What to do? Research led me to a company that makes dies to punch out caps from aluminum soda cans. They also sell the chemicals to make the priming material.

Another company offers a replacement for the percussion cap nipple that allows you to use #209 shotshell primers. This solution comes in two parts: First the replacement nipple that accepts the primer. On to that, another piece screws on that contains the firing pin that hits the primer when the hammer drops. I ordered one of these setups.

Since it had been nearly 30 years since my last one, I figured that I needed to get the original T/C manual, just to make sure that I was reminded about anything that I might have forgotten. These are available on eBay, in several editions.

An order to Midway USA got me a box of 100 .490 caliber lead balls and 3 boxes of Hornady Great Plains pre-lubed conical bullets, 20 bullets per box.

Then I needed a box to store all this stuff. MTM makes such a muzzleloader-specific box.

Pictured here are a number of the accessories that you might need to shoot or hunt with a traditional muzzleloader:

Let’s start with the upper left, moving right, then down to the second row. First are cleaning patches. When target shooting, I found myself swabbing the bore with a wet patch, then a dry patch after each shot. Otherwise, getting a patched ball down the bore gets tougher and tougher each time.

Next is a small spray bottle of “Moose Milk”, a popular black powder solvent. This is what I used to dampen the wet swab patches between shots to keep the bore clean.

Finishing the top row is the box of .490” lead balls and one of the boxes of the Hornady Great Plains bullets. Because you seat a lead ball on top of a lubed patch (shown below the Great Plains bullets), the balls need to be slightly undersized from bore diameter. The lubed patch takes up the difference and engages the rifling.

The Great Plains bullets have a slightly undersized and hollow base to allow starting a bullet down the bore, but the upper driving band is full bore diameter to engage the rifling. No patch is required, but savvy shooters often use a lubricated felt disc wad under the bullet, over the powder, to protect the pure lead base from the hot gas. I haven’t tried that yet.

Proceeding to the bottom row, left, is a one pound canister of Pyrodex RS black powder substitute. Back in my Grey Hawk days, I also only ever used Pyrodex. The RS stands for rifle and shotgun. This is equivalent to the FFg (“2F”) grade of black powder. These days, there are several additional new BP substitutes out there, but they may not ignite well with percussion caps. They may need the hotter spark of #209 primers. Again, I was going with what I already knew and was comfortable with.

To the right of the powder is an original T/C short starter. This was another eBay find, new, unused in original packaging. You can see how it is used to start a patched ball down the bore in the sequence of pictures below.

To the right of the ball starter is a capper. Those percussion caps are tiny little things, difficult to handle. The capper is basically a magazine for percussion caps that make it easier to place a cap onto the nipple. I’m not happy with this particular one. It doesn’t hold the cap at the end very tightly and they tend to fall off, which negates the entire point of it. I’ll be looking for something better.

The green tubular things are muzzleloading speed loaders. The cap at one end is labeled “powder” and the cap at the other end is labeled “ball”. You place a patched ball (or conical bullet) into the end labeled “ball” as if you were starting the projectile down the muzzle. Close the cap. Then in the end labeled powder, you drop your measured powder charge. Then cap that end.

These make it faster to reload your rifle in the field. Open the powder end and pour the powder down the muzzle. Open the ball-end cap, hold the speed loader over the muzzle and push the ball down through the speed loader into the muzzle using your ball starter. Use your ram rod as normal to get the ball or bullet all the way down to the breech end of the barrel.

Pictured below the speed loaders is a field flask for powder. The mountain men used a powder horn, but a hunter today doesn’t need to carry that much powder in the field. This brass flask only holds enough powder for maybe 10 shots. That’s more than enough, especially if you are carrying speed loaders with pre-measured charges.

In the round white tin below the lead balls, to the right of the speed loaders, are #11 percussion caps. Yes, I found some, but not in any store, nor online. At a recent club shoot I mentioned to Wade that I was getting back into muzzleloading, but that I couldn’t find percussion caps anywhere. It turned out that he had a stock of them. I happened to have a pistol scope that he could use, so we struck a deal that resulted in the pistol scope going to him, and some dollars and some percussion caps coming to me.

Below the tin of caps is a 3-in-1 combination tool. One end is a small hammer that allows the barrel wedge to be started out. Another end has a claw-fork to pull the barrel wedge all the way out. The barrel wedge is what holds the barrel into the stock. Removing the barrel from the stock is important for a thorough cleaning, which I will explain shortly. The third end of the combo tool is a nipple wrench to allow the removal of the nipple from the barrel.

Next is an adjustable brass powder measure. You may know that black powder and its substitutes are measured volumetrically, not actually by weight. This powder measure adjusts to measure from 30 grains to 120 grains in 10 grain increments. A typical charge for this rifle is from 70 grains to maybe 100 grains.

Finally, there are the pre-lubed patches used for shooting lead balls, already mentioned. By the way, a .50 caliber lead ball weighs about 177 grains. The Hornady Great Plains bullets weigh 385 grains, more than twice what the lead balls weigh.

Loading procedure: 1. Measure powder, drop down bore. 2. Place ball over pre-lubed patch over the muzzle.
3. Using the stubby nub of the short starter, seat patched ball down bore. 4. Using longer side of the short starter, push ball down about 4 or 5 inches. 5. (not shown) Push the ball all the way down using ram rod, seating firmly on top of powder. 6. Place cap on nipple.

Right now I don’t have any kind of a pouch for carrying supplies in the field for hunting. I plan on making myself some kind of a leather pouch, but probably not a purse style one that hangs over the shoulder as one pictures the mountain men of old using. I’m leaning toward a belt pouch, though I might add some D-rings to give me the option of attaching a shoulder strap if I later decide that’s what I want to do.

When the rifle finally arrived at my doorstep, it came through the U.S. Postal Service by the way, I found that it was in great shape - looked practically new. Then I ran some cleaning patches down the bore. They came out blackened. Uh oh. Somebody shot the gun then neglected to clean it before putting it away – a cardinal sin when it comes to black powder firearms. How long ago was that? Also, the rifle came from a moister place than the desert southwest – Georgia.

It didn’t take too many more solvent soaked patches before they started coming out clean, but then I shined a strong flashlight down the bore and saw ugliness. Not good.

I hold out hope though. I have some old military surplus rifles with rough bores that still shoot acceptably. Such are the risks when you decide to buy an approximately 35 year old black powder gun I suppose. I had hoped that since the outside looked well taken care of, that the inside would have been as well.

The first chance I had to shoot the New Englander was at the July 20th Combo Silhouette Match. I brought it out to show it off and of course to get first shots down range.

I took the first shot, then three other club members gave it a try. We shot patched round balls at the big pigs at 100 meters. None of us hit a piggy. It seemed that the sights were set to hit too high, and a bit rightward.

About a week later I decided to go up to the high country to put the rifle on paper to sight it in and to check grouping. I took my camper and stayed for a couple of nights. I spent most of a day shooting this rifle and getting re-acquainted with shooting a muzzleloader.

The first thing I tried to do was get velocities. I set up the LabRadar, but was not getting good results. Was the big cloud of smoke interfering with the radar signal? I only tried a few shots before giving up. I might give it another try the next time.

I shot patched round balls (PRB) for most of the day, chasing zero on the rear sight. For PRB, I ended up cranking the sight all the way down. In the end, it was a bit frustrating, as grouping sucked. Just when I thought I had it zeroed, I would get a flyer way off to the side, or the next several shots moved way over.

I was shooting at a round black bullseye target, 8 inches in diameter, at ranges between 65 and 85 yards. My modest goal was to get them centered in the black and keep them there, but that wasn’t happening.

I tested with various charge levels from 70 grains to 90 grains, even testing the 5 grain increments between the notches on the powder measure. None of that seemed to make a difference. I also experimented with different sight holds. The sight picture looks like this:

The rear sight appears as a shallow valley, with the front sight appearing as a ball on a stick. It seems that centering the ball in the valley left-right, should give you a fairly consistent windage hold, yet I was getting a lot of off-to-the-side flyers.

My first inclination was to bury the ball into the valley so that no stick is visible, however I later decided that some stick showing was better because you can then more precisely see that the front sight is centered in the valley for windage. But then that means that you don’t have a real positive reference for how high the ball should float above the valley for elevation hold.

Then I played around with the front sight ball covering the target bull, or should it form a figure-8 with the target bull? Halfway covering the target bull? If I could keep them all in the black, at least at 50 yards, that would mean that I could give javelina hunting with a muzzleloader another try, but so far, no luck with that.

I finished the day shooting 10 of the Hornady Great Plains conical bullets. I did seem to achieve greater consistency with these bullets than with PRB. These shoot a lot slower than the PRB because they are twice as heavy. I had to bring the rear sight up many clicks to get the holes into the black:

I wish I could tell you that those were two 3-shot groups with a sight adjustment in-between, but it wouldn’t be true. At least the windage showed good consistency among my final six shots of the day.

I had taken about 50 shots over the course of the day, and though I had been swabbing the bore between shots, the crud was really starting to build up around the nipple and the back of the barrel (see lock area smoke in the first photo). I decided that it was time to quit and give the gun a good cleaning.

The time tested technique for cleaning a traditional muzzleloader is to remove the barrel from the stock and soak the breech in a bucket of hot water, maybe with a little soap, and to pump the hot water up and down the barrel, through the nipple and/or nipple hole at the back of the barrel, using you ram rod, jag, and patches.

I like to loosen the nipple at first to pump the water through the nipple, and so that some water leaks past the nipple threads to clean them. Then I remove the nipple so that the water pumps through the barrel and breech with higher volume and velocity.

I found that a clean, unused, 1-gallon paint can from the hardware store is just about ideal for this task, as it can be heated on a stove burner. The hot water does a good job of heating the barrel, so that once you remove the barrel from the bucket, the water evaporates quickly. But most importantly, the hot water dissolves the corrosive salts deposited by burning black powder (or BP substitutes). After the barrel dries, you then dress the bore and the outside of the barrel with moose milk, bore butter, Ballistol, or other natural gun lube to leave a thin layer for rust prevention.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am a rank amateur at this muzzleloading stuff. I know just enough to be able to make it go BOOM, most of the time. There are nuances and subtleties involved in loading a traditional muzzleloader to achieve best accuracy. There is much to learn.

For example, after getting home from my disappointing range session shooting PRB, I read that round ball inaccuracy could be due to not centering the ball perfectly on a pre-cut patch when loading. A cure? Start the ball in a pre-lubed strip of patch material (“pillow ticking”) and cut off the excess with a knife flush at the muzzle before seating the ball fully down the barrel. That way, the patch wraps symmetrically around the ball every time.

Another thing I want to try is saboted .44 caliber pistol bullets. Saboted bullets are something that I never tried back in my Grey Hawk days.