Cleaning A Napoleonic Charleville Musket - Part 1 - Terminology

I just spent a day after a re-enactment event cleaning my Charleville musket, so I thought "Hey, let's make a post about it !".

The next question was "Where ?" Hive doesn't have any re-enactment related communities, so I decided to post it in #thebbhproject because it's a kind of general posts place.

It rapidly became apparent that making it a single post would be a monster, so I'll split it up into three parts. This post covers terminology so people will know what I'm waffling on about. The second post will cover disassembly and cleaning the barrel, and the third will cover cleaning the lock and reassembly.

This is the musket in question. It's a modern replica of a Charleville An IX musket (which was an update to the Model 1777) used during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

My Charleville was made by Pedersoli, and is probably better engineered than the originals. Many Charlevilles used by re-enactors are made in India, and tend to be slightly more rustic in terms of the screws used and the finish on their fittings.

The image above shows the main parts of the musket.

The barrel is held on by three bans plus a screw at the rear, and three bands in turn are held in place with spring clips. The bands are also shaped to allow the ramrod to be slid in and out.

On many muskets (e.g. the British Brown Bess), the barrel is held on with pins that are an interference fit to holes in tangs on the barrel, and the ramrod runs through pipes which are also held on with pins. Personally, I think the French system is far superior becaue it's possible to remove the barrel for cleaning, while the pinned system makes it a much harder job.

The lock is the bit of the flintlock that gives the gun it's name.

It works on a very simple principle. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer flies forward and the flint it holds hits the frizzen, forcing it open. The face of the frizzen is case-hardened, and as the flint slides down it, it creates sparks which fall into the pan where a small amount of gunpowder has been put as priming. The gunpowder goes bang, and the flame goes through the touch hole in the rear side of the barrel to ignite the main charge.

The key to getting the whole thing to work reliably (although in this context, "reliable" means 3 of 4 attempts to fire goes without a hitch) is to have a good flint, a frizzen that is properly hardened and opens at just the right rate.

If the frizzen spring it too weak or too strong, then the frizzen could snap open without allowing the flint to slide down it, or stick and not open fast enough for sparks to be generated. Flints generally last anything from 20-50 shots, and getting them set just right is more of an art than a science !

This is the inside of the lock.

The tumbler is attached to the hammer and has a series of cutouts; one for the main spring, and three that the sear locks into, one each for safe, cocked and fired. The sear has an arm that the trigger presses against and is held against the tumbler by the (relatively weak) sear spring. When the the trigger is pulled, it overcomes the resistance of the sear spring allowing the sear to be pulled down away from the tumbler. That in turn allows the powerful main spring to open, forcing the tumbler around and spinning the hammer into the frizzen.

Describing all this makes it sound complicated, but it really isn't !

In the next post I'll describe how I take the musket apart and clean the barrel....

All photos by me

Posted using The BBH Project