Earlier this summer, I put an 1878 Sharps Borchardt military rifle up for sale on the forum. I’d never fired it myself and assumed it would disappear as fast as the last Sharps I listed and after all, it is a Borchardt. Surprisingly, it just sat there.
That got me thinking… why?
I started digging. You can find plenty of info on the militias that carried these rifles, but details about how they actually shoot today are surprisingly scarce. Even stranger, I couldn’t find a single video of anyone firing an original military Borchardt. Not one!
Well, that settled it. Since it wasn’t promised to anyone, I decided this old warhorse deserved to speak again. I grabbed some .45-70 brass, mixed up a few classic trapdoor-level loads, and seated a handful of 500-grain bullets. Technically the rifle predates the long 500-grain slug it would’ve originally been fed the 405-grain hollow-base but history has never stopped any of us from experimenting a little. I loaded 60, 65, and 70 grains of black to see what the old girl would do.
Before the results, let me say this: operating a Borchardt is pure mechanical satisfaction. The action is lightning fast and throws brass straight out the back like a miniature torpedo launcher. If you love tipping-block rifles—Peabodys, Martini-Henrys, all those beautifully over-engineered contraptions this rifle feels like coming home. Smooth, efficient, and utterly confidence-inspiring.

My “proving grounds” are nothing fancy just the 75 yards of clear line-of-fire outside my garage door. It was getting dark, so there was no time for blow-tubing or wiping between shots. I just loaded, fired, and listened to the echo.
And to my amazement—every single string printed into roughly a 2.5" group, each group stepping progressively higher with the stronger charges. No fuss, no cleanup between shots, no special treatment. Just straightforward, honest performance from a 147-year-old rifle that most people only talk about, but rarely shoot. The rifle shoulders very naturally and absorbs recoil very well.

If anyone’s interested, I’m seriously considering running the test again, this time in daylight, and filming the whole process. There are a lot of Sharps videos out there but almost nobody shows the military Borchardt doing what it was built to do. If you’re curious about how these rifles behave with real black powder and heavy bullets, I’d be glad to put the 1878 back to work and let you all see it in action.
Just say the wod