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I hate to be a bit of a nay-sayer here but barn guns and shimmel rifle guns popularity in the 18th ct. appears to be greatly exaggerated. The cost of a rifle did not depend upon whether it has brass butt stock, trigger guard, pipes, and nose cap. The cost of a rifle was in making the barrel by...

From what I can see from the small pictures, it looks like it has an octagon to round barrel, which was common in the "smooth rifle" firelock. That was not a rifle that had been shot smooth but rather it was a smoothbore made in the style and shape of a rifle. Commonly they had the cheek rest...

Shooting a ramrod out of the barrel is the exact reason that you will never see anyone ram the paper form a cartridge down at a Continental Line, BAR, NPS, or other sanctioned event. It was back in the Bicentennial that they put a stop to ramming the paper down on top of the powder. A number...

Then you mixed it wrong. I've been using it for 20-years in both my longrifles and never had a problem. I did a LOT of reenactments from about 1999 through 2015 in both Vermont and Virginia, where I would typically fire 50-120 blank rounds per weekend. Not so much here in Washington state...

I mix up a 48-oz batch because I can just dump a pint of each ingredient in there, shake it up well, and it's done! Then I pour about 12-oz. in a glass bottle with a cork sealing it and put that in the shooting box I take with me to reenactments.

Easy way to do that without laboriously measuring it out is buy a 48-oz or larger plastic container and then buy a 16-oz bottle of all the ingredients. If you can't find the 16-oz bottle of Murphy's, go ahead and get the quart size. Then take the alcohol bottle and mark the outside at the...

Not when it's mixed with the alcohol (70% to 91% isopropyl alcohol) and Murphy's soap. Stumpy explained the chemical reasoning why many years ago and I don't remember what they were. You might be able to use the search to find it. I can tell you I've used MAP for the last 20-years or so in my...

Archaic units of measure are very much alive and well in the medical profession. Most meds are rated in milligrams. Larger doses are rated in Grains. One grain is slightly less than 65 milligrams (64.79891 to be exact). Aspirin often comes as 5gr. (325 milligram) Most of these archaic...

I typically carry a strip of pillow-ticking cut to the appropriate width but not cut into little squares. Normally I will use Stumpy's Moose Snot for my patch lube and just rub the end of that strip in my lube with my thumb until I can feel it come through. Then put that over the muzzle, put...

Just as an FYI, Hawkens were originally made in Ohio and they were full-stock flintlocks, later changing to percussion cap in the 1830's. Most of the Plains-style rifles were made after Samuel moved his gun-making shop to St. Louis, MO in 1822 where his brother Jacob already had a gun-making...

Actually the big ones are moose antler. You can either go kill a moose and use the bottom of his antlers or you can buy one for about $100 to $150. They are spendy when you can find them. You only really need those for big raw nodules. You can also use a hammer-stone to bust those nodules...

You are most welcome. Had a gun builder help me out with that when I got my first longrifle. It's worked well for me and I'm happy to pass it on.

First of all, you don't need to remove the barrel every time you clean it. I typically remove the barrel once a year to check for rust under the barrel and to clean any gunk from the bed the barrel lies in. After removing it once a year, I put some car wax on the underside of the barrel to...

Those sound even better than the nitrile ones I use. How much are the kevlar gloves and do you just need one pair?

Had to laugh, a big box of band-aids is always a good thing to have close by whenever you are doing any type of flintknapping. The Nitrile gloves that I mentioned makes a HUGE difference in how cut up you get though and they are thin enough to still feel what you are doing. And they are cheap!

You're most welcome Jeff. Be careful of one thing though, when you start knapping flint you will be dropping all kinds of small and extremely sharp bits about. Either do that over some cement (without any hatch lines in it) so you can easily sweep up all the little sharp bits and pieces...

Just as an FYI, the method used for making gun flints is quite a bit different than flintknapping an arrowhead. You are basically trying to get a big solid piece 3" or 4" tall called a blade core and you knock off long thin pieces around the edges of it using percussive flaking. Once you knock...

The reason Pyrodex doesn't work for beans in a flintlock is that its flash temperature is about 450° higher than real black powder. So it really takes a much hotter spark than a flintlock can more than occasionally provide. A percussion cap will provide a hot enough spark, but not a flintlock...

Brits did not use .75 caliber lead balls. Their barrel caliber was .75 and they fired .69 caliber balls out of them. The reason they used such undersized balls was so they could keep shooting at a rate of 3 shots per minute without having to run a wet patch down the barrel to remove the...

For almost 20-years now I have only used 3F powder to charge the pan and as the main charge for both of my .50 caliber longrifles. By the way, you do NOT want to put powder into the vent hole. If you do you are likely to get that fuse effect ignition where the pan goes "whoosh" and then the...