building a cannon...

Yea, in my part of the Florida panhandle they have a second muzzle loader season that starts Feb 22nd.
so I'll be packing a CVA .50 inline, a T/C .50 Renegade, a Ruger .45 old army cap and ball and a 1" cannon. :D

and a box of balls, bullets, primers, caps, powder and fuse. I'm sure when I get there there'll be something I forgot though.
 
I'm bring this there too, 250 gal. propane tank. this is going to be dedicated to a whole house generator.
when hurricane Michael went thru my area was out of electric for over two weeks, and my lines coming in weave thru the woods, they got taken down and weren't fixed for weeks. so a whole house generator is on the top of the list for living there.

XT0cD8x.jpg
 
bladegrinder said:
I'm bring this there too, 250 gal. propane tank. this is going to be dedicated to a whole house generator.
when hurricane Michael went thru my area was out of electric for over two weeks, and my lines coming in weave thru the woods, they got taken down and weren't fixed for weeks. so a whole house generator is on the top of the list for living there.

XT0cD8x.jpg
Click to expand...
good thinkin. here, every winter takes down the lines over the mountain that feeds our substation (goes over 7500 ft elevation) hence we have 2 generators (one dual fuel) and cook and heat with wood. our woodstove is a 6 burner with a water jacket. so we do ok and pretty much self sustain for as long as needed. several years age it was 2 weeks.
 
bladegrinder said:
I'm bring this there too, 250 gal. propane tank. this is going to be dedicated to a whole house generator.
when hurricane Michael went thru my area was out of electric for over two weeks, and my lines coming in weave thru the woods, they got taken down and weren't fixed for weeks. so a whole house generator is on the top of the list for living there.

XT0cD8x.jpg
Click to expand...
I would love to have a whole house generator but I may have to settler for a smaller one. But when I do, it will run off propane. Propane, in most cases, is much easier to obtain when the power goes out.
 
That's a nice big cannon there Chris. I didn't know that much about them until I started building this one.
I found that on those big bore guns like that one the charge of black powder was measured in the pounds.
and a lot of the civil war cannons were dumped after so many shots before the blew up from stress.
nowadays cast iron, bronze and brass barrels have seemless steel liners in them to keep them from blowing up, the one in your picture looks like it has one but even those don't last forever due to internal corrosion.

As for mine I found that an approved max load for a 1" barrel is 180 grains of FG black powder, and that's as far as I'm going with it and only shooting blanks for noise.
I just read this morning someone in Michigan bought one at an auction, fired it, and it blew up killing him.
there's more to these things than just packing powder in them and firing them off. I'm sure your friend knows something about that with that beast he's got in his yard.
 
opaul said:
I would love to have a whole house generator but I may have to settler for a smaller one. But when I do, it will run off propane. Propane, in most cases, is much easier to obtain when the power goes out.
Click to expand...
Natural gas is the way to go if it's available. the problem with propane that most people don't think of is during a snow storm or natural disaster those bulk trucks may not be able to get to you to refill if you run out.

It was a few days after hurricane Michael went thru my place before I could get to it, and that was only because my neighbors
got together with tractors and chainsaws and cleared the roads themselves. if it was left to the county it would have been a lot longer.
I'm sure the LP company's were real leery about where they were sending their bulk trucks in the aftermath of that storm.
 
bladegrinder said:
That's a nice big cannon there Chris. I didn't know that much about them until I started building this one.
I found that on those big bore guns like that one the charge of black powder was measured in the pounds.
and a lot of the civil war cannons were dumped after so many shots before the blew up from stress.
nowadays cast iron, bronze and brass barrels have seemless steel liners in them to keep them from blowing up, the one in your picture looks like it has one but even those don't last forever due to internal corrosion.

As for mine I found that an approved max load for a 1" barrel is 180 grains of FG black powder, and that's as far as I'm going with it and only shooting blanks for noise.
I just read this morning someone in Michigan bought one at an auction, fired it, and it blew up killing him.
there's more to these things than just packing powder in them and firing them off. I'm sure your friend knows something about that with that beast he's got in his yard.
Click to expand...
Yeah he has a couple of cannons including one he made that is small scale and shoots a standard glowstick. Looks like a tracer round. He is big on the re-enactment stuff so blanks for him too.
 
 
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opaul said:
I would love to have a whole house generator but I may have to settler for a smaller one. But when I do, it will run off propane. Propane, in most cases, is much easier to obtain when the power goes out.
Click to expand...
And it stores better than gasoline. A local WV company makes conversions for most generators to work off propane.
 
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