Crossen Cartridge

I am a small hobby business, black powder enthusiast that was looking for a way to streamline the process of making paper cartridges. This all started by not having a large enough block of wood to make an envelope form. Two smaller blocks of wood were mounted in my old South Bend lathe and a tapered hole was bored through, creating a split envelope form. The blocks were held together with a C-clamp at first. This allowed the form to be opened to release the finished envelope. While it worked, it was very slow. A rudimentary cam operated clamp was made, this worked very well. While the tapered form work well for the envelope it didn't work well for crimping the bullet to the envelope. A second set of blocks were made that had a straight wall that would fold envelope up around the heal of the bullet, pressing the two firmly together. This works like gluing two pieces of wood, a glue joint doesn't hold very well if it's not clamped. This proved the basic concept. The design was refined and some features were added. Improvements and additions are still being worked on.