Swedish Cannon ??

[katana]

One of the threads posted by Micheal has a link stating that the 'Swedish cannon' idea was brought back and modified by Captain of Infantry; Robert Scott and was sucessfully used in English civil war.

http://home.earthlink.net/~dgshinn/companyinfo.html

This 're-inactment group' have built a functional version from x-ray images of a surviving cannon.

".........Our leather cannon is constructed like the original, with a copper core, sleeved in a steel tube held in place by a steel cage, wrapped with rope, plastered and covered with linen and the leather casing shrunk on the tube and over a wooden cannon muzzle and breech ring. The only departures are the steel tube sealed with its threaded breech plug rather than the cast amalgam used a to seal the breech of the wrought iron original. The simpler design adopted suffered serious design flaws that plagued it throughout the War. The Ripp design overcomes these and likewise offers greater strength solving in large degree the age-old failure of iron tubes subjected to the wet swab that eventually cracked the casing, by using a cooper core and the cage that helped dissipate heat. No doubt its added weight and expense though made it prohibitive to adopt on large scale. Our carriage design is taken from an original leather cannon....."

Regards David