ok, got a smoke pole

[recurve shooter]

sorry, no pics right now, got a different phone and i cant figure out how to post pics.  anyway, its a cabellas sporterized hawken, percussion, .58  cal. i have a few questions for yall. i tried asking a few on the muzzleloading forum but it didnt help much. anyway, patches, what do i use and how tight should it make the ball fit in the bore? second, lube. i havnt tried to make anything homemade yet, but i have some muzzleloading lube, but i dont really know what its based on, i think its petrolium based, and of course, i have bore butter, which i think can be used for lube??? and it has a replacement ramrod on it that falls out when you point the gun down. how do i fix that???

anyway, i really like the gun. not all trad but close, short little sucker, 28 inch barrel. double set trigger set finer than a frogs hair, which i love. the bore is chrome lined , adjustable sights, its outfited for a sling, and has a sling my uncle made for me years ago when he was in angola state pen on it. its sighted for a hundred yards, so at the fifty that ive been shooting it it hits 5 inches high or so. thats alot of drop! but anyway, it should make a good partner for my .44 bp revolver, and whas appropriatly dubbed, The Beast. 

[JW_Halverson]

Bore butter is a fine lube, never had any problem with it except that it is often liquid at higher summer temperatures.

Go back to your owner's manual and get the rate of twist for the barrel, you might have something that has a fast twist for shooting conical bullets rather than slow twist for round balls.  Or it might be a red-haired stepchild with a rifling twist rate that is in between meaning it won't stabilize maxi-mini-conical bullets for spit and spins roundballs so fast that you blow out your patching. 

If you are shooting a .570 roundball purchased from the store, it's going to be made of soft lead, almost elemental pure.  Nice advantage there is that the ball will "upset" or deform when the gun goes off.  The force of the black powder explosion behind the ball will cause the ball to flatten slightly at the back and squeeze outward to grip the rifling.  In my opinion, too many people claim that muzzleloaders (traditional ones) are tempermental and picky in their loads.  Ten thousandth patching should be just fine, easier loading than thicker patches.  THAT is very handy for that backup shot.

I own 4 different muzzleloaders and I find that they all change point of impact when I change somethign in the load, whether it be different sized ball, different thickness patch, different lube, etc.  But all loads shoot consistent patterns and the sights can be adjusted to compensate.  I have yet to find a load that sprays all over the target unless you count the one where I didn't use any patch at all.

Lastly, go load a tightly patched ball down the barrel without any powder behind it.  Yup, you heard me.  Then pour a little water with plenty of dish detergent down the barrel and practice pulling a stuck ball.  Sooner or later you are going to run a dry ball down the barrel, might as well get it over with while you are at home and no one is standing behind you at the range pointing and laughing. 

Smoke'em if you got 'em.

[Eric Krewson]

Just checked cabelas' website, your gun's rifling is 1 in 48 if it is the Hawkins and 1 in 28 if it is the Hawkins carbine.

1 in 48 will shoot balls or conicals, 1 in 28 is a conical barrel.

[Dane]

A good patch material is pillow ticking, always worked well for me.

Experiment with different loads and ball combinations, including minis, which dont need patching, as the base is hollow and expands into the grooves when you fire the piece. Place a large piece of white fabric, maybe a drop cloth, on the ground in front of your bench, and when you see unburned particles of powder, you know you have gone beyond what the gun likes, so reduce the load from there. The odds of you blowing up a modern barrel are pretty slight, so hefty loads are fine, even 125 or more grains of FF for that caliber.

The best advice for any muzzle loader is to clearn it religiously as soon as you are done shooting for the day, so you don't get pitting. The stuff is so corrosive, you cant be lazy on that part.

Dane 

[WOODSLORE]

I have a 50.cal hawken so maybe I can help.OK here goes, #1. patches first DEFINATELY use pillow ticking its what the mountain men used and you can get a crapload of the stuff for a few bucks. #2. Lube, mink oil and tallow are great(tallow you can getfrom fat from the butchers for free). #3. ramrod, take a little piece of leather and glue it to the rod track to tighten the fit. Hope this helps

[JW_Halverson]

Woodslore, do you have any first person documentation of "mountain men" or anyone's choice in pillow ticking.  The only specific documentation I have seen was thin leather (mentioned because they had run out of patching material but no mention of what patching material), and a few references of using shirt tails when they were late in season and low on supplies. 

Whatever your choice in patching, remember that the tighter it gets going down, the more you have to deform the front of the roundball pushing it down and seating it firmly on the powder.  Try using several different th8icknesses pre-cut patching and decide what you like best.  Then measure it with a micrometer and go to your local fabric store and buy a couple yards of tightly woven pure cotton cloth of a similar thickness.  You'll pay about $10 for 3 yds of fabric that will last the life of the gun vs $3.50 for 100 precut patches.

[Eric Krewson]

Walmart pillow ticking runs about .018 and is what I use in a .54 with a .535 ball. For patch lube I like Hoppes #9 plus lube and cleaner on the range and mink oil or natural lube for hunting because I may leave my gun loaded for a month or more.

I am a flintlock guy now but shot percussion for years.

Made this flinter last year from scratch(pile of parts and a block of wood), my first.

[HatchA]

That.....is beautiful!!!   

[recurve shooter]

cool. thanks guys. i got some cotton fabric from hobby lobby, lady said it was the thickest cotton material she had. it seems to be working pretty well. the guy has a 1 in 48 twist, and im gunna stick to roundballs if i can. im about to go load her up and shoot some more. 

Eric, that thing is SWEET!!!! 

[stickbender]

     Recurve, what the other guys said, and don't rely on the chrome barrel being a barrier from rust.  If it is only water, and no Black Powder, it is very minimal rusting.  But if you have black powder, and it gets moisture, from humidity, or where ever it "WILL" rust.  Stainless steel, reacts differently to black powder rusting, or sulphuric acid, which is what you get when sulphur and water mix, and sulphur is a component in black powder.  Stainless will have very little surface rust, but it will pit really bad.  So do as Dane said, clean it extremely well !!  I use hot soapy water, and remove the barrel, and the nipple, and stick the barrel down in a bucket of hot soapy water, and take the ram rod, and put a piece of cloth on it that will fit somewhat snug, and stick it down the barrel, and put the barrel in the bucket of water, and start pumping the ramrod up and down, and it will act like an old pitcher pump, and start drawing the hot soapy water up into the barrel, through the nipple insert, and you can bring it all the way to the top.  Do this for at least three to four minutes, or longer, then run a clean rag down the barrel, and it it comes out sooty, or streaked, repeat the hot soapy water process, and then when a clean rag comes out clean, put the barrel down into a bucket of hot clean water, and do the pumping action with it, till it comes out clear, and no soap.  You can just pour hot water down it also, to clean the soap out.  Then let sit upside down, for a few minutes, and then run a clean dry rag down it, and then when it is dry, run a lightly oiled rag down it.
You have a lot fun ahead of you.  Dirty, but fun! Don't forget to clean the nipple also.  And it would be a good idea, to get an extra nipple.
                                                                                      Wayne

[recurve shooter]

stickbender, thanks, i'll clean it like that. i know it'll rust bad. 

ok so i upped the charge to a hudred grains FF, and went out back and shot it about twenty times. (ouch.  )
here are the results. i was shooting off of a little sapling tree. not perfectly stable but close. at something like thirty or fourty yards i was grouping high left. i got it tuned it hitting bulseye, but every shot varied by about an inch in random directions. i decided i was content with that, as the inch or so varriation may have been me, and moved a target out to about a hundred and twenty yards, cuz i was currious. first shot off my sapling rest compleatly missed my one by 3 foot backstop. so i reloaded and layed prone, proped on a stick (that hurt even worse lol) and let her rip again. that shot hit dead on as far as windage, but about a foot high. after all that i looked for some spent patches, and found a bunch of pieces of patch. its demolishing my patches. so i guess my cloth isnt thick enough, i would assume that would account for my troubles huh? 

[mullet]

 Try running a cleaning patch after each shot. The more you shoot, the more residue you build up in the barrel. This causes you to have more back pressure and will make your shots start climbing or shoot erratic.

[recurve shooter]

will do mullet. ok so my walmart dont have ANY fabric, so i cant get ticking there, and hobby lobby seems to have everything EXCEPT ticking. 

[mullet]

 Cut up some cotton sheets or pillow cases.

[recurve shooter]

would that be much different from the cotton cloth i bought? it seems like it would work well but it desentigrates in the barrel when it shoots and i tried to like double-patch it but i cant get it to go down the barrel with tow patches around it.