doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com From .410's to punt guns

Oddly, even though I really like .410’s, on the other end of the spectrum punt guns have always intrigued me ever since I read a long ago article in Field & Stream. Even when I was a kid watching high altitude geese flying overhead, I often envisioned taking a shot at them with a punt gun roped off to a tree (so ya think your safe, well I’ll show ya…..). I was looking on the internet and saw a clip of a guy shooting one from a skiff and from a table stand, it looked like fun. The other thing that I’ve been interested in building for years is a large trebuchet, but that’s way OT for this forum.

Does anyone have any experience with punt guns; I understand they’re still legal for hunting in Britain. I wonder how hard it would be to make one, apparently most were muzzle loaders and were one of kind guns built for the market hunter (ie: function over form, the finish was often crude yet they were effective). It seems that if you could obtain a nice sized slab of utility grade walnut, a 6’ to 8’ length of stout 1.5” to 2” steel pipe, and a percussion lock and a trigger assembly from Dixie Gun Works, or maybe a used lock assembly on eBay, building such a gun should be pretty straight forwards. Imagine showing up at the next Vintagers shoot with one of those mutha’s… KABOOOM!

One can dream anyhow.
Steve

Steve-

Although I have absolutely zero experience with punt guns, and I've never built a trebuchet, I share your interest -- and have been interested in everything from ray guns to heavy artillery since I could read -- and I started that at a very early age.

I have been involved in some pretty outrageous projects though, and for quite some time had a program on my computer that was essentially a trebuchet calculator which took into account swing, payload, counterweight, and track (possibly more variables, can't quite remember at this moment)
Ten or so years ago a group of friends and I were poised to build one but as it always works out, we ended up split off in separate projects instead.
One of those friends ended up being one of the support characters in the mythbusters show. I don't remember if she ended up building a trebuchet during her contribution to that series or not. I just note that to give you a sense of the kind of characters who were involved in that caper.
The machine would have ended up at the burningman event. We wanted to throw cars with it.

I think a punt gun would be easier to build than a trebuchet.
A good piece of drawn-over-mandrel (DOM) tubing of good enough alloy (you can just do the hoop stress math on whatever gauge/load/velocity you were after and choose an alloy, or just go 4140), a suitable breechplug, and some way to anchor the thing to a boat should be all you need -- that and a touch hole for ignition.

Go for it Steve!



--Tinker

A friend here in Michigan has a punt gun that he built, his name is Jim Marsh. I know he's fired it quite a bit with just paper and powder but don't know if he ever actually loaded it with shot or not.

It's still legal in the UK but there are very few punt gunners these days. I know a few, but have never been lucky enough to get to go out for a try. They do it during the day, not at night like it was mostly done here. Years ago all the punt gunners in the country sort of made a gentleman's agreement to stop the night gunning as it scared the birds so badly and that's hung on through the years up until the present day.

I have an early muzzle loading 1 1/2 gun in my collection that came off the Mississippi River at Chester, Ill.


Destry

For you punt gun fans try wildfowling.com. It has a punt gun section and is from the UK.

They stopped shooting them with punt guns at night because the law made them stop.....

Punt gunning was no glamorous sport that Sportsmen participated in.

I've seen a .410 punt gun before. a friend shot at a dove and missed about ten times in a row at which point he threw down the gun and kicked it,it did not go far. He does still shoot skeet with it last I heard.

Joe,

No, in the UK it would still be perfectly legal to shoot ducks at night with a punt gun, the boys just don't do it.

Over there it's considered almost sacred, the few folks that still do it are looked up to by most wildfowlers as carrying on a nearly gone tradition.

A lot of their punt gunners were cut from a different cloth than most of the markethunters here in the US. There were books written about the sport by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallway and Colonel Peter Hawker, both famous shooters from the UK. Sir Peter Scott, the famous wildfowl artist, was a punt gunner in his youth.

WAGBI, their version of Ducks Unlimited, was started by punt gunners, mainly Stanley Duncan and Gallway.

It's just a different game there than here and always has been. That's why they can still do it and we can't.


Destry


P.S. to Will: How could a .410 be a punt gun?

I fail to see the sport of shooting into flock of ducks sitting on the water with a small howitzer mounted on a skiff....sport humbug.

I agree with Joe. Where is the sport of hoseing down a hundred ducks sitting on the water? One reason the Atlantic Flyway is no more and the Mississipi is only a glimpse of what it once was. Killing for killings sake was always wrong.

Just My Thoughts......George

I never thought there was 'supposed to be' any kind of sporting agenda around the use of punt guns.

They'd definitely be *the way* to get the tables stocked for the next family reunion!



--Tinker