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Hi guys and girls,

Thought I share this, you never know. It might be interesting. First disclaimer – I am not an expert, this is just a passion of mine.

This thread will show the construction and loading of the British and Empire rifle musket cartridge for the P1853 “Enfield” rifle musket and its subsequent patterns.

For those that are not familiar with the concept of the rifle musket, the “selling point” of the firearm is actually its ammunition. Hitherto to the introduction of the rifle musket armies of the World were primarily armed with smoothbore muskets – the interior of the barrel was completely smooth – the ammunition used was simply a lead ball and loose blackpowder, the ball was usually of a much smaller diameter then the bore of the barrel, for example, the “Brown Bess” had a bore of roughly .75ins, but the issued ammunition was a ball of between .67-.69 in diameter. Upon firing the ball would travel in the rough direction the barrel was pointed and had a tendency to wander in flight (just like a thrown tennis, or baseball), the average, accurate range of a smoothbore can be argued to be 100 yards

The rifle musket was a muzzle loading firearm still, but its barrel was rifled and it fired a conical lead “bullet” which had a hollow base. The bullet was smaller in diameter then the rifle’s bore, the reason for is – as with the smoothbore – is that a smaller projectile will load quicker and easier in a blackpowder-fouled barrel. However, due to the hollow base of the bullet, upon firing the gases from the powder expanded the “skirt” of the bullet’s base into the rifling, effectively sealing the escape of gasses. The rifling span the bullet and stabilised it in flight and almost increased the range of fire by 5 fold

Theoretically the rifle musket had a range of around 500 yards, a massive improvement over the smoothbores 100 yards – unfortunately it did not revolutionise warfare as predicted, mainly due soldiers not being trained to appreciate range-estimation, sight-adjustment, parabolic trajectories and a fact that all major armies still used linier tactics to fight – the most common method was a mass volley of muskets at less then 100 yards, the range of a smoothbore, but that might be story for another day.

On to the ammunition.

The Enfield cartridge was made up of three separate parts of paper, a bullet, powder and lubrication. There were three patterns of cartridge used in the Enfield’s life, all made in separate ways and with different cuts of paper and size of bullets. However, for this thread I will concentrate of the first pattern of cartridge.

Manufacture: (I have used contrasting paper just to show where the paper needs to lie)

The first pattern of cartridge is made up of two trapeziums and one rectangle, as below.(The reason the large traprezium does not have a length measurement is because, if you look at the small and large trapezium's size, they are essentially identical, and when rolled together any paper longer then 3.5ins will become the cartridge's tail, I prefer a long tail so I have extended the large trapezium. You may not wish to.

PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE

The first step is to take your small trapezium and place this down as shown with the rectangle upon it so that the rectangle’s points mate up with the trapezium’s and covers the whole of the trapezium’s bottom half. Like so. A tool that is required is a simple piece of .50 dowling. Place your dowling so that it is flush with the bottom of your trapezium with the tip of your dowling flush with the rectangle, like so. Now you can roll this up. When you have rolled your tube you will need to fold in the edges of the paper, starting first where the apex of the trapezium is, to close the tube. You have now made your powder tube. Next, we need to form the main tube and patch. Take you large trapezium and lie it like so with your powder tube. You will need to take a bullet and place it about an inch from the edge of the paper with it’s tip pointing towards the powder tube. Taking care to ensure that the edge of the paper is constantly straight and flush, roll your cartridge. The end of the paper will need to be folded into the base of the bullet, again using the apex first. This is now essentially the cartridge in it’s completed form. The cartridge now needs to be charged with powder, the charge of the day was 2 ½ drams, or 68 grains. As you withdraw the dowling you’ll probably find that the paper tube comes with it, not a problem, simply ease the dowling out, charge your powder and push the powder tube back down to rest upon the bullet, now you need to close the cartridge tale. I have found the best way to do this is to pinch where the power tube ends and to fold the fold the tail down and around like so: Now all you need to do is lube the bullet and it’s all done. Your cartridge now looks like this:(this has been lubricated, more on that later)

Bullet:
The bore of the Enfield was traditionally .577, however manufacturing tolerances of the time and general wear meant that this was never the exact bore size. The bullet that the Enfield fired, unlike the US Springfield, was a straight-sided Pritchett bullet of 529grs in weight and .568 in diameter at first, then it eventually dropped to .55
During its use it was found that these bullets were not expanding uniformly, so an iron base plug was introduced to help push the skirt into the rifling, in the .55 bullet this base plug was made of boxwood.

Here’s my first pattern (no base plug) bullet: Paper:
The paper of the powder tube you can make of anything as this will be discarded, however the outer, larger trapezium will need to be made of modern-day paper that is on par with “cartridge paper”. The original paper of the day was very thin at about 130gsm – modern day paper with a gsm of about 135gsm can easily be obtained from artists’ pads and the like. I use the wrapping paper in my local chip shop.

Lubricate:
The purpose of lubricating the bullet is twofold. One it helps with loading ease, and secondly it reducing fowling in the barrel. The original lubricate was 1 part beeswax and 6 parts tallow. Tallow is animal fat with has been rendered, but plumbers also stock this. Then it was changed to 1 part tallow and 5 parts beeswax. I personally use 1 part beeswax to 1 part tallow. 50/50. Now to apply to your cartridges you will need to melt this compound into liquid and drip your cartridges in, bullet first, and only so that the bullet is covered in your lubrication, like so:

Loading:
To load you Enfield cartridge you will bite off its tail, or tear, depending on your prerogative on the day:

Pour your powder, reverse the cartridge, so the bullet is now pointing up and push into the muzzle – this act will remove any excess lubricant, so don’t worry if you’ve over lubricated. The powder tube can now be torn off and discarded, you can lever it against the muzzle, it comes off surprising easy. Now you are left with you paper-patched, lubricated bullet, which can be rammed and shot. And that, my friends, it basically it. We’ll make you a Queen’s soldier yet!

Hope you enjoyed it.
Tower.75

Great article! :goodjob:

I will give this a try next time I am at Andrewsfield

I do a similar, but luckily much simpler, task to make up paper cartridges for my .36 revolver....

....only takes a few cigarette papers and a fountain pen as the former


I find paper cartridges MUCH quicker to use than a powder flask and a lot less messy

Be carefull with plumbers tallow as most of the stuff nowadays doesn't have much if any tallow in it.

I get my tallow from ships chandlers, its the real thing all be it beef. I haven't seen mutton tallow since the last batch I made myself nigh on forty odd years ago now. I undestand that you are no longer allowed to slaughter your own animals nowadays, when did we loose the plot on everything?

Well done indeed.

Interesting read, I especially like the "local chip shop" bit..... :lol:

Worthy of stickyfication.

:P

That was very interesting, thanks for sharing! I must admit, muzzle loading has never been on my radar but since learning that the club I've joined has an interest in this aspect of shooting I've become rather interested, looking forward to trying it out in the summer. (when I say summer I obviously mean that brief rainy bit between winters....)

Have you written any other similar articles?

[noob]Is this always the preferred method to load this particular rifle? How many of these little cartridges would a soldier generally make/carry around? [/noooobie]

I used to spend ages making up paper charges for the cannon I was in charge of. Wasn't allowed to use bullets though :) might have hurt someone.

Bloody Hell. I've got a sticky? :G

I didn't think it was worth more then a passing interest. I could of put way more effort into it. Thanks, though. I feel quite chuffed at that.

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

I will give this a try next time I am at Andrewsfield

Do you have Pritchett-style bullets or commercial .575 with the "greese groves"? If you have the latter then firing paper-patched wont provide a benefit, and the .575 bullet with paper might proove too tight for the bore. You can make up "Springfield"-style cartridges, whcih were the same, but the paper was unlubricated and the bullet was taken out of the paper completely to load, as the Springfield bullet had greese-groove and the bullet was lubricated.

Have you written any other similar articles?

[noob]Is this always the preferred method to load this particular rifle? How many of these little cartridges would a soldier generally make/carry around? [/noooobie]

This cartridge is the first-pattern used with the Enfield rifle musket and that is how they were loaded and fired. The first type of cartridge like this was used with the P1851 Minié rifle musket in the Crimean War. As far as I can know, we were the only ones to fire paper-patched. The other nations, used paper cartridges, but they took the bullet out of the paper to load, as their bullets were made with greese-grooves and lubricated. The soliders themselves did not make these cartridges, rather they were made at the factory. The amount they offically carried depending on nation. The US soldier carried around 40 in their cartidge box, the British carried around 60.

But then, as now, if the solider could find the room and take the weight they'd take more ammunition if it was available.