doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Punt Gun

This has to be the largest punt gun I've ever seen!
Jim

Let's see - it's a muzzleloader, so you would have to load it on land before you mounted it in a boat. That means you only get one shot and then return to land to reload it. You better make the shot count.

There is one the same size, or even a little bigger, in the Limerick City Museum, Ireland. It was still in use in the late fifties on the Shannon estuary. I used to see it mounted on a fowling punt drawn up on the mud flats near the cottage of the owner. He used to sell wild geese and ducks to a couple of dealers in the city. At the time I was using a Webley & Scot single barrel 16 bore. I was happy if I got one duck. I suppose he wouldn't have been happy unless he got a boat load.
nial

WJ Jeffery 16 sent this picture to me

He wrote
"Took this photo at a game fair over here it�s a punt gun don�t know if you guys use them it�s the first one I ever saw being fired they had the big shell packed with duck feathers for added effect it was loud great to see though ."

Tom Knapp did a demonstration with a smaller version. A full 4x8 sheet of plywood had clays glued over the whole surface. One shot broke all the birds!

Did they make those in a foe'tin.

Weren't some of what we see called punt guns, actually crew served "wall guns"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEyHZUW9LFE

I'm surprised that the Democrat Party hasn't Photoshopped Obama and Biden's heads on those guys to try to convince Low Information voters that they are really big Pro-Gunners.

Irish Tom, fired a service charge of fifty ounces, roughly equal to a box of heavy 12 bore wildfowling cartridges.

Irish Tom is 14 feet 1 3/4 inches (4.31m) of punt gun, weighing 300lbs (136kg) and once firing 3lb 2oz (1.4kg) of shot, propelled by 10 ounces (283g) of black powder.

In the 1930s the gun was bought from a professional wildfowler in Ireland by Stanley Duncan, founder of BASC's predecessor WAGBI (The Wildfowlers' Association of Great Britain and Ireland). It was regularly used by by Stanley Duncan from 1936 until the second world war. After that it was acquired and used by actor James Robertson Justice during his many wildfowling exploits on the Wash. It even spent a night at the bottom of the river Welland, to be retrieved at low tide the next day. For a number of years the gun was lost, but is believed to have had a brief incarnation as a builder's scaffolding pole. Now of too large a bore to shoot waterfowl legally, it was rediscovered in an Inverness boatyard in 1981 and restored before being presented to BASC.

A new puntgun built by Alan Myers, proofed for 32 ozs of shot.