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The bullet/cloth combination will have a nice, tight fit. Place a small amount of gunpowder in the flintlock's pan. Snap the frizzen in place over the pan. Fully cock the hammer. Pull the trigger to fire the gun. When you fire the gun, the flint strikes the frizzen and shaves off iron to create sparks. The hammer's blow also snaps the frizzen back to expose the gunpowder in the pan. The pan's gunpowder ignites, and it flashes through a small hole in the side of the barrel to ignite the gunpowder inside the barrel. The gun fires! The barrel of a flintlock is its own technological marvel, especially for the time. A blacksmith would take a flat piece of iron and beat it into a cylindrical shape around a mandrel -- a long rod of the proper diameter. By heating the iron to a high enough temperature in a forge, the blacksmith actually welded the seam along the length of the barrel to form a strong tube. This process could take days. Barrels ranged anywhere from pistol length (6 to 12 inches, 15 to 30 cm) to long gun length (40 to 60 inches, 102 to 152 cm). The blacksmith could finish the interior of the barrel as either a smooth bore or a rifled bore. A smooth bore is just that -- smooth along the entire length of the barrel. The Brown Bess of the American Revolutionary War was smooth bored. So is any shotgun. Drilling out the tube with successively larger bits and then polishing with a reamer creates a smooth bore barrel. Rifling a barrel is a way of increasing the accuracy of the bullet, whether the bullet is spherical or cone shaped. To rifle a barrel, you start with a smooth bore and engrave spiral grooves down the inside of the barrel. A typical pattern is one twist of the grooves in 48 inches (122 cm) of barrel length. As the bullet speeds down the barrel it engages the grooves, exiting the barrel with a rapid spin (between 1,000 and 3,000 RPM) and traveling at a speed of 1,000 to 2,000 feet per second (305 to 610 meters per second) through the air. You can see the spiral grooves cut into this barrel. Once the barrel is smoothed or rifled, one end is closed off with a breech plug. Then, a small hole is drilled in the barrel to allow the flame from the flintlock's pan to enter the barrel and ignite the charge. The slow-burning rope was attached to a lever that you moved with your finger to rotate it into position -- the first trigger. Obviously, the matchlock had several problems: You had to light the rope ahead of time. The rope could burn itself out if you took too long between lighting it and firing the gun. It glowed, so people could see it at night. Rainy weather would put it out. Despite these problems, matchlocks were common for 200 years because they were a better option than lighting the gunpowder by hand and they were cheap to build. What the world needed was a way of igniting gunpowder in the barrel of a gun that was instant, reliable and fairly weatherproof. It also needed to be relatively inexpensive and easy to make. The flintlock was the technological marvel that solved all of these problems! The Merriam Webster Dictionary describes a lock, in the context of a gun, as "The method for exploding the charge or cartridge of a firearm." The flintlock is the most venerable of the lock technologies. The flintlock mechanism, like the pendulum clock mechanism, is amazing from an innovation standpoint. This single device solved so many of the problems of the time, and it did so using the fairly primitive tools and technology already available then. The flintlock was quite an accomplishment! The basic goal of the flintlock is simple: to create a spark that can light the gunpowder stored in the barrel of the gun. To create this spark, the flintlock uses the "flint and steel" approach. The idea behind flint and steel is straightforward. Flint is an amazingly hard form of rock. If you strike iron or steel with flint, the flint flakes off tiny particles of iron. The force of the blow and the friction it creates actually ignites the iron, and it burns rapidly to form Fe3O4. The sparks that you see are the hot specks of iron burning! If these sparks come near gunpowder, they will ignite it. The flintlock therefore needs: A piece of flint A piece of steel A place for the sparks to touch gunpowder The flint needs to move at high speed and strike the steel in such a way that the sparks fall into some gunpowder. You can see the four parts that make this happen in the picture below.
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