Need some help please

[Claywms]

Hello everyone. I had some trouble at the range today and I'm looking to get some advice. I'm shooting a .54 cal. Cabela's Hawken flintlock rifle. After 6 shots I could not get the main charge to fire again, although I always had good flash in the pan. I cleaned and cleared the vent hole, so I'm pretty sure that was not the problem. I drilled it out a bit bigger when I got home, just to be sure that wasn't it. I was using pre-soaked wonderlube 1000 patches to clean in between shots, and they seemed very greasy and alomost over-soaked with wonderlube. I wonder if I was getting a lot of that lube built up down in the bottom of the barrel, perhaps cloging things up? I don't know. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. On the upside the rifle seems really accurate....when it fires! Thanks in advance.

 

[Trench]

I think you could be right about the oversaturated patch. I had that problem once when I was squirrel hunting with my .36. I used a patch that was too wet and it must have dampened my main charge when I poured it down. That darn squirrel just sat there and watched me re-prime and shoot at his head three times. I was so flustered, I missed when it finally went off. Lucky him.

 

[Packdog]

C.J.
I hunt and have shot the same rifle you have for years. When I first started shooting it I had a very similar problem when using wet patches.
I swapped to a greased patch over a liquid lube. I limited my wipping between shots to one swipe and sometimes not even that. My problem went away. Your experience my vary.

 

[renovato]

Always good to run a pipe cleaner or pick through the vent now and then to keep it clear. You might have gotten some lube or wet crud in it.

 

[BadHorse]

i got a .50cal GPR basically the same thing. and i use the prelubed wonder lube 1000's i dont swab until i got an issue shoving it down the barrel, and that doesnt happen till ive fired 50-60 rounds. i like to keep it dry in there

karwelis

 

[paulvallandigham]

CJ: Clean with cleaning patches- usually cotton flannel, but muslin, pocket drill, and other fabrics work as well, including Tow made from linen plant fibers. Save the greased patches for wrapping around the ball.

The point of cleaning between shots is to REMOVE the residue from the powder. Residue is carbon, graphite, and some traces of potassium and sulfur. The carbon and Graphite generally will make up the bulk of the residue, and the " chunks" you feel as you run a cleaning patch down the barrel.

Since you are loading and cleaning a rifle, you can use ONE SIZED cleaning jag. Its needs to be about .030"SMALLER in diameter than your bore diameter. That allows the fluffier cleaning patch to slide down OVER the dirty lands, then bunch up and fill the grooves of the jag, so that you can PULL the crud out of the barrel, from both the lands and the grooves. If your jag is a closer( tighter ) fit, all you are doing is pushing the crud down in to the breech and powder chamber.

When you clean, you will find it works better if you run the first patch down to about 1 inch above the breech, and pull out as much of the crud and residue as you can from that point. Then, when you run a second cleaning patch down the barrel Only 1 inch of crud is going to be pushed in front of the jag and cloth patch, leaving much less crud down on the breech. I use a damp patch for my first two swipes, then a dry patch to follow to remove any moisture I might have put in the barrel. I feel that patch when its comes out of the barrel to feel how damp it is. If its WET, I run a second dry cleaning patch down the barrel, to dry the barrel thoroughly before pouring in the next powder charge. Humidity is EVERYTHING you have to consider when loading and cleaning your MLer. Be prepared to get your hands dirty. At the range, I have towels, water, and soap to wash my hands off, or wipe the crud off during a shoot. When hunting, I have that stuff back at the car. I fire a lot more shots at the range than I ever have on my best day of shooting doves, which have the highest daily bag limit of any hunting game in my state. I can wait to wash my hands when I get back to the car. However, I do take a hand towel with me into the dove fields, to wipe my hands and wipe the sweat out of my eyes.

I believe your gun has a smaller diameter powder chamber. Most are about .32 caliber in size. You can clean them with a .30 caliber brush, or cleaning jag. If you push crud ahead of the cleaning jag into the chamber, it will eventually clog up enough to prevent powder getting down into it for ignition. With any flintlock, you want some powder in the barrel to be close to the vent hole, for good ignition. With some of the Nock style breeches, there is a flash channel that goes from the vent hole to the back of the powder charge. The distance is not great, but if NO powder gets down into that flash channel you can get misfires.

Remove the clean out screw on the side of the bolster, and visually inspect that flash channel. It should not only be clear of debris, grease, and dirt, but it should be very smooth. Sometimes they are rough, and any rough surface will catch and hold onto residue, eventually blocking passage of powder, or heat. Misfire is the result. Use a drill bit and/or reamer to smooth that flashchannel out. If you have to widen the flash channel to get it smooth, don't worry about that. Do it. Clean that flash channel after each shoot with a pipe cleaner, and some solvent. If you pump solvent and soap and water through the breech, usually the higher pressure created by pushing the wider column of soap and water down through the narrower flash channel and out the vent, will clean the flash channel, too. The, a pipe cleaner is only used to DRY the flash channel.

Some smiths take those breeches out of the gun and drill open the powder chamber to bore diameter, so that you can clean the " chamber " with the same patch and jag you use to clean the rifling.

This is a foreign made gun. Warranties are about useless for these guns. If your gun continues to give you problems, do whatever it takes to make it work, or trade it for a U.S. made gun. The factory is not governed by U.S. laws on warranty, no matter what any tags might say on the new guns.

YOur current problem stems from using the wrong cleaning technique. Get some flannel cleaning patches and use only them to clean the barrel. That will pull the crud out, and should let you fire the gun without concern that your cleaning technique will cause a misfire. :thumbsup:

 

[Claywms]

Thnks very much. That helps!

 

[Birddog6]

1. Get rid of the grease lube & use som Lehigh Lube & you will see a Big difference in tha tifle & the fouling. Use a Tight ball & patch, that also cuts down on the fouling.
2: As mentioned, sounds like you are pushing the cruds down the bore rather than pulling them out. Use a modified cleaning jag such as this. Turn in a drill & file with a 3 corner file, Front land to be about .010 smaller than the other two & all lands sharp. The idea is a arrowhead effect, pushes past the cruds, grabs & gathers patch & fouling on the pull Out..... Use patches from old tee shirts, they are cheap or thin flannel cleaning patches.

Your rifle has a patent breech such as the below photo. Basically you are shoving all the crud into that breech. Most of them I have seen have a .36 dia hole in them & you can usualy take a .36 cal breech scraper & round off the end of it & clean out this patent breech. Also a .36 cal brush works well but you need to get the majority of the cruds out of it first. Also don't just jam it in there or you might wedge it, rotate it in to the Right & keep turning & working it. If it gets tight pull out. Don't trun left as you will unscrew the jag from the rod. I think T/C makes a rounded jag just for cleaning this patent breech if you don't want to make your own.

 

[wcontratto]

One of the older gents at our last monthly shoot took a shine to me 'cuz I'm pretty much a newbie.

He gave me some advice that I plan to use from now on. He said that you should only clean out the barrel when you feel significant resistance loading, and to do it with the ball/patch already in place. Dampen (not wet) a cleaning patch with plain water to clean out the crud. The patched ball will keep water out of the powder so you don't even need to run a dry patch.and the next shot will load easy as pie. Any gunk left behind will be shot out the barrel so you don't leave a bunch of it in the breech.

Cheers,
Bill C.

I've tried it a couple of times

 

[Zonie]

I agree with your old adviser about waiting until you feel a significant resistance but I don't agree about running a wet patch down a barrel with a patched ball in it.

Personally it is just that I don't like sticking things down the barrel after it is loaded.
Before someone points out that the gun isn't primed yet, I might remind them that Flintlocks have been known to fire without any priming in the pan.

As for wiping the bore, I would't use a grease for the job.
A plain piece of dampened rag will work better because the moisture will soften the fouling.

The technique I use is to make the cleaning patch slightly wet with water (or Moose Juice) and rapidly run it down the bore using a cleaning jag.
Then count to two and pull it back out.

This will allow the fouling to soften so when the jag/patch is retracted it will remove 90 percent of the fouling.

Running another cleaning patch down the bore at this stage will only scrape off the remaining 10 percent and knock it down into the breech of the gun so I don't recommend doing this.

 

[paulvallandigham]

It all depends on the relative humidity in the area of the country and the day you shoot. When you are shooting in an area with high humidity, you will want to run a dry patch down the barrel after cleaning with a damp patch, per Zonie's advice.

Most new shooters, and, unfortunately, OLD SHOOTERS, don't really understand how to use a cleaning jag and patches, either after each shot is fired, or at the end of a shooting session. Your jag needs to be about .030" undersize of your ACTUAL bore diameter. I prefer a jag where the rings are " stepped " so that the forward or end ring is smaller than the ones closer to the ramrod. That way, the cloth cleaning patch slides OVER the lands and residue, pushing NOTHING ahead of it into the breech. When the jag nears the rear of the barrel, but before it touches the breechface, I pull the patch back out. The moisture on that damp patch will have soften the residue, so that it comes loose in the folds of the cleaning patch as it is " bunched-up" in the grooves of the Jag. The residue then is pulled OUT of the barrel, not pushed down to the breech.

If you use a solid bench rest, and shoot for groups, at even 50 yards, you will see that NOT cleaning between shots causes the length of the powder chamber, where the crud builds up, to put the ball a little further forward in the barrel for each shot. That changes the burning area, for the powder charge, and changes the chamber pressure for the load and ball combination. This will result in balls shooting to a different Point of Impact, and open your groups.

You won't find target shooters NOT cleaning between shots. In fact, if you will attend some of the bigger BP shooting events, you can learn a lot about shooting, and cleaning your gun by watching the benchrest shooters. ( HINT!)

Now, for casual shooting at large targets, at short range, ( plinking) , off-hand, its probably not going to matter than the lack of cleaning is opening up your group. You won't notice, with the use of open sights, your ability to shoot off-hand, and the closeness of the target. You will notice a big difference in how much crud comes out of your gun in big chunks, when you do get around to cleaning it.

The question you need to ask yourself, would you load any kind of powder into a cartridge casing that has crud in big chunks in it, of unknown weight, and dimension( volume) and expect those cartridges to give you good accuracy? That is what failing to clean your rifle or smoothbore between shots is doing when you shoot BP.

Welcome to the sport. :thumbsup: :hatsoff:

 

[Semisane]

What "OLD SHOOTERS" are you talking about Paul?

I'm a "long experienced" shooter, so I guess that makes me and old shooter. Heck, I'm getting along in years too. I guess that makes me and old, old shooter. :wink:

 

[paulvallandigham]

If you spend anytime being a range officer for a day at your club, you will meet older shooters who you think should know better, but don't. They are much harder to get to listen to you when you try to help them avoid those misfires, and hangfires, etc. The new guys at least will listen.

When I was new, we only had three members of the club who ever brought a flintlock to shoot. I was always interested in flintlocks- a depraved mind, I am sure----so I asked these older guys a lot of questions about the guns, how they mounted the flints, which kind of flints worked best, how and why they knapped the edge? When do you know you have to knapp? Are there different ways to knapp? Why they loaded their flintlocks differently than percussion guns, etc.

What I got back in return was conflicting advise from all three men! There simply was no agreement on just about anything to do with shooting flintlocks. It took me years to figure it out, but I know they just didn't have any good source of information when they started shooting flintlocks, and were working on a lot of hearsay, old wives tales, and just plain wrong information.

I began to question the information I was getting form other members, all well meaning, about percussion locks and MLers, too. And, no one talked about the importance of the relative humidity as a key component for deciding how to clean your gun. An infrequent shooting member of the club was a personal friend of mine, and he was the man who disclosed how important it is to adjust how you clean your gun based on how wet the barrel is, from humidity. We were shooting at another range, and he had me feel his cleaning patches to know how damp the residue and barrel were.

I started using his advice at my club, and I stopped having the usual misfires. Other shooters began to notice, and began asking me how I had succeeded in stopping misfires when they were still having them. Then they watched as I cleaned my gun. A few followed my examples, and they too stopped having misfires. The others cursed us all! But, reluctantly, the others slowly began to change their loading procedures, and cleaning procedures and they also found that misfires became a thing of the past. They had more fun shooting. They actually began hitting smaller targets. None of them would admit that all these improvements were due to listening about the importance of paying attention to the relative humidty. One cold winter day, when I changed my loading and cleaning procedure, someone noticed, and asked me. I explained how darn dry it was, and that I changed my cleaning procedure to reflect that low humidity. ( I used liquid " moosemilk" instead of saliva, and I dried the gun using alcohol on a cleaning patch, instead of sending just a dry cleaning patch down the barrel. )

The guy was a little upset that I had changed my cleaning procedure until I reminded him that I had told everyone that the way your clean is dictated by the relative humidity, Not by some written set of directions. I let him use my alcohol to clean his gun, and the hick-ups he was experiencing ended. He was a happy guy. And, he quietly thanked me. That was a novel experience. :hmm: :hatsoff: