BlackPowderMag.com Flintlock Rifles and Black Powder Guns
May 2009 Spring Practice
This video was produced in 2009 but was never uploaded. In doing site maintenance to www.blackpowdermag.com I found it in a different folder. Besides some shots of excellent locks, it shows some of the trials that one goes through to prepare for a video session.
In preparation for the Spring Shoot with Olympus Industrial, Steve Chapman and I met Grant Ferguson on the NMLRA grounds. We set up equipment behind Gun Makers Hall and tried different exposure settings, camera angles, and experimented with lighting.
Slow Motion Crew L to R: Steve Chapman, Kevin Pletcher, Dave Schnitker, Grant Ferguson (from a later article)
It was at this point that we made the decision to shoot B&W instead of color. We weighed the advantage of increased definition against the loss of color. Increased definition won.
When viewing the video you will see the different camera angles and exposure settings as we experimented. This gave us the information we needed to plan for the video we did a month later, during the Spring Shoot.
We used two large Siler locks for this practice session. The first one viewed is one built by Sam Everly. The lock’s tumbler is supported by tiny two ball bearings. It is an extremely smooth lock and deserves to be mounted on a gun. The video contains 4 tries, the first with Goex cannon grade powder just for fun. The remaining trials are with Swiss Null B.
The second Siler is a workhorse. It has been used for testing purposes since 1986. It has probably been fired 5000 times with all sorts of flints and powder. Practically all of my experiments and articles used this lock. Jim Chambers has given me incredible support with this lock.
Our video contains three firings with the workhorse Siler, two with Null B and a final one with Goex cannon.
