"Bruce" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:56:24 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
"Bruce" wrote in message
. ..
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:11:27 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
There's a museum on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Easton? Cambridge?)
that
has three or four punt guns. They all have names, which they were
given
150
years ago or so.
Have you ever been up close to one of those suckers? The barrel looks
like
the sewer pipe in my basement, only prettier. Despite the fact that
the
buttstock looks like it goes against your shoulder, if you tried, your
arm
would wind up in the next county.
My limits are a Thompson Center contender in .375 JDJ or my uncles
Browning highwall
pushing a 320g bullet at 2400 fps. After that, it quits being fun.
My
lightweight 338
win mag isn't that much joy either. Hot 44 mag loads in my
superblackhawk, yeah baby. I'm
still up for that! Maybe when I get older the redhawk will make more
sense if i can lift
it 
Whatever perverse motive used to attract me to guns with painful recoil,
it
left me years ago.
If you haven't seen a punt gun, or how it's used, you should look it up
on
Google. I'm sure they have plenty of info on them. These are guns around
which people would build a boat. d8-) The barrel rested in a padded
notch
in
the bow, and a thick plank, braced with grown knees and all kinds of
reinforcement, projected up from the transom. You rested the buttstock
on
this plank and hoped that firing the gun didn't rip the transom off the
punt.
They could sluice a whole flock of rafting ducks with one shot from
those
things.
Actually not quite so gruesome.
Most of the punt gun boats were little more then a very light weight
single man boat. Generally they were operated with the shooter laying
prone and paddling with what looked like ping-pong paddles. When the
gun fired much of the recoil was absorbed by the boat scooting
backward. When I was a kid there was an old guy in town that had one
of the punts in his garage and either him, as a young man, or
perhaps his daddy had shot ducks for market out of it.
There is a picture of a gun punt at
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/muse...ves/003537.asp
that looks very much like my memory of the one I saw.
Cheers,
Bruce
Good grief. You call that a punt gun? That's what they call a gentleman's
fowling piece on Maryland's Eastern Shore. g
The ones they used on the Eastern Shore, in the Chesapeake tributaries and
on Sinepuxent Bay, around Crisfield and up to Baltimore, ran up to 13 feet
in length and fired a load of up to five pounds of cut shot and nails.
Here's a Maryland-style punt gun:
http://www.bluerockheritage.com/tom_...e_punt_gun.htm
And I've seen some with even bigger bores.
I'm not sure that 5 pounds of shot qualifies as a "punt gun". More
likely as a "gun" in the navel sense :-)
Cheers,
Bruce
Did you see the photo in the link above? That's a heck of a bore. Two inches
is, what, about 50mm?
The first time I saw one of those things was on a school trip when my family
lived in Hagerstown, MD. I was impressed, especially since I thought you put
that buttstock up against your shoulder. g
Many years later we used to go to Eastern Shore vacation spots, and I saw
several of them at once in a museum down there. I distinctly remember that
the bore on one of them was 2-1/4".
They also had old photos of the punts, and they were square-enders, longer
than the little boats I saw Googling around for a photo of one of the guns.
As I recall they looked more like traditional Jon boats.
They had some of the cut shot at the museum, too; little triangles cut from
a flat sheet of iron. Cut shot was also made from lead, but I don't know if
they used that in the punt guns.
--
Ed Huntress