Hi-

I'm curious as to whether anyone has done a compilation of the failures of Federal Parrotts and various CSA manufactured banded rifles in service? How many known failures were there? What sort of average number of rounds fired before failure? Has anyone tried to estimate the average failure rate itself--with a given model going into action what was the liklihood of it bursting in that action?

The more I read, the more dangerous the heavier Parrotts and other banded rifles appear to have been to their own crews. It seems that in many cases only a few firings were conducted before the piece burst (especially the 100 pdr Parrotts and the 7" Brookes.) In others the pieces lasted through most of the action. The 30 pounder Parrotts had a lot of failures as did the 20 pounders. From what I can tell the failure rate of the 10 pounders was considerably less than these, but still bad.