Good Day!
New here so I figured I'd do the needful and introduce myself before I start asking silly questions elsewhere on the forum. First things first, I'm not new to the world of black powder but am returning after an extended hiatus. Born and raised in California to "semi firearms tolerant" parents, I got my first exposures to the world of shooting sports through my Grandfather and the Boy Scouts. I took my first muzzleloading shots at the age of 13 in the mid 1990s at a scouting event and I was immediately hooked. I asked my parents if I could get a muzzleloading rifle but times weren't great and money was thin, so this request was deferred. As luck would have it, my father the land surveyor literally found an old rusty rotten rifle in the dirt with a pipe locator and traded it to some old fella for an unfinish Hawken kit. My memory is hazy but I think it may have been some sort of Sharps carbine pattern rifle, but regardless I finally got my rifle! I built my first rifle at 15, bought my first brass framed reproduction Colt 1851 Navy in .44 at 16 (shhh, don't tell!) and several more revolvers followed.
Some years later after some unfortunate downsizing at the company where I worked, I found myself seeking gainful employment and was free for the summer. Out of the blue, an old Scouting friend contacted me as they were looking for "responsible adults" over the age of 21 for leadership roles at the camp where I used to work, and I found myself as the Shooting Sports Director at said Boy Scout Camp. I was trained up as an NRA RSO and Certified Instructor for Rifle, Pistol, Shotgun & Muzzleloading. The camp where I worked did not have a formal muzzleloading program, but I had a rifle and the certifications to do it so I put together a little introduction to blackpowder as part of the Rifle Shooting Merit Badge course I was already leading. I ended up working at that camp for 12 summers, and was a full time employee of the local Scout Council during the off-season.
That's enough words, so here's a picture:
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This is the Armsport, Miami stamped .45 caliber Hawken I built from a kit some time in 1995. My understanding is that this is most likely an InvestArms knockoff of a T/C Hawken? It has an [AE] proof mark on the barrel which may indicate a 1979 production date. This rifle has fired probably thousands of "first shots" for who knows how many Scouts over many years, and hopefully, maybe, some of them got bit by the bug as hard as I was. It originally had a dual triggers, but the set trigger was removed for simplicity and unfortunately, was lost. As you can imagine, the action on this lock is
very worn, to the point that you can drop the hammer from full **** by lightly pushing on the hammer spur. I'm not confident in its ability to safely hold full **** so I stopped shooting it some time ago.
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It disappeared from my life for a couple decades as I thought it burned up in a house fire, but a family member recently put it back in my hands so here we are. It was very rusty which someone tried to remedy with a scotch-brite pad, so now its missing a bunch of blue and shows a pitting. Miraculously, the bore is great. The stock work could have been much better and many mistakes were made by 15yo me. None of the brass fits up very well and I don't really think the spray on gloss polyurethane is the best finish ever, but at least I've got the rifle back. I've contacted the fine folks at Track of the Wolf and they have been incredibly helpful in directing me to potential replacement parts, so I'm getting an order together to maybe get this rifle back up and working. The urge to purchase a complete L&R lock and Davis trigger set is very high, but really not in the budget at the moment.
My original reproduction 90's Pietta and Uberti Colt revolvers are long gone, but I did manage to purchase another Pietta 1851 Navy .36 about 10 years ago and never fired it, and scored a smaller Pietta 1851 Navy .36 with a 5" barrel earlier this year. I've been shooting them with a tin of caps and a bottle of Pyrodex P that's been lost in my garage since 2014. I managed probably 75-100 rounds yesterday through the 7" at the range while dodging rainclouds, the first 50 of which were 17gr combustible paper cartridges I made from a Guns of the West cartridge kit.
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I bought the birdshead grip and trigger guard from a guy who blew up a Pietta 1851 .44 snubnose with smokeless powder. He came out OK but the rest of the pistol did not, these may have been the only undamaged parts. I tell people these are the 1850s equivalent of a Glock 17 and 19
Anyway, that's me. I'm hoping to maybe get some tips on refinishing this rifle, or perhaps salvage its parts and re-stock it into a full stock Hawken. I see TotW has a replacement full stock for the
InvestArms STK-IAF-15-M1 or
Thompson Center STK-TCF-16-M3 which might fit the bill, but we'll see. Don't expect to talk me into a Kibler kit as I don't have anywhere near that kind of budget and almost non-existent woodworking skills.
I also have zero access to real black powder so I don't see a flinter anywhere in my future.
Any questions or additional information please ask away, and thank you all for sharing your experience here on the forum.
