[geeks] OT: bang, bang, bang...

[Phil Stracchino]

On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 03:15:57PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Sun, 07 Dec 2003 @ 14:25 -0500, Phil Stracchino said:
> 
> > > Have you ever tried building your own?  Interesting...
> > 
> > My own complete piece?  No.  But I've done plenty of carriage work.
> 
> Interesting.  Every restored a historic piece?

I've worked on restoring original pieces, yes.  All Civil War period.

> Around here, we have a lot of Revolution and Civil war artillery, and a
> lot of it has no carriage.  Evidently hard to get people to do the work,
> and of course the budget for parks is dismal.

Isn't it always?

> It's fun though, to go to Yorktown and watch them fire the shore
> batteries into the York River.

And that tells me about where "here" is.  :)

> I came around the corner two years ago as they were firing an 8-inch
> motar, and had no idea what was going on.  I saw the costumes, but never
> thought about them firing a cannon.  They touched off the powder just as
> I appeared behind the thing.

The 3rd US had a British 1812-model howitzer which had been recovered
with a badly cracked barrel.  In the course of restoring the tube, it
was welded, bored out, and sleeved in half-inch chrome-moly with a
hemispherical chamber.  It was an interesting gun to work the front end
of, because every time another gun in tha battery fired, the howitzer's
barrel rang.  It wasn't something real obvious you could hear at a
distance, but if you were working No.1 or No.2, with every round you'd
hear **BOOM** bonnnggg!


-- 
 .*********  Fight Back!  It may not be just YOUR life at risk.  *********.
 : phil stracchino : unix ronin : renaissance man : mystic zen biker geek :
 :  alaric at caerllewys.net : alaric-ruthven at earthlink.net : phil at latt.net  :
 :   2000 CBR929RR, 1991 VFR750F3 (foully murdered), 1986 VF500F (sold)   :
 :    Linux Now!   ...Because friends don't let friends use Microsoft.    :