An intermittent blog of a few gamers and their adventures wargaming the English Civil War

Saturday 25 April 2015

Matchlock Rifle

This week I came across some ECW artefacts at the NRA museum in Virginia which was very interesting:

Matchlock Rifle:

 Ammunition bandoleer:
 Note that the projectile is embedded in the lid:
Rifle rest

4 comments:

  1. How do you reckon they rifled the barrel in the 17th century?

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    Replies
    1. As far as I can ascertain, rifling didn't come into general use until flintlocks. Some long barrel fouling pieces may have been rifled but because of the additional time to load and the fact that the black powered fouled the rifling after a few shots anyway, military muskets were generally unrifled, in this period at least.

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  2. Yeah, but how did they actually cut the rifling groove into the barrel?

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