In firearms, what’s the difference between flint lock, cap lock and percussion?
In: Technology
All these weapons work in a similar way. You load gunpower into the muzzle with a ball/bullet on top. Then, you find a way to ignite that gunpower and propel the ball. There are different ways to ignite that power.
A flintlock uses a piece of flint as an igniter. Pulling the trigger releases the spring loaded cock with a pieces of flint attached. The cocks scrapes the flint against a steel backing plate, called the frizzen, which creates a park. When the frizzen is hit, it folds backward and uncovers the pan, which also contains power. This sparks ignite the powder in the exposed frizzen pan. This ignited power then ignites the powder in the muzzle and fires the weapon.
A cap lock/percussion cap are parts of the same system. Instead of scraping a flint against a frizzen, the weapons creates an ignition by exploding a cap. The cap contains chemical that explode when exposed to friction (those chemicals are called fulminates). When the cock of the weapons slams down on the cap, it causes the friction which explodes the chemical. The explosion then ignites the power in the muzzle and fires the weapons.
An older type of firing mechanism is called the matchlock. This is one is fairly simple. It used a slow burning match (a piece of rope). When you fired the weapon, the cock dipped the match into the priming power, which would then ignite the muzzle power. Another older system is the wheellock. Similar to the flintlock, a wheellock creates sparks. However, instead of a flint hitting a steel frizzen, the sparks were created in the rotation of the wheel mechanism—the mechanism is similar to a modern cigarette lighter.
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