- Joined
- Nov 26, 2005
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Hi Guys,
We all have various reasons and attractions to shooting and building muzzleloaders. There is no one correct reason or motivation. What bothers me with respect to the big commercial makers is most have stuck with their historically dubious designs and models from the 1960s and 1970s without making any effort to upgrade them to better more historically accurate designs despite 50 more years of accumulated scholarship and knowledge. So we have Pedersoli "Pennsylvania" rifles that look like something that folks in the 1950s thought looked like long rifles, Blue Ridge rifles modeled after obscure "Hatfields" that don't represent any real group or school of long rifles and were pretty mediocre guns, Pedersoli Brown Besses that are kind of like pattern 1769s but have the wrong lock marks and other details, and then other makers with their "Hawken" rifles that are awkward blends of old and modern designs but nothing like any real "Hawken" rifles. It is like the name "Hawken rifle" has no meaning anymore, like the Hawken brothers have no meaning anymore. Over 30-50 years, upgrading any of those guns to more historically correct and/or more historically representative guns should not have cost that much to do. Little cosmetic changes and updated manufacturing processes should have made that possible but they did not bother to change and what's worse, we never demand that they do so.
dave
We all have various reasons and attractions to shooting and building muzzleloaders. There is no one correct reason or motivation. What bothers me with respect to the big commercial makers is most have stuck with their historically dubious designs and models from the 1960s and 1970s without making any effort to upgrade them to better more historically accurate designs despite 50 more years of accumulated scholarship and knowledge. So we have Pedersoli "Pennsylvania" rifles that look like something that folks in the 1950s thought looked like long rifles, Blue Ridge rifles modeled after obscure "Hatfields" that don't represent any real group or school of long rifles and were pretty mediocre guns, Pedersoli Brown Besses that are kind of like pattern 1769s but have the wrong lock marks and other details, and then other makers with their "Hawken" rifles that are awkward blends of old and modern designs but nothing like any real "Hawken" rifles. It is like the name "Hawken rifle" has no meaning anymore, like the Hawken brothers have no meaning anymore. Over 30-50 years, upgrading any of those guns to more historically correct and/or more historically representative guns should not have cost that much to do. Little cosmetic changes and updated manufacturing processes should have made that possible but they did not bother to change and what's worse, we never demand that they do so.
dave