Yeah Swampman, you're right, but expensive flintlocks can be problematic also. Isn't that part of the fun of hunting with them? It is for me anyhow. You can do everything right and the gun not go off due to any number of things. A friend and I with at least 80 years of roundball muzzleloading experience between us have a story that is way more fun to tell than any or all the deer we've killed. He was hunting with a smooth bore flinter and I was using a .62 caliber flintlock rifle. We were side by side, and had a buck standing broadside at 30 yards. He was well into rut, and more interested in if we wanted to fight or have sex than he was running away. The buck was in Gary's smoothbore range, so I let him shoot first. His gun klatches, he reprimes and it klatches again. This happens again, and he knaps his flint. I'm keeping the buck covered, because if he is starting to leave, I'm going to kill him. Gary klatches two more times and decides to change his flint. The buck is still standing there. So when I see Gary changing flints I decide to go ahead and hang my tag on the buck. My gun klatches. Gary is changing flints, I'm repriming, Gary isn't done, so I try again and klatch. By now the buck is really disgusted and walks off up the hill, and stops one more time, still in range of my rifle. I'm reprimed and ready, draw a bead, and klatch, sisssssss, boom. Clean miss, I was taking the rifle off my shoulder when it went off, and the buck leaves for other parts. Why did those guns do that? I don't know. When it did go off, why did it hang fire, it never does that. There was probably more moisture in the air that day than we realized and that had something to do with it, but I don't know that for sure. At the time there was 75 to 80 years of flintlock experience involved. On my part I had a new flint that was making lots of sparks in a modern high dollar rifle. The dang rifle goes off ever after that without a problem, and it fired before that over and over without a problem. Gary was shooting an original that I'd killed a buck with in a previous season, and he went on to kill bucks and an elk with it later. I think an old German saying applies to this. "Alle Kunst ist umsunst wenn ein Engel auf das Zundloch burnzt", which translates something like this: "All skill is in vain when an angel wets in the touch hole of your musket." Needless to say, if all I wanted was a dead deer, then an inline would have done the job as would have any other modern rifle. But to me not getting that buck has been way more fun. That deer would have been eaten up and forgotten long ago, but now I've told this story yet one more time and relieved it all again. Or how about the time I set the front trigger and blew a hole in the sky and got to watch one of the best bucks I've ever had in ML range trot off. There was probably a little buck fever involved with that one. All of this is just part of hunting with a flintlock, which I have been doing sense around 1975 when I got rid of my cap lock and got a flinter. Nope, I don't have to make meat to have a successful hunt. At 68 just another day in the woods with my health means a lot, and if the good Lord wants me to eat deer meat, then that's a bonus. This year I tagged a buck using a sinew backed long bow which is a first for me.
