How to Use Black Powder Pistols

Video Transcript

"O.k., what we got here is a black powder pistol, talk a little bit about it. This pistol here, this one is pretty special to me. Keith McClanahan out of Las Vegas builds them and my riffle is called the McClanahan. It's a fifty cal percussion, it's got a set trigger on it. What we got here is a percussion pistol, instead of my riffle being a flint lock. The difference between the percussion and the flint lock is you have what they call a nipple here,m you take a cap. Instead of a flint to where you have to nap it, put the powder in the pan and stuff like that, you've got a cap here. Now you just take this cap, put it on there and that's ready to fire. That's the difference between a percussion and a flint lock. Now on this pistol, same thing as a riffle, you have primitive sites, fixed sites, same as you got the front blade here, same thing as we described on the riffle. Pretty well the same thing, you site it in the same way, you pretty well shoot it the same way. So what we're going to do now is show the process of loading this and shooting it. We take our dead on powder measure here or powder horn, twenty grains, pour your powder right in to the barrel. Then again, you never load from the powder horn, in case you ever have a hot spark or something in there. You don't load from the powder horn, you have a chance if there was a hot spark, this powder horn could blow up. We take our pillow ticking batch, your ball, this is a fifty cal which is a four ninety ball. O.k., center the patch over the barrel the best you can, put your ball on there, take your ball starter and we're just going to set that down in there like that. That starts the ball. We're going to seat this down, ram this down in there and seat that at the bottom, 'till it's seated in good. You got your ram rod out, we're ready to shoot. What we're going to do now, is we've got this loaded, we put our cap on there, on the nipple. We're going to go ahead and shoot it. So here we go, got the hammer back, this has got a single set trigger, put the trigger forward, pull her up there, fire it on. That's all there is to firing a percussion pistol."