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An Interesting 8 Monme Tanegashima


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As you can see, they are both horrible translations. Several members here could do a far better job, but unfortunately translation takes time and thought and cross-referencing, especially when special readings of names of people and places are involved. :phew: If you are in no rush, Ron, I am sure we can fill you in little by little, or even just go back and correct the worst parts of these machine translations. 8)

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Ron, what a beautiful piece! I'm certainly glad that the NMB covers guns as well as swords.

 

If I may, I'd like to pose some more (doubtless rather simple) questions for the experts hereabouts (i.e. everyone but yours truly). I expect they'll all have been answered many a time before...

 

First, that lock. It's really quite beautiful, but if I'm not mistaken the mainspring appears to be a coil spring. I didn't know this was at all common on any lock of this period, and am interested to know more about it. Why did the Japanese adopt such a mechanism, and when? It seems to me (as an utter novice) that such a spring would be decidedly more difficult to manufacture, and possibly more fragile, than the much simpler V-springs prevalent in Western guns. Did the weapons first introduced to Japan, perhaps, have a similar spring? I'm especially curiosu since a quick gander into the operation of the snapping matchlock turned up this happy picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan ... eum_SF.JPG

 

Secondly, and still on that subject, does anyone have any insights on how they eliminated what I understand to have been the principal difficulty with the snapping matchlock - that of extinguishing the match if an overly strong spring were used? The obvious possibility that occurs is, simply, that of very careful manufacture; perhaps this and that coiled mainspring are connected.

 

Third, I notice the gun is fitted with what seems to be a backsight, highly unusual on most Western muzzle-loaders unless they happened to be rifled. I'm assuming this piece isn't rifled, but I'd be most interested in finding out why, if it isn't, the Japanese bothered with a backsight in a weapon known, even with careful loading and shooting, to be highly inaccurate at the sort of ranges where one might use a backsight.

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Can I step in and give a general answer before the details arrive. J Tanegashima locks fall into two types, an outer V spring type, and a hidden inner coil type. They are found in roughly equal numbers, in my experience. In both cases the spring is quite gentle, just enough to encourage the serpentine to fall gently onto the pan. (In contrast, the Japanese had to come up with a more vicious spring for the pellets and percussion caps which appeared at the end of the Edo period.)

 

Not sure how to answer about the backsight. Wishful thinking? :lol: But they all have backsights, and some even have a third intermediate sight. Early gunnery school texts show sighting using both sights, and sharpshooters had a special folding ladder back sight for longer distance and greater accuracy.

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Dear Mr. Jones,

Piers has answered your query as to the two major types of Japanese firearm " locks ". Basically these constitute the whole with only minor internal variations ( speaking of Matchlocks only ). Other types of locks, ... percussion for example show up at the end of the Edo Period. With respect to the European Matchlock, ... the problem of having the match extinquished by falling too hard against the priming pan was solved by having the priming pan crisscrossed with grouves or sometimes punch marks. This compensated for the possible mis-fires that would be encountered by the match hitting upon a flat surface. The Japanese defeated the problem in a slightly different fashion by having the serpentine spring made of brass .... only strong enough to actually allow the serpentine to little more than free fall upon the priming pan.

This assured the match did not strike hard enough to extinquish the coal. The brass coil spring is actually quite easy to manufacture, as when you wrap the thin flat piece of brass around a wheel ( tumbler ), ... the slight stress you creat by wrapping produces a very weak spring. Thus no hardening or tempering is required as would be for a steel spring. The picture you refer to in Wikipedia is actually an example of the outside spring that Piers refers to, ... and was common to the end of the Japanese Matchlock period. Although much thicker than the brass used for a coil spring, the amount of spring is really no greater. It simply took more brass to creat the same amount of spring when using brass in a V type spring.

 

It is interesting yes, ... that the Japanese would place a rear sight on a Musket ( smoothbore ), .... when most Euriopean Smoothbores of the time .... even well into the flint era did not have a rear sight. I feel it is simply the Japanese penchant for even the slightest improvement in design. The Japanese have always been very adept at improving upon a mechanical design. The Japanese in some cases put sights on barrels so short that they would have been competely impractical to use, .... and even mortars which you sight by range rather than by direct aim invariably have sights. They seemed to have put sights on these barrels simply because of aestetics. The slight advantage of putting rear sights on ANY smoothbore musket are outweighed by the cost and labour involved especially when you could not expect to hit anything aimed at much past 50 yards, .... and pure bloody luck to hit a man sized target at 100 yards ... with or without sights period.

Only when rifling ( which the Japanese never did employ ) came forth did stability of projectiles improve to where sights front and rear mean great accuracy in firearms. I hope between Piers and I we have answered your query satisfactorily.

..... Ron Watson

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匁 An old Japanese unit of mass = 1/1000 kan, after 1891 = 3.75 grams John

 

Guns were described by the weight of ball that they fired. A cavalry pistol would be about 3 Monme, which is about 1.3 cm caliber/calibre, I believe. A good field weapon Samurai Shi-zutsu long gun would be around 6 Monme. 10 Monme is a heavy gun with quite a large bore; above this guns were classified as O-zutsu. O-zutsu generally ranged from 20 anywhere up to perhaps 80-100 Monme.

 

Incidentally at displays I mainly fire a 3 Monme cavalry pistol Bajo-zutsu, an 8 Monme Shizutsu castle long gun, and a 20 Monme (75 gram ball) O-zutsu.

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