Amusing/Ridiculous Muzzleloading Misconceptions...

[Whitworth]

While I was at the local shooting range one day, loading my rifle, a couple of guys came up to watch.
When I started raming the ball down the barrel one of them said to the other, "Talk about a waste of time! Shooting one of them guns makes as much sense as fly fishing."

After pulling the ramrod out of the barrel I looked at the guy and said, "I like fly fishing too."
They both turned and walked off in disgust.

Guess my bamboo Orvis would be wasted on them......

 

[Newtire]

Was hunting doves with my twice barrelled front loader when a guy came along who looked amazed and said, “I never knew they made such a thing!”

 

[Art Caputo]

I built my 1st muzzleloader in my 8th grade shop class. The science teacher, who had a mounted buck on the wall in his class, heard of this. One day he asked what I was building. I told him a 45 caliber Kentucky rifle. He said the 45 was too small to kill anything. That was upsetting for a 14 year old to hear this..................

I find that most of the misconceptions about muzzleloaders can be laughed off, but the one that gets under my skin the most is the discouragement of using a 45 cal LRB for deer hunting(NE whitetail). In my youth, most muzzleloaders used were many 45’s, some 50 cals, and an occasional 54. A high premium was placed on accurate shooting and picking the shot. My observations whether it was back then, or over the next few decades has been that with a well placed shot from any of them, the result was a dead deer. With a poorly placed shot, you had a problem.....and the size of the ball made little difference. .

 

[Bob McBride]

I find that most of the misconceptions about muzzleloaders can be laughed off, but the one that gets under my skin the most is the discouragement of using a 45 cal LRB for deer hunting(NE whitetail). In my youth, most muzzleloaders used were many 45’s, some 50 cals, and an occasional 54. A high premium was placed on accurate shooting and picking the shot. My observations whether it was back then, or over the next few decades has been that with a well placed shot from any of them, the result was a dead deer. With a poorly placed shot, you had a problem.....and the size of the ball made little difference. .

I couldn't agree more. Ol' Pop and I take between 3 and a half dozen Whitetail each on average every year here on the farm. He uses a half stock .45 and I use either my .50, .54, or 58. Usually the .58. There isn't a foot's difference between how far we drag his and how far we have to drag mine, or in the rare instance of a bad shot, how far we have to track them. If you can't hit them in the clockwork 90+% of the time, a larger caliber won't fix it.

 

[Pukka Bundook]

Another old idea, from the country areas of the UK, was that Chewing the shot before loading your smoothbore gave better patterns at long range.
(When you've tried it let me know! )
I can see Some logic to this;
Maybe wet shot slides up the barrel better, but damaged shot spreads wider.
Maybe the chewed grains stuck together for so long, in which case it Might appear to work at times!
Still, it's summat I never tried!

Re. some folks commenting on how slow a flintlock fires;
I have sometimes offered these folks the opportunity to try it;

"You stick your hand over the muzzle and I'll fire it. See if you can get your hand out the way before it goes off".

 

[Eric Krewson]

I shoot at a public range every now and then, the black rifle (AR) people ignore me but everyone else is friendly and interested, I have yet to hear a disparaging remark. I always offer to let people shoot my flintlock, I have had a couple of people try it out.

I had a friend I hunted the same land with who passed on a monster buck at 100 yards with his .54 Lyman plains rifle thinking it wouldn't kill that far away.

I told him with his load at 100 yards it would be the same as if he put a .45ACP to the deer chest point blank and pulled the trigger. I had checked the ballistic charts, he had no idea.

 

[rescuemike]

My coworker offered to take me Turkey hunting a few years back; however, he changed his mind when he found out that I was hunting with a Muzzleloading shotgun. Said, “I can’t take you out there because it’s dry and you’ll burn my woods down with that thing.”

This is actually a real thing the morons in WA State get concerned about. They have delayed and suspended a season before because they were worried it was too dry and would start fires.

 

[TexiKan]

Back in the day when we were allowed in the public schools to talk about the history of the times and able to discuss the guns, knives and hawks, I had a student ask about the accuracy of a muzzleloader. I thought I answered his question. (I am a former teacher) He was not convinced that my answer, which involved the various variables, was correct. He persisted and I once again told him my accuracy depended upon multiple factors, unlike cartridge guns. The general perception of muzzleloaders being inaccurate continues to prevail.

 

[B P Arn]

Off the subject but Gibberish is a language.
Used by the Gibbers being the natives of Gibraltar.

I specifically referenced Authentic Frontier Gibberish!

 

[Coot]

Another old idea, from the country areas of the UK, was that Chewing the shot before loading your smoothbore gave better patterns at long range.
(When you've tried it let me know! )
I can see Some logic to this;
Maybe wet shot slides up the barrel better, but damaged shot spreads wider.
Maybe the chewed grains stuck together for so long, in which case it Might appear to work at times!
Still, it's summat I never tried!

Re. some folks commenting on how slow a flintlock fires;
I have sometimes offered these folks the opportunity to try it;

"You stick your hand over the muzzle and I'll fire it. See if you can get your hand out the way before it goes off".

Perhaps they were thinking that chewing the ball (roughing the surface) would have the same effect as the dimples on a golf ball?

 

[N.Y. Yankee]

Actually, the "fill the barrel with black powder" test has been done, more than once. The barrel didn't explode. It's not a myth. Look on YouTube.

So, what you're saying is that we really can just ignore all the silly "maximum charge" warnings listed in our owners manuals and just load what we want? Cool! I've been wanting more power!

 

[Spikebuck]

Smoking a pipe, drinking a fine liquor, watching a great performance in a classic movie, reading a great book

Or as the "other side" thinks: Constantly looking at my cell phone texts while I'm driving while I'm on a work phone call while I'm missing my kids ball game while I'm eating a jug of TUMS!

 

[Cruzatte]

The Type C was a gentleman's gun.
The Type D was a workingman's gun.

 

[Nameless Hunter]

So, what you're saying is that we really can just ignore all the silly "maximum charge" warnings listed in our owners manuals and just load what we want? Cool! I've been wanting more power!

Well, do a little research. This "myth" has been tested several times.
Burn as little powder as you want, or as much REAL black powder as you want.
Filling half your "modern" muzzleloader rifle barrel with REAL black powder will NOT rupture your barrel.
It might damage your stock, and at some point it WILL give you a sore shoulder.
It won't buy you a huge increase in muzzle velocity (you will reach a point of diminishing returns).
How much you burn is up to you. Personally, I don't anticipate ANY need to go over 110 gr.
As Zonie has mentioned multiple times, round balls shot at high muzzle velocities just slow down faster.
What has been proven is that over stuffing a modern barrel with REAL black powder will not produce a ruptured barrel, barring someone purposely plugging the end. As far as "silly" warnings in manuals go, the world is FULL of silly warnings dictated by lawyers. What I care about are warnings that are proven by someone who has done valid testing, such as NEVER putting smokeless powder in a black powder only weapon.

 

[Muddly]

Folk who act like the thing hanging under the barrel of my unmentionable is a tubular magazine...
Folk who can't understand that I enjoy shooting anything that requires me to pour powder and ram.
The look on people's faces when I tell them my P53 works better on yankee deer than yankees. At least they take hits!

 

[Tanglefoot]

Back during the Bicentennial there was a surge of interest in muzzleloading. I was on a job in New Hampshire at the time, and by chance met a gentleman in the edge of the woods during deer season, busting one cap after another on his brand-new .45 caliber muzzleloading rifle, one of those early factory
"Kentucky Rifles" with the two-piece full stock and a brass spacer between the pieces. I asked if he needed help, and he said that his son had given him the gun but that he hadn't had a chance to fire it and thought he should do so before he started hunting just to see where it shot, but he couldn't get it to go off. I asked several questions and found that
a) He didn't clean the piece before loading it,
b) He had been given a large brass powder flask with the rifle with a 60-grain spout on it, plus a package of .440 RB and another of pre-lubed patches,
c) all he knew about the care and feeding of his muzzleloader was what his son told him,
d) all his son knew about it was what the clerk in the sporting goods section of a discount department store told him, and
e) most of that was wrong.
Following the instructions he had been given, the gentleman had poured "Five or six of those spout things full of powder" into the bore, then a lubed patch with a .440 RB, and rammed them down as far as they would go with the ramrod provided in the thimbles. Quite a lot of the ramrod still protruded from the barrel. I suggested that the best thing would be to pull the charge to see what the problem was, and asked if he had a ball puller or a patch worm for his ramrod. He didn't know what those things were.
I keep a small tin box in my hunting pouch with an assortment of loading and cleaning tools to fit most common ramrod threads, a spare nipple, leather flint pads, several cleaning patches, etc., and there's a knapping tool and a nipple wrench (both) in the pouch too.
Finding some that fit his ramrod, I first made sure there was no live cap on the nipple, then pulled the patched ball. We also pulled and cleaned the nipple and swabbed the grease out of the breech, but that was later. I dumped his powder charge out .... as much as would come out .... onto a nest of large leaves. It just kept coming out! Turned out that the clerk told his son and his son told him, "You can't over charge a muzzleloader. Black powder burns slow and if there's too much and it doesn't have time to burn in the barrel, it just gets blown out the muzzle. Just put 5 or 6 of those spouts full in and let `er rip!"
My best guess is that there was between 300 and 400 grains of black powder piled on those leaves --- maybe another 30-40 grains stuck in the grease we found in the breech --- and it was all 4Fg because that's what the clerk sold hisson! Mercy! The bursting charge of a fragmentation hand grenade used to be 500 grains of 2Fg. Fortunately, the breech end of his rifle bore was clogged with that thick grease, probably put there by the factory, and the rifle didn't fire.
When my heart slowed down again, we adjourned to a small stream nearby and cleaned his rifle. Swapped the gentleman's 4Fg powder for some of my 2Fg and explained to him that loading ONE measure behind each patched round ball would do the job until he could work up a better load at the range. He loaded his rifle with me watching and let `er fly at a knot on a dead limb maybe 25 yards off with a good big tree trunk behind it. He hit maybe an inch from his point of aim.
The next evening, I sat down with the New Hampshire Field Rep for the NMLRA and told him this tale. We agreed that something had to be done. He made some calls and that was the origin of the first Muzzleloading Hunter Safety Course which was developed and taught by volunteers in New Hampshire, then spread to the rest of New England, then parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. A free handout was developed with the basic information about ML guns, and their loading and cleaning and copies were distributed to any retail shop that sold hunting licenses or any type of ML gear, to be handed out to anybody who bought those things or even inquired. It was printed on both sides of a single 8-1/2 inch sheet of paper and folded to fit in a shirt pocket .... or a hunting pouch. The ML HS course was structured to include classroom instruction plus a short course of live fire on a range.
The NH Field Rep sent copies of all handouts and instructional material to Friendship and it's now taught nationwide.
Sometimes you get lucky and this was one of those times, but who wants to count on that?
Tanglefoot

 

[JBrandon]

I remember one of the old catalogs, can't find it at the moment, but it was Bannerman or Sears in the 1920s or so, advertising Trapdoor Springfields (for a ridiculously low price) with the comment that "our Civil War veterans will remember these well..."

 

[JCKelly]

When I was interpreting in Colonial Williamsburg in the late 90s I once had a guest tell me that he didn’t know how anyone ever got killed with a muzzleloader since “all you have to do is watch for the flash and duck!”
Jay

" . . . watch for the flash . . ." Worked for the sparrows I tried to shoot w my Paget carbine as a teenager

 

[N.Y. Yankee]

Well, do a little research. This "myth" has been tested several times.
Burn as little powder as you want, or as much REAL black powder as you want.
Filling half your "modern" muzzleloader rifle barrel with REAL black powder will NOT rupture your barrel.
It might damage your stock, and at some point it WILL give you a sore shoulder.
It won't buy you a huge increase in muzzle velocity (you will reach a point of diminishing returns).
How much you burn is up to you. Personally, I don't anticipate ANY need to go over 110 gr.
As Zonie has mentioned multiple times, round balls shot at high muzzle velocities just slow down faster.
What has been proven is that over stuffing a modern barrel with REAL black powder will not produce a ruptured barrel, barring someone purposely plugging the end. As far as "silly" warnings in manuals go, the world is FULL of silly warnings dictated by lawyers. What I care about are warnings that are proven by someone who has done valid testing, such as NEVER putting smokeless powder in a black powder only weapon.

OK, let us not get our collective panties in a twist on this, I was simply poking fun at the subject.

 

[N.Y. Yankee]

One of the popular sayings that I, too, have heard said around the shooting range goes something like "Look at the size of the hole in the barrel! That thing will kick like a Kentucky mule!" Sometimes, I am able to explain that black powder is a much lower pressure powder than modern smokeless, etc, etc. Sometimes not.