Martini-Henry Cartridges

Jack recently bought a dilapidated old Martini-Henry rifle and is attempting to it repair to working condition. It is in very sad shape. The trigger pivot was a bent nail, the firing pin was broken in half. When we took the screws out of the butt plate they stripped the holes in the wood. The cocking lever retaining clip was rattling around loose in it's socket in the stock. It was only held in by luck. The barrel is horribly corroded both inside and out. He's been chipping away at it and is making some progress. It looks like it might turn into a working gun someday.

    If it ever gets to that stage, he's going to want to shoot it, and to do that he's going to need some cartridges. You can buy ready-to-shoot cartridges, but they want $130 for a box of 20. That's kind of steep, I mean that's more than he paid for the gun, so he's been looking around and he thinks he might have found a way to make some cartridges by starting with some 24 gauge (or was it 28 gauge?) brass shotgun shells. It's going to take some work, but he has a lathe so theoretically he can make whatever dies he needs to reform these shells to suit his purpose.
    If he fails in this endeavor (we'll give him six months), he will have gained a new appreciation for the value of that box of ready made shells, and the $130 price tag won't seem so bad, so either way, the effort spent in trying to make some cartridges will pay off. (My camera is on the fritz, so I stole these pictures off the net.)