Ep. 895: Project Punt Gun | 12 in '26

Spencer Neuharth gives behind-the-scenes details and answers viewer questions about his “12 in '26” punt gun experiment with crew members Seth and Max. They're also joined by Joel Kolander of Rock Island Auction, who will be auctioning off the punt gun with 100% of proceeds going back to Land Access Initiative. Watch the film now on MeatEater's YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4RUe49NGS4 Connect with MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and YouTube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Subscribe to MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:14Speaker 03

  Welcome to the MeatEater Podcast. I'm Spencer Neuharth, joined today by Seth Morris and Max Barta. Today's episode is a little different. We are going to be talking all about punt guns. If you're not aware, we bought one a few years ago, then we shot it, we filmed the whole process, and you can go watch that right now on the MeatEater YouTube channel. This is our fifth installment in the 12 in 26 series that we're doing this year. That's 12 long-form films that we're dropping in 2026. This film is probably the most different of everything that you'll see on our channel. The other episodes have more traditional outdoor adventures, where Yanni does an archery bear hunt, Clay chases mountain lions with hounds.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  The only thing that we hunt in the punt gun episode is clay pigeons and watermelons. So very different. And some balloons and some paper targets and some hats.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  We'll talk about in a little bit. So this is a story, you know, about conservation and a very badass gun. So today, we are going to be answering your questions about the punt gun. Although Steve and I host the film, Max and Seth were there every time we shot the thing. So they got real familiar with it. And then Seth and Max even got to shoot it. We had six shells with us. Steve and I shot five of them. We had a sixth one. We said, what should we do with this thing? Should we just throw it in the river? And then Max and Seth, they said, no, no, no, let us shoot it. So they did. And so we have a piece of the film here that didn't make the final cut.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  This is behind the scenes.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  This is behind the scenes.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  This is a real look behind.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Max and Seth shooting the punt gun.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  This is a nice moment, Max.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  This has really bonded our friendship even more.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  I'll tee it up with this real quick.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Sorry, I, we only had one shell left, but two people who wanted to shoot it. So they were going to pull the rope together. That's how you fire the punt gun. You pull this rope that's like, I don't know, two feet long. And so they, they were very kind and they pulled the rope together, but I noticed something in the film.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  I know what you're gonna say.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Play it for us, Phil.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  He unnamed it.

• 3:27Speaker 06

  That's good.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Unnamed it.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Seth brings back the hammer. He got that on it.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  On three. Hold on, ready? Yep. Right on. One, two, three.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  What I, what I wanted to bring up is Seth has his hand on the rope. And then Max trumps him and reaches in front of Seth's hand to get the grip further up the rope. And then Seth says, hold on. And then he reaches in front of Max's hand again.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  I didn't even notice that.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  It was just like a little pancake or whatever it was.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  That's right. They were like doing a totem pole of hands. Whoever got to be closer to, to the trigger. Who do you think actually shot it? Which one of you pulled the rope?

• 4:09Speaker 05

  I felt like I had more on it.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  It felt pretty equal, I thought.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  I was more on your hand, not on the rope.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  Almost holding my hand, too.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, Phil, can we see it again? Could you like really slow it down? Let's get a good look at who may be. And then Phil, you, you help us decide here.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Which one of these two shot the punt gun?

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Okay, Seth's going to grab.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Max grabs. In front of him.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Cute.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  And now.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Holding hands.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  I had the majority. I had like the little anchor point, you know?

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Okay, now we're gonna shoot it. Here we go. I think both.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Ooh, it looks pretty slacky, Seth.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of nice.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  That looked equal.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  It looks like Seth's jacket starts the motion first.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  See that there?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  But then I felt like Max had a more aggressive pull. We'll call it fifty fifty.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Wow, look at the fire. I'm still gonna say I've shot a punt gun, whether Seth pulled it or not.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  I was thinking about this. I think, I don't think there's ever been a punt gun in Montana before this. Would you say? That's a pretty fair point.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  I mean, this is not punt gun country.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, not at all.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Way east, the Chesapeake Bay and Europe. That's a good point, Max. If I had to guess if one came through here, no, I don't think so.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Now, we're gonna talk to Rock Island Auction later in the show. Those are the guys who sold us the gun that are then going to resell it. All that money's going to go back to the Meat Eater Land Access Initiative. But leading up to us buying the punt gun, they had mentioned that sellers will come to them and say, I have a punt gun that I want you guys to sell. But in reality, it's not a punt gun. It's what they would call to be a pigeon gun or a fort gun. Now, ours like hits the nail on the head for the definition of a punt gun. I bet there, there were obviously fort guns here at some point, maybe some pigeon guns, even though I don't think that was in Montana's culture either. But as far as the only punt gun, that's a good point, Max. We're gonna call that the first punt gun.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  I would say so.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, unless there's some like private collectors, you know.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Probably not, though.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so on today's episode, we're going to answer your questions and then we have that interview with Rock Island Auction. So those guys are the expert on old firearms and we're gonna chat with them and that's gonna be a lot of fun. Here's the first question. This is from Nick Sikowski. He says, feels like ages ago when first discussed, exactly when was the first conversation about it? Nick is referring to the punt gun. He's right. This has been a long time coming. For Nick, I tried to get us the cleanest timeline of the punt gun leading up to us buying it. The first time it was discussed, it was in December of 2021 on an episode of Meat Eater Trivia. Trivia was still in its infancy. It was so young, in fact, that the episode that

• 7:00Speaker 03

  this happened on, it was just called Game On Suckers. That episode didn't even have a number after it. For context, the episode that came out this week is CCXXII. That's, what is that, Max, in Roman numerals?

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Don't ask me, ask Seth.

• 7:15Steven Rinella?

  No clue.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  222.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  I was gonna say.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  That's 222 in Roman numerals. So the episode we talked about this on didn't even have a Roman numeral. It was literally the first episode that said Game On Suckers. Now, like, wasn't our, technically, our first episode of Meat Eater Trivia, because there was a period where we would do trivia and it was like a kangaroo episode inside of a regular episode. This was the first time we pulled that away and made its own show. Anyway, just some background for you.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  What was the question? Do you remember?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Phil's going to play it for us. Again, this is that, on that episode in 2021.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  He versus you.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Play the clip, Phil.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Spencer, for this question, Spencer actually showed the room a picture of the punt gun and then asked what it was called. So here's the audio of the rest.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  The correct answer is the punt gun.

• 8:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, I'm glad I got it.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  The average punt gun ranged from a two gauge to a four gauge.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Let's see hands.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  And could fire over a pound of pellets at once.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  They are very rare and hard to come by, though. I was able to find a few in online auctions ranging anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000.

• 8:19Steven Rinella?

  You could buy one?

• 8:20Speaker 03

  You could buy one.

• 8:21Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna buy one?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  No. Unless you, like, pony up 5,000 bucks, yeah.

• 8:25Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know how serious you were, you know?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:28Steven Rinella?

  Because we could shoot it.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  I would love to have that in the wall in this room. That's the genesis of the punt gun. That's the beginning of it. You know, Max knows this, Seth knows this. If you want to get something done at Meat Eater, you just need to get Steve excited.

• 8:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  So as you can hear, Steve was excited about it. And it didn't take long until, like, those sort of maybe, should we, could we, to, Steve is like, yes, let's, let's get a punt gun. So here's the rest of that timeline. Again, that was December 2021. January 2022, I found some punt guns online. They range in price from $4,000 to $8,000. I talked to one seller. He said that him and his buddy shot theirs. They stood back to back. And what they did was they had one guy who stood in front, and he let the barrel rest on his shoulder. And then the other guy stood behind him, and he sort of pressed the butt of the punt gun against his shoulder, just like if you were shooting a regular shotgun. When they pulled

• 9:25Speaker 03

  the trigger, that guy said that his buddy had his collarbone broken.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  Oh, it's like an episode of Jackass.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  It's exactly like that.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  God, that sounds like a terrible idea.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Bad idea. We didn't buy any of those punt guns. Just I think some of them floated closer to the category of pigeon gun, which which we'll learn about later. Just didn't love any of those. We didn't buy them. But again, this is the timeline of how it unfolded. February of 2022, I found a five footer at an antique mall in Wisconsin. I called them. They wanted $5,500 for it. The seller was unsure if it would shoot. Didn't want to change the price. And that was an important thing to us. We wanted to buy a punt gun that we think would work. And so because we couldn't figure out if that one would actually fire, we walked away there. February 2022, someone reaches out to me with a hot tip that Rock Island

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Auction has two of them coming up for sale that summer. Again, Rock Island, they're the biggest auction house when it comes to historic guns. Here's some examples of the guns that they have sold in the past. Han Solo's DL44 Heavy Blaster. That sold for $1 million. They sold two Remington revolvers that were owned by Ulysses S. Grant. Those sold for $5 million. And then they sold a Winchester 1886 with the serial number one. So literally the first ever Winchester 1886 that sold for $1.2 million. Just to give you an idea of like the kind of guns that they traffic. That's who had two of these punt guns for sale.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  March of 2022. Here are some emails with Steve. Here was one where he said, quote, "As my dad always said, you can't lose your ass on punt guns." I don't know if Steve's dad actually said that, but I like, you know, it'd be like, "As Abraham Lincoln said, you can't trust everything you read on the internet." Like, I feel like that's what Steve was doing, but I'm just like, trying to give you more context of how excited Steve was about this. The next day, he says, "I can't wait to mount it to a boat and set out some soda bottles like ducks." Here's an email from a few weeks later. He says, "We gotta buy the damned punt gun. We're poised and ready." And then a week after that, he says, "This will change our lives." And then he put in parentheses, "for the better."

• 11:44Speaker 03

  So Steve is now excited, and I ended up getting approved a budget here at MeatEater of $20,000 to buy a punt gun. And as we talked about on that old podcast from December, Steve was interested when it was like $4,000 to $8,000. So some strong negotiating by me to get us up to $20,000. Okay, May of 2022. This is the day of the auction. Again, $20,000 budget, not a penny more. Rock Island has two punt guns up for auction. First punt gun. This was the one, if I just got to pick, like which one we were gonna have, I would want the second one. That's the one we ended up getting. The first punt gun, it was a smaller model, less prestigious brand.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Rock Island estimated that it would sell for between $12,000 and $18,000. I bid up to our ceiling of $20,000. Two bidders blow right past me. The gun sells for $25,000. So that's 7,000 more than the high-end estimate.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  I wonder what those people are doing with it, you know, like, why do they want it so bad?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  I don't know. I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Rock Island to auction later. Like, who is the buyer? What does this person look like? What are they gonna?

• 12:52Speaker 05

  Because we have a reason, you know?

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a goal.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're probably not gonna shoot theirs, you know?

• 12:58Speaker 05

  Probably not.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that was punt gun number one. $7,000 over its high-end estimate. Second punt gun. This is the one that we want. It's much bigger, it's older, it's from a more prestigious brand that's Holland and Holland. Rock Island estimated that one would sell for between $16,000 and $22,500. So if it follows the pattern as the last punt gun, that means this one's gonna sell for $30,000. It's basically me and one other bidder and I assume that this other person is the odd man out from the last punt gun auction. They went back to back these two, these two auctions. Bidding goes fast. I quickly get to the ceiling of $20,000 and then it just ends. The, the other guy doesn't go anymore, which I was kind of shocked at at the time. I didn't think it was

• 13:43Speaker 03

  going to work out, but it, but it was a big relief because that was the gun that we wanted.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  So this guy went past 20 grand for the first punt gun?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  He, I, I don't know. I don't know that it was him who was competing. I just assumed that he was the odd man out who didn't win the smaller one.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and if, if he would have went to $20,000, uh, and one penny, I'd, I'd have been out and he didn't do it.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  Come on. No, you wouldn't. You would have pitched in of like your own 100 bucks, you know?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  You know what? I, I think I could have, I could have explained it away to Steve later. I'd be like, Steve, it was gonna get away.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  What do you want me to do? You know?

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Exactly. So that, that is the origin. That is how we got the punt gun, uh, back in May of 2022. All right. Next question here. This is from outdoors biggie. He says, what are the punt guns stats? All right. It was made by Holland and Holland in 1885. So that makes it 140 years old, 141 years old, I think. Uh, six years younger than the light bulb, a decade older than the radio, and it's actually older than the state of Montana. Just to give you some context of like the technology that we're working with. This would be the equivalent of someone taking a gun out of Max's safe, uh, that he just bought today and then shooting

• 14:58Speaker 03

  it in the year 2166. You can't, you can't even fathom like, well, what's the world gonna look like in 2166? I have no idea. But that'd be like if someone took Max's brand new gun that he got today and then shooting it there.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, I hopefully like my kids are gonna be doing that. But then I was like, oh no, I gotta add a couple more decades. Like maybe it's my kids' kids' kid, you know?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great, great grandkids.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  They'll be talking about how, you know, great, great, great grandpa, uh, Maxwell shot a punt gun back in the day.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  They're gonna think you're so old.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Hopefully they'll still be able to look up the video.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  That's.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Who knows?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Uh, more stats. It's a two gauge shotgun. Uh, if you listen to trivia, you know this, but. When something is listed as a gauge, if you have a 12 gauge shotgun, that means you take 12 balls that fit in 12 lead balls that fit in the end of the 12 gauge barrel and that equals a pound. So that means that if you had two lead balls that fit in the end of our barrel of our punt gun, that would make one pound. That that is like as big as a punt gun gets. Seven and a half feet long, 60 pounds. It's an awkward 60 pounds though. Like this is always being carried by a couple of people around here. Nine and a quarter inch shell. It's original walnut stock and then it has a gray paint that Rock Island told us is the original gray paint and

• 16:20Speaker 03

  it has about 95% of that left on it. So those are the punt gun stats. All right. Chase Howard says, if you can answer, what's the overall cost per shot? We had six shells. Max and Seth, take a guess as to each, what each one of those shells cost.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  Bismuth was in it, right?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was filled with, it was a little over half a pound of number six bismuth. And the shells were made of brass that I think was nickel plated. So that's, that's the, what we're working with. And again, it was a nine inch shell, half a pound of number six bismuth. What do you think that cost us?

• 16:55Speaker 05

  45 bucks a pop.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  45 bucks.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  I was gonna say 35 a pop.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Way, way more.

• 17:00Speaker 05

  Way.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Take another guess.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  135.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  For, I'll, I'll give you some more context. The punt gun came with one singular spent shell that seemed to be original to the gun. Like that shell that came with the gun was probably fired out of that gun. It was made for that gun, you know, 140 years ago. That's, we had that thing to work off of. We had to pay a machinist, an engineer to do some CAD drawings for us to figure out what the best materials are.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Ship this thing across the country, which they didn't ship. They actually drove it over here personally.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can't.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Because it was like basically an explosive at that point. And we joked about this. I don't think it was ever in the film, but like when you're handling one of those things, you're like, do not drop that.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Okay. So take another guess.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  You said 130?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Well, after all that.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  Imagine if it was TSS in there.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Imagine.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Geez. Uh, 150.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Like, what does a TSS shell cost right now? 20 bucks?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  It's right around that 15, 20 buck range.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  150.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go like 2, 220.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  $1,000.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  What?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  It was $1,032.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  We are so off.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Shell.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Uh, okay, so that's roughly.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  We just wasted that much money on a shot?

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't think, I didn't know it until Chase Howard asked this question. I, I was like, I don't know, probably like, you know, 200 bucks a shell? And I went and booked up our invoice. Uh, it was 400, this is per shell. $470 in materials, uh, $480 in fabrication and assembly, uh, and then a $500 flat fee for doing the CAD work to make it all possible. So divided by six, that's another $80 per shell for a grand total of over $1,000 a shell.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  We're way off.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, but surely they didn't cost that much back then when people were actually u- using punt guns?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I can't fathom that they did know.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  If you adjust for.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Although I bet it was expensive because a lot of, a lot of punt guns back then, um, were loaded through the barrel, right? Like, you, you drop down a scoop full of gunpowder and then like a, probably a cardboard wad, uh, and then a handful of, of pellets. Um, ours is breech loading, so it, it's loaded more like a traditional shotgun. I bet those things were expensive to make back then as well.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  I wonder if you get, if you, you get a flock of ducks on the water, how many rounds of like 12 gauge bismuth would it take to kill the amount of ducks? One shot of the punt gun kills?

• 19:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's good. We'll never know.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. $20,000 punt gun, uh, and then, you know, it only takes 20 shells to equal the price of that. Now with, with our auction, when we auctioned this thing off in August, you are getting one of the spent shells. You, actually, you're getting two. You're getting the OG one, uh, that we based our modern ones off of, and then you're getting one of those modern spent shells. Uh, that way, if you want to shoot this thing, you can go have your $1,000 shells made as well. All right. 86 Spencer says, did you figure out approximately how big the spread would be? Or its lethal distance? Our first shot was to determine exactly that. I think we wound up, it was like an eight foot by eight foot spread at 30 yards.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  If you were going to shoot a 12 gauge at 30 yards max, would like a 30 inch spread? Is that what you'd expect?

• 20:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I know there's a lot of factors and things.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Different chokes and stuff, but yeah, I mean, you're probably, if not, maybe like a 40 inch.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Okay, 30 or 40 inch spread at 30 yards with a 12 gauge. So we were like three or four.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  And that's probably a pretty open joke, probably.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  So like four X that was our spread. As you'll see in the film, we do some different tests to be like, if we were shooting ducks on water, which, which we replicate with balloons, we put balloons from like 20 yards out to 80 yards. We popped the balloons out at 80 yards. Lethal distance, I, I bet you could kill a duck with a BB in the right place at a hundred yards, don't you think?

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Like if one of those found the, the brain of a mallard.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  That's a dead mallard at a hundred yards.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  It would have been interesting to maybe do like a watermelon at a hundred yards, just to see like how. Yeah, the penetration of those pellets or, you know, something that could, you can measure the penetration or ballistics gel or something.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  At a hundred.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think if, if a punk gunner used this, they would like kill some ducks dead, dead at 20 yards. Like those things would be obliterated, probably not even going to make it to market. And then they would have some that, you know, just get one BB in the right place beyond a hundred yards. But I bet they were wounding.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I bet there's so many cripples. Yeah. And I was thinking about this earlier. I was like, yeah. So after like one or two shots of the punt gun is like, what are they going to do with all the cripples? You know, they have to like round those up too, or.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Maybe they had some shotguns in the boat.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  I would have to imagine. That's what I would do.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Finish some birds off.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. I imagine at, at the edge of that spread, it's just like, you're probably wounding maybe as many as you're killing.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  At that point, there's just a lot of ducks that aren't probably flying away from that scenario, but aren't dead either.

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• 25:29Speaker 03

  Silas Hayes says, do you think your punt gun was used? If so, when and where? We're going to talk about this with Rock Island a little later, but the peak punt gun era was roughly from 1880 to 1910. That's in both North America and Europe. Our gun is from 1885. So it comes around like right at the beginning of when punt gunning was really hot. Now, our gun shows some signs of use. Like there's a little chipping in the paint. It's missing a screw. It has signs of where it places where it would be attached to something.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  A lot of punt guns at that time like wound up just in the bottom of lakes, in the bottom of rivers, in the bottom of estuaries. Ours survived 140 years. So I don't think it was used a ton, but I bet it shot into some flocks of birds. And someone along the way thought that the engraving was potentially a custom job on our punt gun.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Like on the handle?

• 26:30Speaker 03

  It's got, yeah, so it's got a walnut stock that's like, I don't know, 12 inches long or so. That's got some engraving and then there's some engraving around where the barrel meets the, the stock as well. And someone pointed that out and they're like, that, that looks like it would be custom. Um, you know, that was a special order to Holland and Holland. The other thing I learned is when you look at the punt gun history, uh, you'll find there were obviously like, these were used by blue collar hunters that were making a living off of selling ducks and geese. You'll find instances though, where they're sort of like punt gun tourists who are, you know, a well-off newspaper owner in London, in London, uh, like a well-off banker, um, in England,

• 27:13Speaker 03

  who just wants to experience the thrill of doing a punt gun hunt. Without any evidence at all, I think that's who bought this punt gun. Gotcha. I think it's one of those folks who like, they weren't doing this for a living, but they enjoyed, um, you know, hunting and, and the outdoors and they wanted to go try this sporting thing. So they like, you know, commissioned Holland and Holland to make them a beautiful punt gun with some custom engravings. And then I bet they went and used it a few things, but I don't think this was used by like a market hunter who was living in a shack. And this was like his bread and butter for making.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  I wonder, you said Rock Island said that that paint on there was original?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  They said it was original, which I, I think when most people look at that, they're like, no, that came around later. Rock Island said it was original and they estimated 95% of it was left.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  I wonder, see, when I looked at it, it, I just, it looks like someone put it on there.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  It does.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  And I wonder if that is the case, that this punt gun was used like maybe Chesapeake Bay, salt water?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  If they put that paint on there to seal it from getting rusty.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  You're right. Yeah. It's, it's almost, um, yeah, it's kind of shocking to hear that that's original paint because you're like, no, somebody came around in like 1960 and thought they were like sprucing it up. And it's like, I don't have any way to, to confirm this, but it looks like a thick amount of paint too. Like multiple coats of gray paint went on that barrel.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  So to answer the question from Silas about was it used, I think it was used,

• 28:42Speaker 03

  but not used a ton. Our next question was from Mike Stephan. How did you know it wasn't going to explode? And were you worried about it exploding? Seth and Max were there every time we shot it. That first time, were you guys worried?

• 28:56Speaker 04

  I was behind, I was behind the vehicle.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  I was not. I was filming Steven Spencer, their reaction. So I was, my back was to the gun and everything is just like, fingers crossed this doesn't explode.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  I was worried, I wasn't worried like the, the barrel was gonna explode or anything. I was worried about the integrity of the breach.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Like stuff blowing out the back.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit of this shows up in the cut. But the first time we went to shoot the gun, it was like a pretty cold day. And I guess we hadn't fully confirmed that the shells fit inside of the barrel at that point. So we get there and we realize that it's just like very, very close, but it's not making it into the barrel. So Steve starts, you know, taking gunk out of the barrel, which is why we also thought it was used. Because it had some buildup as though it had been shot in the past.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  And I'm sandpapering the shell and we're just like trying to get rid of some millimeters to make this thing work. And eventually work, but that's what you were concerned about Seth.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  We're just like doing a lot of manipulating in the field, trying to make it come together.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, after that first shot, we like slowly trusted the gun more and more, you know? We like our rope shrunk a little bit, you know, we got right up to it.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  By shell number six, when Seth and Max shoot it, they're like touching the gun.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  Honestly.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  You had full trust.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wasn't so much concerned about an explosion, but I, I guess what I was mildly concerned about was the recoil of it. You have to let a gun like produce recoil. You have to let it buck a little bit. If you don't, if you just clamp everything down as tight as possible, you're just like stressing out the mechanics of the gun. That's not good for it. And so we're like, I feel like walking a tight rope, trying to let the gun recoil. But not recoil too much where like becomes a danger to us. And so that felt like a balancing act. What we ended up doing was we, I found out later, it's called a trunnion.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Trunion is what that connecting point was called. We had a fabricator, Travis fabrication here in Bozeman who made us-

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Travis Barton.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Travis Barton fabrication.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Barton, yep.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  He built us a mount that we could attach to a trailer and then we had some sandbags on that trailer. And my concern with the recoil wasn't warranted. It all worked out well. The gun was able to rise when it shot. We had to go back and sight it in each time. So worried about it exploding a little bit. And as you see in the film, like the first time that we shoot it, Steve attaches a rope to it. That was his dad's tree stand rope. Like his dad would be in a tree stand, he needs to bring his bow up. That was the rope we used. And as you guys pointed out-

• 31:46Speaker 05

  And then I think we tied another rope onto that.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  To get us further back.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Uh huh. It didn't feel like the original rope was going to be the difference between us like losing an arm or not.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Um, okay. Next question was from Billy the Kid Rock. It's a great name. He says, "Do you think the punt gun would be good for hunting anything besides ducks?"

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  What?

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Uh, snow geese.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Snow geese, yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  So, I mean, just another form of waterfall, but I don't know anything else.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Um, what's those like starlings or sparrows that are invasive?

• 32:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  They're always all bunched up. I bet you could-

• 32:26Speaker 05

  Oh, and they do those big waves.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could do a hurt on those things.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. You do a hurting on the flock of winter turkeys.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say. A flock of turkeys.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  I thought that was the absolute perfect thing. Like, short of an elephant, you could kill anything with a punt gun. But the ideal scenario is using it what they use it for. Which is like, you know, sneaking into a flock of ducks on the water and doing one shot that brings down a hundred of them at a time. Some historians think that that is where the phrase "get your ducks in a row" comes from. It's from punt gunners waiting until they felt like they were at the perfect spot in the flock to pull the trigger. But I was thinking about what else it would be good for? Turkeys in like the fall or the winter. I can recall- Call it a deer hunt I was in in the Black Hills in late November. Uh, where all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of a flock of turkeys that must have been like one hundred or two hundred turkeys.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Um, and they, they were just all around me and they were moving past me and they were like mildly aware of my presence, but obviously they felt some comfort. In their numbers. If you had a punt gun in that situation, you'd have been eating turkeys for years.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Lots of Thanksgiving meals.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  I one time in back in Pennsylvania that we had a hard winter. And it was like a, a deep crusty snow. And there was this one farmer that was spreading manure on the fields, like on top of the snow. And there was a winter flock there that I like quit counting at like nine hundred birds.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Like birds came from all over just to, to be there.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  That, that would be the perfect scenario.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  To, to use a punt gun, or if you were like baiting feral hogs, for example, I think anything that you were baiting. And like creating a congregation of critters in one spot. That, that would be the ideal use.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, imagine you could size up shot in those things and, and put like buckshot in there, right?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. You could probably do like a turkey load equivalent, you know, where it's like different varying sizes of pellets. All at once. Now like the, the punt gun thing though, it, it fall, they become illegal in North America in nineteen eighteen. That's when the migratory bird act comes around. The reality is they start to fall out of fashion before that. You have pumps, pump shotguns show up in the eighteen eighties, uh, semi-auto shotguns in the early nineteen hundreds. And the market hunters who are using these, uh, they, they kind of learn that actually we can be more efficient. We have to plan less logistically. It's cheaper. It's easier to use. If we just go out with a shotgun, we can hold against our shoulder.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Um, like we can be better market hunters in that case. So when, when you're talking about like the punt gun being outlawed. Folks were starting to go away from it, like before it actually becomes illegal. And now, you know, this has been the case since 1918. A 10 gauge is the biggest shotgun that you can use. If, if market hunting was still allowed today, though, I don't think you'd see guys out there with a punt gun.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just not efficient.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  No. As you can see, uh, when, you know, when they cost a thousand dollars per shell.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, that too.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  It doesn't work. Um, okay. Crank Jobs says, what was the most unexpected thing you learned from the experience? You guys have any thoughts on this?

• 35:39Speaker 05

  Unexpected.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  When, when we were shooting it?

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Um, honestly, the, the damage it did to the watermelons.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Was a little unexpected.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  You thought more or less?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  I thought, I thought it would be less for some reason. I just thought the pattern wouldn't be that. I don't remember how far we were away from those.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  I think it was like 30 yards, 35 yards.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  I just thought the pattern would be more spread. It would just be like a bunch of holes.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Um, that and one, another thing I did not expect was how like, I, I expected it to be way louder.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  It was kind of like a soft boom.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Hmm, yeah. With, with that said, though, there were still, I think we experienced this in, I don't know which shot, but pellets came back at us.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  I think it was the clay pigeon.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  That was.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Oh, the clay pigeon, yeah. And someone, someone noted that like, yeah, I got hit in the shoulder with one of the, oh, I heard it bounce off the vehicles.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Um, so there was, there was a certain amount of that. Uh, anything surprise you, Max, when we shot it?

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Um, I would say just the pattern and how good it was.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  You know, like, I was very impressed at 35 yards, like when we did those paper, uh, light up targets. Um, I was very impressed. I was like, wow, that's, could do some damage, you know, like, I could see why people use that.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  You know?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, uh, Seth brought up the watermelon. That's the final thing in the film that we shoot. And, uh, that kind of goes back to the genesis of the punt gun. Immediately, four or five years ago when we started talking about this, Steve was like, we gotta shoot watermelons. We gotta do the Gallagher bit. We gotta, we gotta go blow up a bunch of watermelons. And then that also allowed Steve to explain to people who Gallagher is, which I think he enjoyed equally as much as actually pulling the trigger. To shoot the water. He's like, you don't know Gallagher? Well, Gallagher, you know.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Based on how much Steve talks about Gallagher, I think that's the only comedian. I don't think anyone knew what he was talking about.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  I, I will admit, I did not know what he was talking about and then like figured it out.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I would only like, my exposure to Gallagher was from secondhand references, like if.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Family Guy.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Family Guy would do a bit about Gallagher. I'd be like, well, I don't know who, you know, Gallagher is.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  He famously walked out of a Marc Maron podcast. It was, uh, and got really mad.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's a fun listen. He lasts like 20 minutes and then storms out.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  What would possibly make him so, cause what was in his comedy?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  I don't remember what the inciting thing was, but it was just sort of like, what's the deal with all the water? Like he was just kind of, he was kind of poking him. He was poking the bear. Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Uh, so I, I don't think, we wouldn't be doing this podcast today. We wouldn't have bought the punt gun if Gallagher didn't exist. Uh, just because Steve was like so excited, infatuated with the idea of.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  I think you gotta tell people who Gallagher, Gallagher is and what he does.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Steve has said this a million times, but he would smash watermelons on stage and you would like, you know, wear a raincoat if you were in the front row, uh, because you were gonna get, you know, uh, covered in watermelon. Am I getting that right, Phil?

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think it was more than watermelon, but the watermelon was the thing that, that caught on and that's what, that's what people remember, but it was, it was all kinds of fruit, Spencer, not just watermelon.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Well, we, we shoot watermelons, uh, in the film. Uh, most unexpected thing for me was, uh, like during this research, I was, I was learning, you know, about the market hunting era. And when it comes to ducks, there was only a little bit of value with the feathers. The meat was the main product. If, if these ducks, um, didn't have the meat that they had, like this market would not have existed because the feathers weren't valuable enough on their own. But the duck meat is what paid the bills. And then there was like a very clear hierarchy in the prices. Um, what, what would you say is like the best tasting duck, Max, in North America?

• 39:12Speaker 05

  Um, well, I think you ask someone, it's gonna be something and then you ask another person, it'll be something different.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  I'm asking Max.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  I'm just explaining myself. But yeah, I think, uh, wood ducks and, uh, mallards are my favorite.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Okay. Would you say the same thing?

• 39:28Speaker 04

  A fact, yeah. Patty Mallard.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Okay, well, the the prices like kind of show you what the American palette was at that point. A plover, that that's a shore bird that you'd see it's, you know, like a little marshmallow with toothpick legs out on a gravel bar in the Missouri River. Those cost twenty five cents per plover is what you would get.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  I could see that.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  That is nine dollars per plover in twenty twenty six.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Appetizer.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  An appetizer, sure, yeah, not not a highly respected bird, which is the other thing you learn is that these guys weren't just killing ducks and geese, they were killing herons, seagulls, shorebirds, all kinds of different stuff. So a plover was worth a quarter, nine dollars today. A snipe was only a little more valuable at thirty cents, a snipe. Teal wood ducks and widgeons, that's that's what Max said would be his top pick, would be a wood duck. That was seventy five cents per pair, so less than forty cents per wood duck, which is only slightly more valuable than a snipe.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't I don't agree with that. The price should have been a little higher.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so black ducks, those were a dollar, mallards were a dollar twenty five. And then the ones that everybody cared about was canvasbacks and redheads. Those were a dollar seventy five a piece, which is the equivalent of sixty two dollars today.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Sixty two dollars.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  I feel like I I used to do some hunting on the Chesapeake Bay back when I lived in Pennsylvania and like the duck to kill was a canvasback.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, the king of ducks.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's like people are still after them.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so these ducks, if if you were a market hunter in Chesapeake Bay and say you went, you know, punt gunning for a night and you killed one hundred fifty ducks, those ducks would then either be salted or iced and then put on a train and then they would wind up in in some of your premier cities in the Midwest and East Coast, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, New York. And then these would go to like the finest dining restaurants and what they cared about were canvasbacks and redheads. I also read, and and those prices, I should explain, those came from a good housekeeping magazine in eighteen eighty six. That's one year after our punt gun was made. And they said that's what you would sell them for in New York.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  But the other thing I learned is that ducks fetched a higher price if they came from a place with lots of wild celery. Apparently, they they thought that like a duck eating wild celery ate better. Is that your experience, Max?

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Um, I've never experienced a duck eating wild celery, but I remember hearing about that.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  The the.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Um, just like that east coast region, like that's what those diver ducks would do.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  The three premier regions that I saw, like if you kill the duck in this zone, that's going to fetch the highest price. That's what the restaurants want. Uh, it was the upper Chesapeake, uh, Wisconsin's Lake Canash Canong, and then Texas's Lake Surprise.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  Really?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Apparently, those were like the wild.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  All sorts of different regions, though.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. What? Uh, I've I feel like when I hear people talk about wood duck being the best tasting duck, which is that that's not an uncommon opinion that Max has. Uh, people would say it's because they eat a lot of acorns. Is that like wh- what you would think it is?

• 42:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I've had ducks that eats pond scum, tastes like crap, but then also ducks that eat corn tastes really good, you know? So I feel like some of that has to play a factor in it. Um, but I think the wo- wood ducks, there's just a good ratio of meat to fat.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  Um, just because they're a smaller duck.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  Um, I think the biggest ratio of meat to fat is obviously, um, a teal. Like, uh, big fat green winged teal is just like, just a small, small amount of meat and just like lots of fat and a lot of people like that.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Is it different for like a blue winged or cinnamon?

• 43:22Speaker 05

  Well, I said, uh, the green winged teal, just because they're the most hearty.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 43:27Speaker 05

  And a lot of times, like during the migration, you'll see the cinnamon teal, the blue winged teal go first, all the way down to

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Southern Texas, um, even down to parts of Central America.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  Um, and then the green winged teal, they'll be up here hanging with the mallards in December. Some of them, not all of them. So.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  So they just.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  Just get more fat.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  Because they're sticking around later.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Well, the wild celery is what was driving the market back then. Uh, Max, if, if you were a punt gunner, uh, uh, I'll explain how they were used a little bit. A lot of times it was used like either just after dark or just before sunrise, uh, so that the punt gunner could like paddle into the area, uh, and be real stealthy without being seen. Um, they had to allow for four yards of water behind them because that's how much recoil these produced. If you were a punt gunner, no rules, Max. You can be in a national park in August if you want. Wh- where are you taking that thing?

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Uh, probably somewhere in the central flyway during the springtime.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 44:29Speaker 05

  Hunt snow geese.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 44:31Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, I, I don't know if I could do it on ducks because I like them so much, but snow geese are already a nuisance, you know, and so I feel like I would just go.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Carpet the sky.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, I would go after snow geese just because like they're known to roost in large numbers and I feel like it would be a good time, but I would have three punt guns.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 44:54Speaker 05

  One on the water.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  One slightly above and one slightly aimed above that.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Like a 20 degree angle and then like a 45.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  So you, you smoke them on the water. They all get up, get another one and then a, a third shot off.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  What, what if you were trying to play the market though and have a bunch of canvas backs or red.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, then I would definitely go to the Chesapeake and.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  You would.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  Find some canvas backs.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah. Seth, any thoughts on if you were a punt gunner?

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Where I'd go?

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Where you'd take that thing?

• 45:21Speaker 05

  I'd go to that little hole that I hunted with you, Max.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Okay, the secret hole. Can you even say what state you were in?

• 45:28Speaker 05

  No.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  No, okay. I like that, Max.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  No. You could probably swat the whole pond. Yeah. It was a, it was just a small warm water.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  Creek that, uh, well, it was a pond, but there was a warm water creek flowing into it and.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Uh, I don't think you could fit another mallard into it. Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Okay. Could you get a punt gun there if you had to?

• 45:48Speaker 05

  You couldn't have them on a boat. You could have them out. Yeah, it would be like a, uh, uh, canyon or just like roll it up on wheels.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, like a fort gun.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that'd be fun.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, so the things we shoot in the video, we don't get to shoot any, any live animals, uh, in the video, but we shoot, uh, some paper targets to show you it's spread. Um, we shoot the clay pigeons. There's, there's sort of a, a clay pigeon disaster that, that you'll watch on the video. Um, what else? Oh, we shoot the watermelons. Um, and then we also shoot some hats. Uh, these are hats that say this hat was shot by a punt gun. Um, and, and now we are going to sell those in the auction house of oddities. Uh, the auction house of oddities is going to be happening sometime in early July here. Uh, they're not going to be auctioned off the hats. They're just going to have a buy it now price. There are only 73 of them. Um, and when they're gone, they're gone. And when you do buy one, you just get a random hat.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Some of these were absolutely destroyed that they have, you know, 25 pellet holes in them. If you, if you shake them a little, you'll hear the BBs that are still in like the, the, the bill of the cap.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  You can see some of the BBs too.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  Sticking out of them.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the hats, they have a leather patch on them. That's where it says this hat was shot by a punk gun. Some of those leather patches just like absorbed the BB. It looked like, you know, somebody was the hand of God and just put it there and pressed it in with their thumb. Um, so anyway, we have these hats for sale. There's other ones that only got one or two straight pellets in them. If you want to go buy one of these, uh, when they're gone, they're gone. There's 73 of them in the auction house of oddities. You're just getting a random hat. Uh, probably going to sell them for $75 apiece. I, I know that sounds steep, but every penny is going into the land access, access initiative. Uh, so you're funding a good cause. We are also selling the punt gun shells in the auction house as well. Uh, we're going to have three of them that are for sale.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Again, this will be, uh, in, in early July when that's happening. Guys, have any other thoughts before we do our interview with Joel from Rock Island?

• 47:50Speaker 05

  I was just glad to be a part of it.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, that might be the, I'm assuming it'll be the last fun gun I ever shoot.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, same. It's first and last.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  First and last. And you guys got a video of you doing it together.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  I know. Teamwork.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  All right, the video is available right now on our YouTube channel. Now let's do our interview with Joel Kolander.

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• 51:34Speaker 03

  All right, joining us on the line is Joel Collender, the Interactive Production Manager from Rock Island Auction. Rock Island is who will be selling our punt gun later this summer with proceeds going to the MeatEater Land Access Initiative. Joel, welcome to the show.

• 51:50Speaker 06

  It's good to be back, good to talk to you again.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Now, our punt gun will be for sale at the August Premier Firearms Auction. Tell us about that event.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Sure, that's our big, uh, summer premiere auction. We have three premiere auctions here. This one's August 21st, 23rd. Uh, it's gonna be about 1,700 items. It's a three-day sale. It's an absolute, absolute event, uh, at our in-person venue there in, uh, Bedford, Texas. So if you're in the area, heck, even if you're not in the area, come on down. It is, they're always open to the public. Uh, if you can't make it down, like, and if someone wants to bid on the punt gun or see better photos of it, of course, you can always go to the website for, for photos, for more information, of course, to, to place bids on those items.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Okay, so a few months away from selling the thing. Uh, give us a guess as to what the punt gun will sell for.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  So the good news is you have kind of an idea already, right? Within the last couple of years, there's, that's a pretty good comparison because the actual gun sold, uh, in, in 2022. That said, our estimate now is a little bit higher. We got, um, I believe a pre-auction estimate, now these could change. We're still, we're working on that sale right now. Uh, it's estimated between 20 and 30,000.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 52:59Speaker 06

  I think there's, there's a couple of things that go into that. One, hi to you guys, and you know, you guys are a pretty popular thing now. Uh, two, it's, uh, it's actually got evidence that it's a, that it's a functional punt gun, um, which, there aren't too many of those. I mean, there are too many punt guns in general. They're a rare item. So to have one that's documented and functional, has, has a piece of brass with it. That's, uh, always a plus. And it's in actually surprisingly good condition for a punt gun. As you know, uh, those things were often in aquatic environments and are often saltwater environments. So to have one like this with that paint, and it's a Holland and Holland, I think that's, uh, that's all gonna help the value for that.

• 53:38Speaker 06

  Oh, and it's appearing alongside a lot of really just top-of-the-line sporting arms, both, uh, for wing shooting and for a big game. So as far as sporting arms go this August, that punt gun's gonna be a headliner and it's, it's in very good company.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Okay, very excited. I'll be tuning in for that auction. Uh, paint us a picture for the type of buyer that is looking to spend 20,000 or 30,000 on a punt gun that they may never shoot. Who is that person?

• 54:05Speaker 06

  We actually see quite a bit of this. Of course, collectors is the easy answer, right? We're an auction house for fine historic firearms. So collectors is easy. What kind of collectors? Well, of course, you have sporting arms collectors. You see that with premier brands today. Holland and Holland, Purdy, Rigby, some of those more famous names, Kriegdorf, and what have you. So sporting arms specifically, though, you may find ones for British sporting arms. You might find one specifically for British best quality firearms, or even London gun makers. You may also find someone who just loves wing shooting, whether that's, you know, American. There's a bunch of publications, of course, here stateside that focus on just wing shooting and hunting.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  You might find that as well. And then there's just people who like big display pieces or things that go boom. You know, a functional piece is going to appeal to a lot of people as well. So there's a pretty good gamut of cross-sections of collectors there.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Okay, we hope it's competitive that day. Give us some history of Rock Island Auction and punt guns. How often do you have one come up for sale?

• 55:09Speaker 06

  So the short answer is not very often. And, you know, way back when I first started, I think we said we sold, you know, somewhere right around 40,000 guns a year at auction. Well, I've been here 13 years, so that number is, if it hasn't doubled, I'd be very surprised. That's the number one in the world for what we do. But throughout, I checked our records prior to this, and just to see how many punt guns, it's barely, barely over two dozen.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, if you're selling tens of thousands of guns a year, and that few are punt guns. So not a lot of them remain. One, because again, we mentioned already those kind of initial rough conditions. These are guns that are, they're working guns in saltwater conditions. And then two, of course, it speaks to the to the legislation. You can't use these punt guns, you know, what are they for? A lot of people lose the sort of luster of ownership. So at least when they weren't in practical use anymore. So not, not many punt guns floating around anymore, even that come through our doors.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think when we bought ours, there were two punt guns up for sale that week. And previously, we bought it in 2022. Prior to that, I think someone there had told me that 2016 was the last time you guys had sold one. So less than one punt gun a year, it seems like.

• 56:25Speaker 06

  Fair. I mean, you know, you get ones like that where you have two in a sale.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 56:29Speaker 06

  Most likely a, a single collector who's had more than one. Um, so yeah, but, but less than one pun good here as a, since we've opened and we've been open since, uh, nineteen ninety-three. Uh, that's a, that's a safe estimate.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Now, how does the size of our punt gun compare to the other ones that you guys have sold?

• 56:47Speaker 06

  There's so many jokes to be made here, but I will say, um,

• 56:54Speaker 06

  there's a, it's bigger than average. I mean, we have the, there's a lot of the seven, eight, there's a lot of the seven foot range. There's a lot in the eight foot range. Not of course, you know, you, any source you read, they always want to cite the biggest, right? You know, these are twelve foot guns. These are ten foot guns and they're, the fours are an inch wide and they killed, you know, this many hundred things at once. You know, those are, those are the exceptions. That's one end of the scale, but punt guns, I mean, just as a genre are so varied because they were in use for so long. Uh, I'm sorry, for, through so many sort of periods of development.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:27Speaker 06

  By so many different groups of people, through so many different firearm technologies, um, so it runs the gamut. I mean, you get people who were, uh, using them more commercially. So very, very large, you know, the many, the most birds you could take down, the more money you were bringing in.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 06

  Uh, during those commercial hunting days. Then you had people who were just trying to, in their earlier days, just trying to make an extra buck and, and maybe put some meat on the table for their family too. So they're a little bit smaller at that point. Um, yours, I, I didn't have the full measurement. I have a barrel measurement, eighty-five and a half inches, which puts it about seven foot. You know, once you add that sort of tiller or, or stock that's on the back, it's at an extra twelve, eighteen inches. So, uh, it's right in there with a lot of good seven and eight footers. The biggest one that we had was, um, like just over, just over nine foot. Um, nine foot, seven and a half inches. So there's some doozies come through the door, for sure.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, at some point before we bought the gun, someone from your team told me that you will often have sellers that come to you guys with what they call a punt gun. But in reality, they have a pigeon gun or a fort gun. So what is the difference between those three things? A pigeon gun, a fort gun and a punt gun?

• 58:39Speaker 06

  We're getting into the, the collecting nitty gritty here and that's what we're here for. I love it. Um, pigeon guns. They're gonna, there's gonna be some intersection too, because eventually when people were punting, anything that you could use that would get you close to ducks on a punt and take down more than one duck at once, could have seen use as a punt gun, right? If you were just trying to put, again, meat on the table or make a couple of extra bucks, you weren't real picky about, about what it was in form. It was, did it function? Uh, but pigeon guns early on are for the early, uh, pigeon shoots, like literal trap shooting. You have five trap houses. They release pigeons. They could go any which direction and you had to knock them down, uh, within a circle, uh, a giant sort of area to, to get the kill to get credit for it.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  Um, if you wanted to knock those pigeons down fast, you wanted a big gun. Uh, so eight boars aren't uncommon, very long barrels aren't uncommon, uh, and very, very high end as well. Uh, there was a lot of money on these pigeon shoots back in the day. So here you have the size, you have really well put together, um, pigeon guns, they could often be confused for a large punt gun. You also both, you know, smoothbore shotguns.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:50Speaker 06

  Um, but you have a wall gun or what was a?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  A fort gun that I, I had heard, I heard some of them referred to as fort guns. What would that be?

• 59:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, a fort, a fort gun, a wall gun, a rampart gun. Sort of lots of different names all for the same thing. And it's exactly what it sounds like. These are guns that are mounted on walls. A lot of times they will be large, uh, very seldom I've seen like an actual rifled example, um, but oftentimes through some sort of fork with a, um, oh, that's like a pintle or something on the bottom, because you're actually gonna set that on top of a wall to defend your fort, castle, you know, what have you. Um, and it, they're really sort of an intermediate range weapon. You know, you had your small arms for close stuff. You had artillery and mortars for far away targets.

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  But right in the middle, well, you could use a really big wall gun to make an impact on some enemy troops that might be, you know, sieging your position or your, or your building. Um.

• 1:00:48Speaker 06

  The last ones are true punt guns. As you discussed on the podcast, these are large guns to be put in a boat, mounted in a boat or a punt, uh, very shallow because essentially you are sneaking up on ducks on their own turf, trying to be as undetected as possible, getting within a certain range for you to really lob that shot across the water and take out as many ducks as possible. Um, those are again, large caliber, uh, no surprise there, shotguns. You're trying to take out as many as possible, but the, the range of a troop gun is everything from pre flintlock to the cartridge guns like the screw breach, uh, Holland and Holland that, that you all bought.

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  And so everything in between, it's, it's such a fantastic genre of collecting. Once you start diving into it.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Have you guys ever sold a punt gun that is confirmed to work like ours is?

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  The cat answers no. Um, there've been a lot of quote, quote guns, which are again, these sort of large bore, um, like four bore. We have a lot of four bore duck guns. Shouldn't say a lot, but there's, uh, when they do come through very high end, you're dealing with a very high end, uh, custom make from like John Dixon and son, or again, Holland and Holland. People are using these as shoulder mounted four bore shotguns. And again, they're, they're for duck. Would they, are they the type to be like mounted or secured in a boat? I don't know, but they're definitely being used for essentially the same purpose and, and they would be flock shooting ducks. So there are those that are capable in fine enough condition where I wouldn't worry a bit about them being fired.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  But as far as a troop punt gun, like yours with, you know, pintle mounts on it and everything and the recoil device on the bottom, all this fun stuff. No, I have never seen one even thought about being fired.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Great. Very excited. Now, was any part of you nervous about us shooting the one that we purchased?

• 1:02:44Speaker 06

  Now, the funny answer is no, because it's not me. Uh, but the second answer is no, not at all. I mean, if there's a group of guys that I, that I trust to do the research with the outdoors and sporting, it's, it's the folks at Meat Eater. Now, if you were, you know, two guys in a rowboat taking it out, I might, I might be a little more concerned. Uh, you'll still have a quality maker like Holland and Holland. It's, those are sort of like legacy arms that just, they last, they're heirlooms. So, uh, you started out with good materials in good condition, you're smart about it, everything, everything lined up perfect.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's also why it took us four years, uh, to get to the point where we could make the film about us shooting the punt gun.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  I mean, I wasn't gonna bring it up, but I'm, I'm sure it might come up once or twice in the comments.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. Uh, now, how is selling a punt gun different from your typical firearms? I, I imagine there's got to be some real logistical challenges that you guys go through selling, you know, an eight foot gun.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the, the selling part's easy, right? Get an auctioneer and bang the hammer at the front of a room.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  But everything around it is required, you know, to accommodate that, that massive size. So whether it's trying to take photography of it, you know, to put it in our catalog or to put it on the website, uh, transporting it even around the building, around our facility, getting it set up in our preview hall down in Bedford, Texas. And then, of course, eventually, shipping it to a new owner, um, they all have, they all have their, uh, their issues to come up with, which by the way, if you're an in-person bidder, boy, we would encourage that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, our punt gun, when we bought it, it showed up in a literal crate, I think multiple crates, actually. Um, so if, if you are the person who buys this thing, uh, and it's gonna be shipped to you, uh, expect a giant piece, uh, of wood coming in the mail, and that's where your punt gun will be inside of. Now, our punt gun, as most were, uh, was made in England, simply because that's where this style of hunting was the most popular. So with that being the case, what is the most, what is the most English thing about our gun? Is there something you look at that makes you go, oh, that gun, it was made in London?

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  We talked about earlier, but but the Holland and Holland.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  Just a quintessential best quality gun, a London gunmaker that's been around since eighteen thirty five. So they're pushing one hundred ninety years this year, last year, one hundred ninety years last year. And they just heirloom quality, like I said, legacy type guns, the type you pass on. And of course, we see him come out of some pretty impressive collections. Those are guns that will regularly draw six figures, high artistry and embellishment. But they're also guns that you should not be afraid to take out and use. Maybe true to form with a punt gun, absolutely fantastic. And Holland, so Holland and Holland is just quintessential British gun.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Somebody we showed the gun to told us that they suspected the engraving around the barrel most likely made it a special order or a custom made gun. What do you think of that theory?

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

  Um, yes.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Especially given when your gun was made, which I believe was the late eighteen hundreds, correct?

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Eighteen eighty five is what we could come up with.

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  Perfect. Um, because initially, you know, we have the early eighteen hundreds where punt gunning is kind of coming into its own, right? You have a lot of sailors, you have deck guns. How do we use these? What are we doing when we're out of the service? You know, there's a lot of mutual origins there from that British sort of age of naval warfare. And but initially, these are people who are, like I said, not doing this commercially. And so it's whatever you can get. And a lot of times they're very rough. Sometimes you might put it together at home if you can't get those materials. But um, very, very sort of singular purpose. As it goes on, it becomes essentially a sport of the century. You know, the the well healed and well to do are taking this very

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  difficult, rough hunt. I mean, this is cold hunting, this is or cold shooting, muddy, wet, saltwater. Like you might be out all day, laying on your belly and like rowing a punt. That's very physically demanding. There's a lot going on there. So to turn it into a sport at the end of the nineteen centuries is kind of what happens. And then you see more of these. Let's say accomplished gun makers getting into that like like Holland and Holland. Um, John Dixon's another one that made some four board duck guns. Um, and it becomes, you see the engraving, you see a finer quality in these guns. Yours is the only one, I will say, that's in a, in, in that punt gun form that looks like essentially

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  duck artillery, uh, for lack of a better term, that, that does have the engraving on it. That scroll work, that scroll on a canvas.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  Uh, work on there and even a little engraving up in front of the trigger underneath, uh, with little scene of the, of the goose.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 06

  I've no doubt that just based on its time alone, you're looking at a, they're a premier manufacturer already by the 1880s. Holland and Holland, they're getting national acclaim and, and royal endorsements. Um, and with the engraving on there, absolutely, uh, an order for someone well to do. Who, uh, wanted to go out and try punt gunning, it wasn't essential, it wasn't to make money, but they wanted to try it out.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, some real artistry on that gun. Right now, besides our punt gun, what other guns from that auction are you excited about?

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

  So the good news is there are some, the bad news is we have a giant auction coming this weekend.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  And at the American sales, 250 years celebrating American history. So I can't talk too much about August just yet.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:24Speaker 06

  But I will say three things about August. One, as I mentioned earlier, you're in a, a host of sporting arms that should, the rising tide floats all boats. Sorry for the punt gun, uh, pun, but that should help all the sporting arms in that sale. And that's what we do, we build auctions. Uh, there is a second, I will say the August premiere has one item, uh, flagship of the sale. Does have an estimate in the seven figures.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  And I will say about the August premiere, that there is a gun so famous.

• 1:08:59Speaker 06

  In that sale, I, I would wager that everyone in your room right now has seen a photograph of it.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Okay, great. That's, that's a wonderful tease. And after this interview, Joel is going to tell me what that gun is so that I, I know and I don't have to wonder anymore. Uh, now tell folks how they can learn more about the August auction where our punt gun will be sold.

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  Sure. Actually, since that auction will be over, um, upcoming auction will be over Saturday. Go to the website on Monday. We will have essentially a 16-page highlight portfolio that you can flip through digitally on our website. Uh, you'll see the big dogs front and center on the front catalog, on the back catalog. If you go to rockislandauction.com, they will have that, uh, highlight portfolio of the catalog. For anyone who wants to see the punt gun and to place some bids on it, that should be available around mid-July. We'll of course, make you all aware of that. And, uh, you can spread the good words. We can try to raise some funds here.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Okay, very excited. And Rock Island is graciously waiving all of our fees that normally come with selling a gun through them. Uh, that means they are helping put as much money into the land access initiative as possible. So we really appreciate that. Uh, Joel, thank you for helping us fund more conservation projects and thanks for joining us today.

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  It's been a blast. We're, uh, we're happy to come back anytime.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Okay, talk to you again soon. Thank you. Bye.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  All right, that's it for this episode. Uh, the punt gun film is on our YouTube channel right now. Please go watch it. It's a lot of fun. Old guns are cool. Big guns are cool. This is as old and as big as it gets. Uh, so if, if you like history, if you like conservation, if you like firearms, uh, you'll like this video. So please go check it out. It's available right now. Uh, don't forget to go buy your punt gun hat at the Auction House of Oddities. Uh, that will go live sometime in July. You can also bid on the punt gun shells there. We have three of them that we're going to be selling. Uh, and if you want to buy the punt gun yourself, you can go, uh, do that at the Rock Island Auction in August.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Can participate virtually, they'll set you up really well. I bought the gun from Bozeman, Montana while the auction was happening. I believe they were in Illinois at that point. Now they're located in Texas. So you don't even have to be there in person to participate. Again, that's rockislandauction.com. That is happening at the end of August. All right, that's it for this episode. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Bye now.

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