Making Combustible Paper Cartridges
- muleequestrian
- Jul 10
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 12
Modern sport shooters of black powder revolvers don’t realize that paper cartridges were the thing back in the day when these guns were popular. Most modern sportsmen utilize loadings of loose powder and ball covered in grease wads to fire their reproduction guns. Me ? If I’m going to play with these guns, I’m going to do it the old fashioned way… with ammunition made like the original ammo was. Combustible paper cartridges were issued by the thousands during the American Civil War.
I start off with pure grade potassium nitrate powder.
The paper cases are made with rag bond paper. This paper is tough and once dry, it really soaks up a lot of potassium crystals without coming apart. It just doesn’t dissolve like weaker papers do.
I heat up distilled water and add as much potassium nitrate as will dissolve in the water.
Once the boiling water cools, I soak the paper in the mixture and get as much KNO3 as possible into the fibers.
I hang the sheets of nitrated paper up to dry thoroughly.
While the paper is drying, I fire up the lead pot and cast the conical projectiles I’ll need to finish my loads.
When the nitrated paper is dried, I cut out the cartridge bodies from a stencil traced onto the nitrated paper.
My cartridge former is made out of polished steel. Some formers are 3D printed from plastic, and this is fine too. I put a nitrated disk on top of the former….
Then I carefully wrap and glue a paper cartridge body around the mandrel and push it into the former.
This makes a tough paper tube that gets filled with the appropriate charge of powder. Since this is for a replica Colt Walker, the charge is 48 grains of 3fffg powder.
A 200 grain round nose flat point bullet is carefully glued to the end on top of the powder charge leaving no air gap between the powder and the base of the projectile. The cast projectile is from a gang mold from Kaido Ojamaa and is made specifically for a black powder revolver. Shown here is also a reproduction of a cap box of an original label.
This is the first step in loading a paper cartridge. They go in from the front.
You rotate the cylinder until the nose aligns with the rammer, and push it in.
To ensure a proper seal, a little ring of lead and paper is shaved off during the process of pushing the cartridge in place.
The percussion caps are placed on the cones at the back of the cylinder, and each round is ready to fire. A tiny amount of grease serves to lube the projectile over the end of each cylinder load. I don’t advise filling each chamber with grease, because it not only makes a mess when the round is fired and the grease is blown all over the gun… but it also contaminates the paper of the cartridge and causes smoldering bits to remain behind in the chambers. The 200 grain conical bullets have power equivalent to a modern .45 ACP in the 1860 Colt, but in the Walker — it definitely edges out the .45 Colt or even the .44 Special.
Keep in mind that the Walker revolver was designed to kill enemy horses at 100 yards and put the enemy cavalrymen on foot during the War with Mexico, where they would be vulnerable to counterattack from opposing cavalry. Until the .357 magnum was invented in the 1930’s, the Walker Colts were the most powerful factory made handguns.
One thing I’ve noticed, is even though the paper is nitrated and it mostly burns completely up, there are occasional tiny unburned particles of ash left behind in the now empty cylinders. I make sure to tip the revolver on its side and blow these paper bits out. The more grease you use as lube during loading, the more of these particles are left unburned. They could potentially be a source of shouldering sparks and could ignite the next cartridge if loaded while the ember is still burning.
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