That takes balls, Part 2: rebound!

Last week I posted about a little Liegi derringer that I finished and did a laser design on. Well, over the weekend I got together with the BBTI gang and, among other things, had a chance to shoot and chrono the little gun.

Here’s a short slo-mo vid of shooting the Liegi:

As expected, shooting the Liegi was simplicity itself: pour in some black powder (FFFg) until the small chamber was filled, set a .451 ball on top, screw down the barrel, then add a #11 cap and it was ready to go.

Because I wanted to chrono the gun, we were shooting it from where we had the chrono set-up, about 15 yards from the bullet trap:

The Labradar system works well, once you get the hang of using it.

There was a fair amount of variation in the multiple shots we chrono’d, ranging from about 380fps to 600+fps, but the average was about 500fps. That gives the 139gr lead ball about 80ft-pounds of muzzle energy — not a lot, but more than I would care to be shot with.

Well, more than I would care to be shot with directly, anyway. Because one of the shots I chronographed bounced off the surrounding wall of the bullet trap, and ricocheted right back and hit me in the leg. It didn’t hurt at all, just tapped me in the thigh. I picked the bullet up off the ground where it landed. Here it is next to another fresh ball:

Note that it is darkened from the combustion, and there’s a slight indentation where it was seated down on the powder chamber of the gun. Here’s a pic that better shows the flattened profile of the bullet:

And here’s what it looks like on the side that hit the building:

And yeah, that means that I missed hitting the opening of the bullet trap (covering door is about 3×6′). I would be embarrassed about that with most handguns at 15 yards, but certainly not with this thing, which was intended to be used at bad-breath distance.

Like I said: fun little project. Now I’ll add it into my collection of black powder guns for regular use.

Jim Downey