Prove me wrong with actual data.
Nope. Not going to try. From my point of view, such data does not exist.
I keep seeing "internet experts" claiming that somehow smokeless powder has some sort of pressure curve that is sharper and therefore terminal to older guns.
Smokeless powder does have a different pressure curve than black powder. That fact is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is the claim that the difference is "terminal" to older guns.
There are a lot of "internet experts" who take the "Chicken Little" approach. For them, the sky is always falling. What I mean by that, is they take a
possible (and fairly rare) worst case situation and claim that it WILL happen, implying (some outright stating) that it will happen, will always happen, its inevitable, and if you don't do what they tell you to do, you WILL blow up your gun!!!
This is, of course, BS.
All the lovely, detailed and accurate pressure measurements we can do today are useful thing, for some things, but in the discussion of what causes catastrophic failure (blow ups) of older (Black powder guns in particular) guns, they aren't actually relevant.
People get all kinds of focused on the pressure measurements, total pressure, peak pressure, pressure curves, etc., using the data to prove something "safe" or "not safe", depending on the point of view and data presented. They make nice sounding arguments and pretty charts, but they don't tell you anything actually relevant to the question of an old gun failing, at all, let alone catastrophically.
The reason its not relevant is simple, and constantly overlooked. Nobody is testing rare, valuable century and a half old guns to destruction, and even if they did, all it would tell you is at what point that individual gun failed.
The "old guns" are NOT a uniform thing. In addition to all the numerous different designs, methods of manufacture and materials used, their condition ranges from "as mechanically sound as the day they left the factory" on down to "barely functional" and every one can be different.
So, since they are all possibly different, any blanket statement about their strength can not be accurate in all cases. Next point is about them "blowing up". Can happen, rarely does, what is much, much more common is some kind of critical failure that deadlines the gun (such as a crack in the frame) that is NOT a blow up.
And these things also happen when the guns are shot only with black powder as well. The one thing that is always, eventually "terminal" to every gun is using it (firing it) enough. This is something common with all mechanical things. At some point, they will wear out and fail. Whether it takes 6 years, 160 or 600 years, if used ENOUGH they will wear out.
Further skewing the information available is the fact that all our data on "old gun" failures comes from guns that have failed. There are always lots of possible reasons why an old gun fails, how and why it broke the way it did. Pressure is ONE of them. But only one of them. It MAY BE the reason, or the reason may be something else. TO claim that pressure (in some form) IS the reason, and the only reason, and that the gun WILL blow up, just isn't sensible, to me.
Thoughts??
