Greetings all,
I have a Baker rifle kit from TRS, and just getting around to start working on it. Thinking about installing a touch hole liner. However, the Baker has a round barrel. Anywone installed a liner on a Baker? White Lightning? Issues?
I picked up a flint hand gun some years ago made by Miruku of Japan for 20 bucks with a cracked stock ,no loading rod and missing a front sight. The bore was good so I milled out a new front sight, repaired the stock and the gun shoots like a house afire. It is .45 cal and has a rather cheap looking lock that makes a very good shower of sparks and is reliable of ignition.
This really is a head scratcher for me because along with the rather cheaply made lock it has an angled forward vent hole drilled in the barrel wall (no liner at all) so it inters ahead of the breech plug/shoulder interface. The angle of course makes for a longer flash channel.
Every thing I thought I knew about fast and reliable ignition performance is in this gun kind of stood on it's head and the gun just doesn't seem to care about my preconceived notions of what is proper for fast and reliable ignition. It fires reliably and fast in spite of my superior knowledge of why it shouldn't! I get the feeling the little gun is just flipping me off and it makes me chuckle!
When the time arises I see no reason why a liner for this gun cannot be made to thread in at the same angle from a home made, hardened drill and tap guide (I've made and used them before), as the original vent with the interior profiled and indexed to flush out with the bore as I am now doing the same with the straight in liners I am making .
This might be a very good solution for the Baker rifle problems talked about.
This eliminates the need to cut into the breech plug face and will foul less and clean up easier. The shoulder fit and integrity of the breech plug is what keeps fouling out of being gradually blown into the breech threads over time. When this is compromised by cuts in the plug face or thread nothing good comes of it.
The last picture is actually for a different thread that is some what related so I'll just add it onto this one. The picture is of two nipples , one burned out to where it began to give fliers in my groups and the other a new nipple of proper diameter.
Although a nipple orifice will usually be smaller than will a vent in a flint gun the erosive effect is precisely the same in nipple or vent as both occur from interior pressure venting out word not from pan flash or cap brisanance inward.
The nipples are usually harder than vents that are designed to be filed flush with the barrel flat the pan butts up to but still burn out. The eroded hole is not only larger it is also eroded irregular in shape which probably contributes to irregular ignition flash.
One could argue that comparing nipples to vents is apples to oranges but the differences in the mechanics of how they work are virtually the same.