iron cup, which in effect served the same purpose as Thouvenin's metal post. The explosion of the gunpowder would drive the iron cup forward and expand the bullet's base to fit the rifling grooves snugly.

By this point in the story, it should not be surprising to learn that the French army never adopted the new bullet. It took the British army to use it in their new 1851 Enfield rifles, paying Mini� 20,000 pounds for his patent. The army also had to pay Greener 1,000 pounds, after he won a patent infringement lawsuit over the bullet's plug design. The bullet as it would be used by the soldiers in blue and gray was now virtually complete. It had also acquired the name that stuck among English-speaking troops�minnie ball, even though the captain's French surname was properly pronounced min-YAY and his innovation was not a ball but a cone-shaped bullet.

In the early 1850s, James H. Burton, a master armorer at the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, gave the mini� bullet the form it would take into the Civil War. By lengthening the bullet slightly and thinning the walls of its hollow base, Burton was able to dispense with the iron plug. The base of the improved bullet expanded just as well as Mini�'s but was much easier and cheaper to mass-produce. By the mid-1850s, the fully evolved mini� bullet made it possible to build an infantry weapon as easy to load as the old smoothbore musket but with the accuracy and range of a rifle. The term rifle-musket reflected the weapon's lethal combination of attributes.

U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, adopted the rifle-musket and mini� bullet for the U.S. Army in 1855. An improved version of the rifle-musket�the 1861 model built by the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts�became the principal infantry weapon of Northern soldiers in the Civil War.

so since the last knowneastern elk recourded was killed in Pennsylvania on September 1, 1877 .
and the sub species its was not declared as extinct by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1880 you would once again be blowing info out your backside

Nothing about hunting......laffin'

you did not say hunting , you said and i quote



so as to part 1 , your are wrong . it did not happen for some 50 years after the development and patent of what is commonly accepted as the conical we know it today .

as to part two , can you say market hunting by those who actually did kill hundreds of elk in their lifetime
was the RB used for that hunting . you bet it was . but they also didn�t give a rats ass how many they wounded either . much the same ethics as was used years later on the buffalo
but even then i would point out that by the later 1/2 of the 19th century , muzzleloaders were NOT the only guns around
so prove that the decline of the eastern elk was do to the use of only the PRB by market hunters

I am shocked.

As am I

Captchee, you are arguing with someone who will not admit they are wrong

As a wise man once said "he's making another pass, I can hear the trolling motor......"

Naaa not arguing at all Oldelkhunter just make a point for others so at least give some base of research in the bla bla thread .

There is no real need to argue . Things are what they are .
You ask when the conical were invented .
I took that as an honest question and hopefully gave you a reasonable answer .
Swampman said they did not exists when the eastern elk become extinct .
I basically gave information concerning an accepted timeline for when that happened .

Thus people can draw their own conclusions based on that information OR hopefully fined it interesting enough to take it upon themselves to research more on the subject .

Thus when such a subject or question comes up again some time . They will then have the knowledge to state an opinion with something more then just bla bla bla .
See to me , these forums are about learning from others . Not arguing .



yep the smell of 2 stroke motor oil is defiantly in the air concerning this thread

I wonder if ol' Swamplicker has a bullseye tattooed on his forehead? 'Twould be appropriate.

I'd admit I was wrong if I ever was.

Tundragriz, that is a great bull. Especially for a muzzleloader.
I found some (20)405 gr powerbelt hollow points testerday 30 miles from home. Maybe they will be accurate?

Sorry, but isn't the pt gold a saboted bullet. blackhorn powder guy i know shoots the hornady fpb with 90=120 blackhorn or the Thor bullet by barnes. This is serious as i once hilled a huge 5x5 herd bull that had a 54 cal hollow base bullet stuck in a rib by the heart(perfect ml shot from what i could tell). i guess it was the year before as it was sealed by scar tissue internally but still had a little pus draining externally. it also had a big old style broadhead stuck in the side of the lumbar spine at the tenderloin. he was breeding a nice herd when i hit him with a 270 wby with a bearclaw. fun was over. rc

or fffg

no way would i shoot a bull with a round ball in my experience. i've had some difficulty retrieving chest shot big deer and antelope there. rc

i have done well with this same treatment, plus one book muley. his body size reminded me of a medium size cow elk. that is good to 150 yds in my opinion.

10-4

my hawken didnt like the maxi-hunters, but loved those 370 tc maxiballs.