Last week I discovered The Woodland Escape YouTube channel, created by Peter Kelly and Catherine Wolfe up in Ontario, Canada. I've been binge watching it since then. They've put out some great content on 18th and 19th Century living history. This morning I watched this one on what he carries in his shooting pouch and also about making them:
This is the kind of content that The History Channel should be showing, instead of Ancient Space Alien Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon. Two thumbs up!
Yesterday I got out to the range again with my flintlock longrifle for some more practice.
I had a hard time with all that yesterday. After shooting a rather crummy offhand group on paper I spent the rest of the time banging an 18" or so gong, which I was able to do regularly.
That said, a mediocre day at the range beats a good day in the office!
The Delrin ramrod I fitted to the gun a week and a half ago got its initial use. It's whippier than I'd like but I don't need to worry about it breaking on me.
One thing I noticed was that with the October Country Bumblin Bear Grease lube I was using, the rifle develops a crud ring of fouling a few inches down the bore if I didn't wipe between shots. Even though the rifle's muzzle is coned, I found myself using a short starter to get the ball past that ring of fouling.
I also tried using spit for patch lube and wiping between shots. For targets this seems to work fine. I'll note that the cotton flannel cleaning patches don't have much of a taste but the pillow ticking I use for shooting patches is a bit tangy.
Another patch lube I've used in the past is 100% pure neatsfoot oil. I was able to fire over 20 shots without wiping, but that was before I had coned the muzzle and used a short starter as a matter of course. I plan to try it again and see if I still get that crud ring.
Last week I joined the Pennsylvania Federation of Black Powder Shooters, and I'm looking forward to getting the booklet they publish which lists matches. I'm hoping to find a woods walk or two within reasonable driving distance of southeast Pennsylvania, so I want to get my loading from the pouch routine dialed in.
Last Friday a friend and I went to his cabin on 65 acres in Tioga County, PA for the opening of firearms season. We hunted Saturday and again on Sunday but then really bad rain blew in and we bailed.
He missed a big buck at ~210 yards Saturday morning (for which I busted his chops) and the rest of the deer we saw over the weekend were does. Both of us already tagged out on does during the early muzzleloader season, so they all got to walk. We may go up again for flintlock in January.
Anyway, Friday night's dinner was backstrap from the fat corn-fed doe I shot in October.
We cooked it on the cabin's wood stove, along with sliced red potatoes, onions, and garlic.
Paper plate, because it's a primitive cabin with no running water and we like to limit the dishes we need to wash.
This was one of the best pieces of meat I have ever had. Absolutely no gaminess and if I didn't know better, I would have thought it was top quality beef.
How to make for those so inclined:
How we made the side:
Proceed to stuff your face.
Serves two.
My longrifle, which is a reworked Dixie Tennessee Mountain Rifle, came with the original ramrod. It was made of some mystery wood by Miroku and was 9mm in diameter (a standard metric dowel size). I've managed to damage a ramin wood replacement that I bought several years ago and then this happened yesterday at the range with the original rod:
(Several years ago there was a shortage of hickory ramrods so ramin was offered as a replacement. IMHO, it is inferior to hickory.)
Thankfully, I didn't get stuck. Last night I ordered a couple hickory replacements from Track but I later also found a Delrin 9mm rod that I'd bought from them but never fit to my rifle, and forgot about. I fixed that this morning.
The brass tip was not pinned to the rod which is a recipe for losing it down the bore. The tip has a snug fit on the rod but I drilled a hole and pinned it with a piece of .098" diameter brass rod, peened over on both ends.
Thin Delrin ramrods tend to be whippy but won't break. They are less abrasive to the bore than fiberglass or aluminum. I'll be more comfortable taking the rifle into the woods with this ramrod in place.
I took this afternoon off and went to the range with my longrifle, having coned the muzzle for easier loading last weekend. As others have reported and I hoped, the group size and point of impact were unchanged at 50 yards. This target was shot offhand at 50 yards with .490 patched round balls on top of 70 grains of 3Fg black powder. The bullseye is 5.5" in diameter. My point of aim was at 6:00.
I also got the chance to use the M-1817 style worm I recently bought from Track of the Wolf. In the 18th and early 19th Centuries, cloth was too expensive to waste in cleaning gun barrels, so tow was wrapped around a worm and used to scrub out the barrel. Tow is waste material left over from processing flax or other fibers. The stuff I have is hemp tow.
Back in the 18th - 19th Centuries in the US, most rifle shooters did not use short starters. Instead, most rifles had internally coned muzzles. In other words, the muzzles were funneled so that a patched round ball could be started with thumb pressure, and then seated home with the ramrod. Eventually barrel coning fell out of favor but has been rediscovered in the past couple decades.
Cabin Creek Muzzleloading list barrel coning as a service. There are also a couple of tools you can buy that will allow you to do it yourself. I recently purchased one of these from Joe Wood, who posts under the name "flintsteel" on the Muzzleloading Forum. There is a thread about purchasing the tool, here.
I should note that when I mailed Wood my check he was away on vacation. He called to let me know that there would be a delay, and after he returned from his cabin he called to let me know that he was shipping the tool I ordered. I couldn't be more pleased with his service.
This morning I finally got around to using the Wood tool to cone the muzzle of my George Dech Pennsylvania rifle. This pic is a few years old, taken while hunting at my friend's land in Tioga County, PA.
The tool is a tapered brass mandrel that you afix a piece of wet/dry sandpaper to using carpet tape or an adhesive. I tried both and carpet tape is much better. I used three grades of paper: 220, 320, and 400 grit.
You will also need a tap wrench to use as a handle for rotating the tool. Wood recommends dismounting the barrel from the stock and rotating both the tool and the barrel simultaneously, in order to grind out the cone evenly.
Before starting I pushed a couple cleaning patches down the bore to a little below where the tool stopped, and left them there. This way they'd catch grit and metal particles and can be removed later with a patch worm.
The instructions state to periodically check your progress with a ball and patch. I used a .490 ball and dry 0.020" patch material. Once you can seat it with a dry patch about halfway it's done. However, I went further and can fully seat the ball. I did this because I want it really easy to seat, especially since I normally use 0.018" pillow ticking for patches, lubed with Track of the Wolf's Mink Oil Tallow, or October Country's Bumblin Bear Grease.
I wound up using three pieces of 220 grit, three of 320 grit, and two of 400 grit. The 220 is what does the bulk of metal removal while you polishing with the higher grits. After two rounds with 400 grit, the coned out area shined like a mirror.
Over on YouTube, Mike Beliveau did three videos on coning a rifle barrel with Joe Wood's tool and shooting it afterwards.
I recommend watching the first video before using the tool.
After I get to shoot the rifle I'll post a follow up.
The leaves on the magnolia tree in front of my house finally all fell on Friday and yesterday we found these:
Not one, but THREE hornet nests in one tree. The one in the middle is huge, at least 18" tall by a foot wide. Never seen nests close together like this.
Yeesh. I've lived in this subdivision since 1979 and never saw even one hornet nest until about 15 years ago.
I was running a leaf blower underneath them last weekend, and my lawn guy was here Thursday mowing. Both those activities are known to aggravate hornets so I'm virtually certain the nests are no longer active.
We had a couple hard frosts a week or so ago so I think they are just about dead. However, I hosed them down with wasp spray (I have a pole that holds the can and allows me to get it right up to the nest). I saw one hornet come out of the nest on the right when I sprayed, but nothing else.
It's going to be warm this week but hopefully it'll cool off again next week and I can take them down.
They'll give me a nice supply of wadding material for my muzzleloaders. They can be used between the powder charge and a patched roundball, or over-powder and over-shot wads in a smoothbore. I've been wanting to try that for awhile so I'm not entirely unhappy about finding these things out front.
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