So when I first started shooting my Pedersoli 1859 Sharps I had made up tubes by rolling a simple rectangle of paper around a mandrel with a single vertical overlap seam of about 1/8". I'd use an Elmer's Glue Stick to apply some paste along the vertical edge, and then roll the paper on the mandrel. Afterwards, I used Hair Curler Paper, punched with a 1" punch, to glue end caps into the ends of the tubes. I did this for both the Pedersoli Christmas Tree bullet, as well as with the Eras Gone Richmond Sharps.
One thing I noticed with the small ringtail on the Christmas Tree bullets was that there wasn't much engagement with the paper tube. Consequently it was not uncommon for the bullets to break free of the tubes.
Another issue with my simple tube design was sometimes the vertical seam would burst open when I was putting the powder and wad, due to an insufficient glue bond.
Another issue with them was that in use, because I was using reduced charges for best accuracy, there was, naturally, an air gap between the cardboard wad glued in place on top of the powder and the base of the bullet. When you pushed the bullet into the chamber, sometimes you could feel the cartridge crumple and collapse on insertion. I don't know if the bullet did not fully seat into the throat or what.
Still another problem was that when they dried, they had a tendency to distort and not be nice round tubes. This didn't matter after you got the powder and a cardboard wad in place, but it made it finicky to get the components inside the tube anyway.
I like the Eras Gone Richmond Sharps bullet because it has a very long heel on it, like an overgrown revolver bullet. This gives you over 1/4" engagement with the paper tube, and so they never come free from the tubes once glued in place (I use Elmer's White Glue, applied with a Q-tip shaft).
But I still had problems with collapsing tubes, and the cartridges themselves just didn't feel rigid in the handling.
Still, they worked well enough. I made my tubes initially out of 17 pound vellum paper. This seemed to shatter and fragment very well and there were almost never any remnants left in the chamber or barrel. I had also experimented with nitrated computer paper and while it worked very well, never leaving any ash behind, it was a hassle to make nitrated paper and I worried that the finished product was more susceptible to a cookoff than non-nitrated paper.
With the Richmond bullet and my simple vellum tubes, I had found that 45 grains of 3F Goex gave the best group. It wasn't a fantastic group, but it was at least as good as what I got with the Pedersoli bullet, and it is much easier to cast than the Pedersoli bullet, and is two-cavity to boot, so I went with it. Plus I think it's cool to shoot a copy of a historical bullet.
Anyway, I decided to revisit my loads and cartridge design. I took the Ordnance Manual trapezoid, and shortened it to match the chamber length of my Sharps. This resulted in a trapezoid like this:
I originally avoided the trapezoid design for a couple of reasons. First, it seemed like it would be harder to cut out than strips of rectangles. Second, I worried that by doubling up paper in the rolling you'd end up with more ash and residue in the chamber after firing.
Well, it turns out if you stack the pattern properly, it's no harder to cut these out with a straight edge and a razor knife than simple rectangles. You just have a couple of angled cuts to make. I basically cut out the rows first, and then cut the other lines after I have strips. You can do multiple layers at once, and so if you print out 20 pages it's possible to cut out 300 blanks in a matter of minutes.
Another benefit of rolling trapezoids as opposed to rectangles is that due to the overlapping nature of the roll, you can roll the tubes tighter on the mandrel than you can simple rectangles, as it sort of self-tightens as you go. This makes it so that the bullet heel fits much more snugly and consistently in the tube ends during final assembly.
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