Don't know if any of y'all shoot blackpowder mortars or cannon, but it's addictive.

All I have left to do is cut the fuse hole and polish out a tooling mark or two on my first HAND-HELD golf-ball caliber mortar. (Some of the first blackpowder 'irons back in the 1100's were 'hand-held' or pole mounted with about an inch diameter bore.)

Others I've made include beer-can caliber, soda-pop bottle (16-20-24oz size) and 4.55" (4" pvc pipe) calibers.

Okay. Now I'm jealous!!!!

So lets get a mortar/cannon discussion going. They're not that tough to make or to have made. AND they're relatively economical to shoot (the one's in smaller calibers like golf-balls).

Coool! Do you weld, or put in a screw-in butt-plug? Or do you machine it out of a solid piece of metal?

Ricochet -
I fill a length of the 4" pvc pipe with concrete. The combination weights 7.5 pounds. THAT goes into the mortar.
4140 steel like most I've made. Tube and trunion weigh 103 pounds. 350 meter range.

120mm - IANG? I grew up in Iowa.

120mm -

ALL of my mortars so far have been ONE piece of steel - usually 4140 (same as rifle barrels). I have seen a cannon explode (not my design) - NEVER again.

One golf ball over about 100gr of FFFg.

Gloves - to prevent powder burns as well as padding.

My friend lit the fuse, another readied the camera.

BLAM! Good report, and actually a brisk but mild recoil.

BUT - SMOKE SMOKE SMOKE .

Couldn't see a thing for the sparks and the smoke!

THEY said it went well past the 100 yard end of the range - into the woods.

Then we tried TWO golf balls (both TopFlight's if it matters).

One went significantly further than the other - again 150-200 yards out there. Is going to the left hooking or slicing?

Great fun, ahhh the smell of black powder and sulpher!!!

I have a couple of small ones. One is a "golf ball" mortar. It will give 25 second air "hang" time with a golf ball. Max range guesstimated at half mile but we never found any of the balls to be sure. I am going to try making some marker balls (hollow plastic golf balls filled with powder to see if we can get a better range measurement. It has a pretty good report shooting blanks. I just got a "hand gonne" with a 1" bore barrel mounted on a 5' tiller. I have not had time to shoot it yet. My next one will be a "beer can" mortar. I would try to make this one if I had the tooling to drill the bore. Otherwise, I will buy one. After that, I want to jump to a bowling ball mortar that is designed as a scaled up version of the golf ball mortar I have. Can you buy 4140 round stock in larger diameters?

Mike - I'm impressed! 25 seconds hang time is a LONG time. My beer-can concrete filled usually are up there for 10-15 seconds & the 105's and 155's we fired usually would go for 19-22 seconds (12,000 meters and more).

4140 is standardly available in many sizes and shapes. The largest that I've purchased is 7" but it's made in much larger sizes.

If you can see where the round lands, you'll be easily able to tell whether it's nearer or farther than objects nearby. To objects nearby you can measure the gun-target distances.

Hand gonne sounds like fun. That was the inspiration of this one - although golfball is perhaps a bit bigger than of that historical vintage. My surprize was that you can't see much of anything else but smoke when you fire it.

My first beer-can caliber mortar was for the older style cans (today's soup can size). Fired in on the 4th of July 1975 for the first time (just down the road a few miles from the bridge between Lexington and Concord too!)

Made it from a hot rolled steel billet. Tore up a cutter bit just getting the scale off. Drilled it with a 3/4" bit, didn't have a boring bar, so it became the tool of choice. It looked so good when I finished I took it down to the local plating plant and had it bright chromed!

Then 20 years of nothing. My second I CAD designed and traded a plotter for the machine work - 4140 steel, 4.55" bore diameter (4" pvc pipe +.050 clearance). Industrial hard chrome plated.

Keep the dreams alive!