Breeching services?

[jerrywh]

I wouldn't say it's imposible to clean. It''s just more difficult. The ones I removed were pretty clean. The manton book has a statement on the cleaning of the manton patton breach. That breach seems more difficult to clean to me.

 

[Birddog6]

I wouldn't say it's imposible to clean. It's just more difficult.

Yes, much more difficult. You would have to have a brush in the barrel on the very End of the rod & it would have to clean back into that groove, whatever depth that groove is. (Have yet to see one)
And then how do you See back in that groove, to insure it is actually clean & you got it all the fouling out ? If you are looking down the bore, you can't see back in the groove, all you can see is a black ring at the end.

And that is my point. Why create a cleaning issue & possibly place to start rust & corrosion, when it is not necessary & it can be breeched without this problem.

I am not arguing the fact that allot of originals had gaps, some no seat, some were loose, most old ones have very coarse threads, etc. That is true & well known.

I am just pointing out there is a better way, IMHO, and with the tooling & knowledge we have today, they can now be breeched better than some originals were.

Keith Lisle

 

[paulvallandigham]

+1, keith. I had a semi-custom gun made by a company whose name I will not give. I decided to convert it from percussion to flint about a year after I bought it. I never was able to clean that barrel completely, and suspected the reason was that the face of the plug did not rub up against the shoulder at the back of the rifling.

Well, my gun builder removed the breech and found plenty of fouling and rust in the gap, the the amount of steel between the sides of the threaded breech plug and the outside were less than half of the thickness of the grooves to the outside of the barrel.

He was angry at what he saw, and i was furious. I had sent the gun back to the maker when I first received it as a Percussion gun, because of several deficiencies. The maker did a hack job in fixing those problems, and, of course, since I did not think to remove the breech, I didn't know about the gap, nor the fact that the breech plug was Cross Threaded! :cursing: :cursing:

I ordered a .50 caliber barrel that was 13/16" across the flats. They don't make or sell these anymore, because the industry believes that they are too thin for a margin of safety. Because I was only interested in shooting round balls in this gun, I also ordered a 1:72" ROT, but received a 1"48 ROT instead! :cursing: The gun shoots accurately enough, but its not what I wanted.

So, I agree with your thought on how Breech plugs are seated. I really don't care that there are lots of old guns out there where the breeches are not seated properly. I don't want someone someday stuffing 120 grains of FFFg powder down my barrel, trying to see just how "flat" it will shoot out yonder, and blow the back end of the gun up, because there is rust eating the sides of the barrel right at the face of the plug.

Because the stock pins and hangers were already set for my gun, my gunmaker ended up cutting a washer of cold roll steel, to fill the gap between the face of the breech plug, and the shoulder in the barrel. He could not shorten the barrel to make it fit the length of the threads on the breech plug, without moving the barrel back in the stock mortise, requiring new hangers, or pin holes in the stock.

 

[jerrywh]

Birddog.
If you read my fist statement again, I said that the seated plud might be the ideal situation. No arguement there. Great plains and some of the other off the shelf muzzle loaders are a rat to clean also. There is a powder chamber in the great plains that is smaller than the bore. A lot of others also.
All I'm saying is perfection is just desireable not mandatory. The gun isn't going to give him trouble in his lifetime if he cleans it well each time.
The original guns I refered to have no shoulder on the inside of the bore for the breach plug to seat against. The plugs just thread into the bore.
I will bet that nobody can show us a gun that corroded at that point to where it was dangerous to shoot. Look at the chambers in percussion guns. The precussion cap channel is almost imposible to clean. The barrels always become shot out beofre they get to that stage of corrosion at the breach plug.
No insult intended, because I believe the same as Birddog but I am often tempted to ask some people if they shine the bottom of their shoes.

 

[J D Hoffman]

try Track of the Wolf They do some gunsmithing pretty resonable

 

[roundball]

One custom breeching place that TOW referred me to is:
Dennis McCandless
Custom Breeching
Los Cruces, NM

He's made / installed six custom Patent Breech breechplugs for some barrels for me...excellent work...

Bill,

Just out of curiosity, did you remove any of the breeches & look inside to actually see what the seat looks like ?

Keith Lisle

Just reading through old threads and noticed this question for the first time, my apologies for not seeing/rsponding to it before.
No, in the case of 4 new Rice barrels, I had Jason ship them directly from Rice to McCandless with no breechplug at all.
The other 2 were complete breeched barrels that were on a couple of like new/used rifles I'd bought, and I simply sent them to McCandless to replace their existing breechplugs with Patent Breech design plugs.