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0t---rifling the 16 inch bore

E.F. Thumann said:
That youtube account has some unbelievable animations/CAD!
Click to expand...
I agree. I wonder if anyone in the model engineering community has ever built a working scale model of one of those guns? Ever since I saw my first Wielen breech mechanism up close on the USS Massachusetts I have always been fascinated by that mechanism and what went into those. I have always wanted to try machining up my own matching set of those threads.

I have always thought a 1/8scale rail mounted version would be a ton of fun to bring to one's local live steam club. Of course even in 1/8th scale you would still have a 2"dia barrel. Would that even be legal to own?



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JHolland:

Thank you for posting this set of pictures & link to the youtube. Quite a fascinating mechanism in both the rifling head and the animation of the breech block mechanism.

It is easy enough to see how the rifling head worked on a large naval gun bore. Even on that big a gun bore, very small cuts were taken with each pass of the rifling head. While I knew this to be true for rifling heads used on small-arms calibers, I was surprised that a cut of only 0.002" or thereabouts per pass was taken on the naval gun bore rifling.

Years ago, I bought Guy Lautard's book which has the reprints of the "J.M. Pyne" stories, and went into details of the hand rifling of Schutzen rifle barrels. Something that has always been in the back of my mind is how a small rifling head for cutting rifling grooves in something like a .22 caliber barrel is made. I am sure the principals are the same, or quite close, to the rifling head used on the large naval gun bores. Making a rifling head with a cutting bit than can fit into a .22 caliber bore and have a replaceable as well as adjustable cutting bit is something that would be interesting to see for a comparison to the naval gun rifling head.

The other question, re: naval guns, is how the gun is actually fired. On large naval guns, cartridges containing the powder and a primer charge are not used. The projectile or "shell" is rammed into the breech of the gun and started up the bore. A charge of powder is then rammed in behind the projectile and the breech is locked closed. The powder charge, at least on the large naval guns used on US battleships, was made up in silk bags, and these bags were rammed into the chamber of the gun. How was the powder ignited to fire these sorts of naval guns, and what kind of 'trigger' was there ? I am guessing some sort of electrical firing circuit was used, but was there a small 'primer charge' that was loaded into a chamber in the breech block ? I am sure plenty of us have fired small arms such as rifles, shotguns, or pistols, and are familiar with the principals of small arms ammunition. These principals pertain to smaller bore naval guns and some artillery pieces. A 16" naval gun is a very different animal, and things seem to have come full circle with a separate projectile and powder charge, somewhat like a Schutzen rifle.
 
Joe said:
How was the powder ignited to fire these sorts of naval guns, and what kind of 'trigger' was there ? I am guessing some sort of electrical firing circuit was used, but was there a small 'primer charge' that was loaded into a chamber in the breech block ? I am sure plenty of us have fired small arms such as rifles, shotguns, or pistols, and are familiar with the principals of small arms ammunition. These principals pertain to smaller bore naval guns and some artillery pieces. A 16" naval gun is a very different animal, and things seem to have come full circle with a separate projectile and powder charge, somewhat like a Schutzen rifle.
Click to expand...

Joe, I think they show the whole process in this video. It looks like a small primer charge gets loaded into the breech block. I would assume they must have had a way to remotely fire and I suspect there would have been some redundancy so the guns could be fired locally if called on but alast that isn't shown in the animation
Loading a Royal Navy battleship 15 inch gun - YouTube

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Joe Michaels said:
JHolland:

Thank you for posting this set of pictures & link to the youtube. Quite a fascinating mechanism in both the rifling head and the animation of the breech block mechanism.

It is easy enough to see how the rifling head worked on a large naval gun bore. Even on that big a gun bore, very small cuts were taken with each pass of the rifling head. While I knew this to be true for rifling heads used on small-arms calibers, I was surprised that a cut of only 0.002" or thereabouts per pass was taken on the naval gun bore rifling.

Years ago, I bought Guy Lautard's book which has the reprints of the "J.M. Pyne" stories, and went into details of the hand rifling of Schutzen rifle barrels. Something that has always been in the back of my mind is how a small rifling head for cutting rifling grooves in something like a .22 caliber barrel is made. I am sure the principals are the same, or quite close, to the rifling head used on the large naval gun bores. Making a rifling head with a cutting bit than can fit into a .22 caliber bore and have a replaceable as well as adjustable cutting bit is something that would be interesting to see for a comparison to the naval gun rifling head.

The other question, re: naval guns, is how the gun is actually fired. On large naval guns, cartridges containing the powder and a primer charge are not used. The projectile or "shell" is rammed into the breech of the gun and started up the bore. A charge of powder is then rammed in behind the projectile and the breech is locked closed. The powder charge, at least on the large naval guns used on US battleships, was made up in silk bags, and these bags were rammed into the chamber of the gun. How was the powder ignited to fire these sorts of naval guns, and what kind of 'trigger' was there ? I am guessing some sort of electrical firing circuit was used, but was there a small 'primer charge' that was loaded into a chamber in the breech block ? I am sure plenty of us have fired small arms such as rifles, shotguns, or pistols, and are familiar with the principals of small arms ammunition. These principals pertain to smaller bore naval guns and some artillery pieces. A 16" naval gun is a very different animal, and things seem to have come full circle with a separate projectile and powder charge, somewhat like a Schutzen rifle.
Click to expand...

the question about how the gun was fired was asked and answered in the comments of the video.

another video of his shows the loading and priming

Loading a Royal Navy battleship 15 inch gun - YouTube
 
adammil1 said:
I have always thought a 1/8scale rail mounted version would be a ton of fun to bring to one's local live steam club. Of course even in 1/8th scale you would still have a 2"dia barrel. Would that even be legal to own?


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Click to expand...


No. Any rifled breech loading arm with a bore larger than .50 is considered a "destructive device" and requires a Class III federal License to own. I'm not sure what the rule would be if it wasn't rifled...it would then be considered a shotgun, in which case the barrel would have to be at least 18" long.

No rules apply to muzzle loaders...you can own your own Civil War 12 pounder or 3" rifle if you want to (and can afford it)...I've known several people who do and even shoot them.
 
Not if it was made before January 1, 1898. There is also a list of exceptions which I think includes all the big double rifle calibers. I've seen the list but since I don't collect breech loaders I don't have it at hand. The law is the predictable result of lawyers, who know nothing about a subject, thinking they can regulate it. It's full of contradictions and ambiguities.

There are also new, rifled 12 gauge shotguns which really perplexed me until I found that there is a blanket exception for 12 gauge...

The OP's question was about making a gun with a 2" bore, in which case it would be new, but I should have been clearer...and I think Evans is still in business if it's the London gun maker. I have a can of Evans Rangoon Oil on my bench right now that I bought in London around 1980.
 
The third picture in post #1 shows a 16" barrel on display outside the 1859 pre-fabricated cast iron building at Watervliet Arsenal in New York. The arsenal made 16" guns, among other things. The iron building is a museum devoted to artillery and machine tools. I have taken that same picture because it is just too hard to resist, though the last time I was there (2008), they had posted a rule against taking pictures outside on the grounds. The museum had some very nice full-size and model cannons on display. In the larger back room, a curator let me in to see lots of old cannons and a display of 19th century machine tools, some working, that a retired curator had put together to educate children and interested visitors. I read that they closed the museum in 2013.

The best model cannon I ever saw was in Honolulu in a museum housed in a 1911 coastal artillery battery on Waikiki, an area that used to be a swampy place with few buildings. Battery Randolph was built to house a pair of 14" guns on disappearing carriages, long gone. In 1911, an attack on Pearl Harbor naval base would have come from ships which could be sunk by artillery if they came close enough to fire their own guns. The museum had borrowed from the Smithsonian a finely detailed working (not firing) model of the type of gun once sited there. I got the impression that someone had built a series of similar models in the early 20th century to show various types of guns then in use. The other models are probably hidden in a Smithsonian warehouse. They seldom test fired the Waikiki guns because it broke windows in surrounding buildings. They never had an enemy target to shoot, and could not shoot at airplanes, so the battery was emptied and a demolition firm was hired to level it. This is very valuable beach front real estate and is still government property, next to a hotel for military personnel. The wreckers broke out a patch of super-hard concrete and found closely spaced 1" rebar and gave up. The building was designed to withstand a direct hit from a 14" shell, after all. So now it is a very well built military museum, and a good one.

I found the William Evans Ltd. shop on a trip to London in 1977. The guns were very nice and very expensive. I only bought a pair of 12 bore snap caps for my Winchester 101.

Larry
 
J. Holland, as you are so good at finding interesting stuff, could you do a search on what is now the Idaho National Laboratory during WW2. I have seen references of where they reworked 14 & 16 inch naval and coastal defense guns by boring out the inside, lowering the whole gun into a furnace buried in the ground to heat and slipping in a new tube.

I can no longer find the reference or photos. I did find this, which I have not read: https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4192201.pdf

Paul
 
From your link it seems that the relining facility was the only one capable of handling 16 In guns. It seems to have been quite important.
 
The Department of Defense sold the last stock of 16" naval gun barrels two years ago. Mutilation of the tubes was required on site, before removal.
 
Here's a link to a catalog that Leblond published back then on gundrilling, skiving, rifling machines they used to build for the government arsenals way back then. The government was still buying these machines from LeBlond as late as the early 1960's. There are s few pictures of the rifling attachment that was used on these machines. When we would get these machines from government storage or from one of the arsenals, that equipment had been removed and presumably destroyed and scraped. I've worked on several of these in my earlier years retrofitting them into trepanning machines. John ODer has a few pictures here on PM standing on one that was originally made by Niles back in the day.

http://pounceatron.dreamhosters.com/docs/leblond/leblond-gun-lathes-nodate.pdf

I thank Greg Menke for posting.

Ken
 
99Panhard said:
No. Any rifled breech loading arm with a bore larger than .50 is considered a "destructive device" and requires a Class III federal License to own. I'm not sure what the rule would be if it wasn't rifled...it would then be considered a shotgun, in which case the barrel would have to be at least 18" long.

No rules apply to muzzle loaders...you can own your own Civil War 12 pounder or 3" rifle if you want to (and can afford it)...I've known several people who do and even shoot them.
Click to expand...

I believe it's okay if it's for blackpowder. We had a replica of a Whitworth 12 pounder breechloader that had a 3" bore in our civil war reenactment group.
 
adammil1 said:
I agree. I wonder if anyone in the model engineering community has ever built a working scale model of one of those guns? Ever since I saw my first Wielen breech mechanism up close on the USS Massachusetts I have always been fascinated by that mechanism and what went into those. I have always wanted to try machining up my own matching set of those threads.

I have always thought a 1/8scale rail mounted version would be a ton of fun to bring to one's local live steam club. Of course even in 1/8th scale you would still have a 2"dia barrel. Would that even be legal to own?



Sent from my SM-J737V using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

In the USA, it would need to be muzzle-loading and/or a replica of a pre-1899 design in order to not be classified by ATF as a "destructive device." If you kept the bore at .500" or less then you could do it without a tax stamp.

I made a bronze Coehorn Mortar that is bored for golf balls (1.75"). Other projectile choices are Redbull cans or soda cans, which need to be filled with cement if you want them to survive firing.
 
One of my to-do fun projects is a Herreshoff saluting cannon -- Herreshoff as in the high end yacht builder in Bristol, RI. Their cannons were based on the British navy 15 pounders and scaled down to take a 10 gauge shotgun shell. One would be bolted onto a railing somewhere and fired in heavy fog to let others know where you are. They are about 24" long and are quite impressive looking if made of brass or naval bronze. I looked into these several years ago and discovered that they are classified as a signalling device and, as long as you use blank 10 gauge shells, no permits are required--even in Massachusetts, the ultimate nanny state.
 
When I was an active shooter decades ago (not what the expression implies today), I recall seeing Winchester 10 Ga. blank-firing salute cannon in the catalogs. I don't know when Winchester stopped making them, but I just looked them up and see that another company is making copies, along with some other, even more expensive saluting guns. At the time, I had plenty of muzzleloaders if I wanted to make noise.

The Cannon Store | Winchester & Herreshoff Signal Cannons and Accessories

I also had a collection of cartridges, including a .600 Nitro Express. I think back then it was supposed to be the largest "modern" rifle cartridge. But I looked that one up just now and see someone came out with a .700 Nitro Express in 1988.

.700 Nitro Express - Wikipedia

Larry
 
L Vanice said:
A 1940's video of the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, DC shows the 100 foot deep pit for relining barrels at 9:40 minutes. Interesting stuff.
Click to expand...


Thanks for that link Larry.
My Grandfather worked as a mold maker during the war at the Washington Navy Yard.
 

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