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To pin or not to pin a wooden ramrod?

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Just looking for advice and experience - should a wooden ramrod be glued and pinned or only one or the other? This is on a 50 cal.
 
Just looking for advice and experience - should a wooden ramrod be glued and pinned or only one or the other? This is on a 50 cal.
Imagine pulling a ball for a friend. You are using the brass end to secure the ball puller. The pull is stout, very stout, you have to hook your RR on a fence post and use full body language to remove the ball. Want to leave it all in the bottom of the barrel??
All my RR ends are pinned/glued and they all have been put to the test.
Larry
 
Imagine pulling a ball for a friend. You are using the brass end to secure the ball puller. The pull is stout, very stout, you have to hook your RR on a fence post and use full body language to remove the ball. Want to leave it all in the bottom of the barrel??
All my RR ends are pinned/glued and they all have been put to the test.
Larry
Thank you.
 
I hate to think of a ramrod tip coming off in the bore. When Virginia introduced ML season in the 70s, I bought a really cheap inline. I promptly got the ramrod stuck. Full charge in the bore because I thought you had to wipe before you shot. Tried and tried to pull it out. Finally I capped it and fired off the load and rod holding the muzzle straight up. I could not believe how high that rod went, much higher than I could shoot an arrow. I learned later how stupid that was.
 
I learned to sand the inside of the tip with coarse sandpaper to give the epoxy some bite, but drill and pin also. Before you do, look at the end grain of the tip of the ramrod. You want to check the orientation of the growth rings. They should look kind of like this: (III) . Drill the pin hole perpendicular to those growth rings. If you don't you can pull the pin right out of the wood if yanking hard enough.

I had that happen once on a used CVA Mt. Pistol I bought. It came with two free .50 maxie balls in the barrel but no powder. They had been there a while. I managed to pull one before the pin tore out of the wood. That pistol rod was one of the first I built decades back, and I did not think of grain orientation a the time. I cut off the boogered wood, rotated the tip so the existing pin hole was perpendicular to the grain and reinstalled it properly. Almost 10 years later that tip is still fine.

My $0.02. You get what you pay for. ;)
 
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