Bevel Brothers Reload 

Bevel Brothers 

This article appeared first in the March, 2021 issue of Muzzle Blasts Magazine

Bevel Down:  Spring will be here before you know it, folks. In hopes that the 2021 shooting season is better than what we got in 2020, we want to talk about pre-season preparation this month.  For us, the chunk shooting sea-son starts mid-March with the Wahpanipe Muzzle Loading Club’s Hog Shoot at Allen Coon’s farm. Most years it’s perfectly timed to precede by two weeks the big Alvin York chunk match in Pall Mall, Tennessee. The Hog Shoot always gives us (and a few dozen other chunk shooters) our first chance to limber up our chunk guns and shoot an actual ten-shot match before the York.

For us, this first shoot is not just a warm-up, but usually the only fifteen or so practice shots we get all winter. The usual routine for us is to shoot the last match of the season in Oc-tober, clean the rifles and put them away till late February or early March when we get them out for a quick tune-up before the rigors of the summer match season commence.

Hard working match guns like ours lead a hard life in all sorts of arduous weather and through many marathon stints on the line. Ten or fifteen shots at a time, of course.  And they tend to show their age after a while. They also tend to suffer wear and tear to various semi-fragile parts that require attention in order to keep working as intended.

Over the years we’ve both had mechanical failures on the range. Too many of those failures have happened in the middle of matches or record relays, which is why we’re talking about preventative maintenance now instead of this summer in the middle of shooting season.

Bevel Up: Every year I would (and still do) get real excited about getting back outside to the range and then off to the first big shoot. It’s even more exciting this year because we pretty much blanked out the entire, miserable year of 2020. In years past I would look at my rifles there on the rack in the basement and see that they looked pretty much exactly like they did when I put them in there the previous November. And then I would pretty much just stay excited about the new season coming without doing much more than slipping the guns into their cases the day before we headed out.

That was until one time a some twenty years or so ago at the big Alvin York chunk match when I added about six inches to my string measure because my gun went off prematurely (not just once but twice, mind you). I took the rifle off the line and pulled the lock. Turned out, a little piece of wood had flaked off of the stock inside the lock mortise and gotten jammed down in the sear so that the sear didn’t fully engage the tumbler notch.

The first time it went off I had the rifle resting on the chunk and had just gotten down on the ground behind the gun and gotten myself situated when I reached up to pull the hammer back to full cock. I grabbed the hammer and pulled it back to full cock and when I let go it just flew right on forward into the frizzen and set the gun off (which sent the ball whistling off into the trees instead of into my target). Scoring rules at most chunk matches, like this one, add three inches to the string of any shot that fails to hit inside the ring on the X target.

Like a dummy, I thought it had just been my accidentally not pulling the hammer all the way back to half cock that had let it go off. So, thinking I knew what happened, I didn’t check the gun or the lock, but just went ahead and posted a new target for the next match and loaded as per usual. I set the gun down on the chunk, primed the pan and closed the frizzen. As soon as the frizzen slapped shut, the hammer fell out of half cock and set off the charge – giving me yet another three inch shot without having even had the chance to look through the sights and give myself a legitimate miss.

Bevel Down: When we took the lock out of the gun to check things out not only did we find that little sliver of wood lodged in between the tumbler and the fly, but we found a nasty gob of iron oxide (a.k.a. RUST!) in, on, around, and under the bolster and mainspring. He was lucky the thing hadn’t frozen into a solid piece of steel and refused to function at all.

So there we have thing number one we check out in our pre-season tune-up: pull the lock out of the stock so you can see it. You can’t assume that everything is just as you left it some months or years ago. Lots of times I will use a gun on a hunting trip or a late season shooting match, and then when I get home I just clean the bore and park it in a corner down in the basement. I really intend to get back to it pretty soon and give it a good thorough cleaning, but sometimes I forget to remember it until a month or two or three later when I want to shoot it again. That’s where the tune-up can reveal problems. Sometimes the problems are new; sometimes they are just old problems that have gotten worse with time and use.

Personally, I recommend taking the lock completely apart once you have it out of the stock. You can’t always see all of the little parts of a lock until you have them out on the table in front of you.

I remember another time when I had a lock out to clean it up and had to take it apart to polish off some rusty gunk that had built up under the bolster and behind the main-spring. When I got the bridle off and pulled the sear out I noticed that a big corner section of the sear where it engag-es the tumbler had completely broken off! There was just a little part of the edge of the sear about 1/32 of an inch wide left to catch the tumbler and hold it cocked. That was an easy fix because I just had to order out a new sear and drop it in when it came in the mail a week later. But if I had waited until the night before the match to check it over, I would have been sitting out that match.

Bevel Up: Sometimes a tear-down like that brings so many problems to light that you wind up replacing a lock or sending it in for a complete rebuild. That happened with one of my favorite chunk guns. I had put about 2000 rounds through it without giving it much attention. Then the lock started acting up and not sparking right, so I took it apart to see what the problem might be. At that point I saw that the roller on the frizzen spring had frozen on its axle. That prevented it from actually rolling as the frizzen flipped open, so it just sat there and took the impact of the frizzen in the same spot every shot, which eventually resulted in

a big divot developing in the roller. That in turn made the frizzen catch and try to stop about three quarters of the way through its travel, which then transferred an extra mid-point impact to the hammer and tumbler. More shooting then resulted in the hole in the lock plate where the tumbler rides getting all wallered out into a sort of egg shaped oval.

The upshot of all that was that I had to send the lock out for a complete overhaul – it got a new frizzen spring roller, a new tumbler, and a bronze bushing where the egg shaped hole used to be. It all turned out fine and I’ve got a lock now that is better than when it was new, but if I’d just kept on shooting it until it stopped working it probably would have been beyond salvage.

Bevel Down: Flint shooters: while you’ve got the lock out, take a real close look at the touch hole. If it is just a hole drilled through the side of the barrel, make sure it hasn’t eroded or enlarged past what you originally intended it to be. Most touch holes work best if they are sized in around 1/16” or maybe 5/64”. If a touch hole gets any bigger than that you will probably start seeing accuracy decline. We discussed this in an article some time ago, but the problem with an enlarging touch hole is that it’s a circle and when a circle gets bigger the actual surface area opened up is much larger than you think. A circle with a 5/64” diameter is just under 25% wider than a 1/16th” circle but is over 50% larger in area.

But the absolute size of the hole isn’t the only thing to look at. Most flintlocks these days have a touchhole liner of some sort installed. Our favorite is the White Lightnin’ liner that Jim Chambers puts out. It is designed to put the powder charge as close as possible to the pan so as to minimize ignition time, but it is also made with very fine threads and a tight fit so as to reduce the chance of any gas cutting around the outside of the liner. What can happen if a liner isn’t tightly fitted into the barrel is that a tiny little gap between the lin-er wall and the side of the barrel will leak powder gasses under pressure. What starts out as an imperceptible, even microscop-ic leak can slow-ly grow into a very ugly fissure that cuts away a significant piece of your barrel. With the lock out, look very carefully for any sign of a gap between the liner and the barrel, and look especially carefully for any sign of powder gasses getting around the liner into the lock mortise area.

At the first sign of a leak around the touchhole liner, pull it out and replace it. At that point, you will probably need to enlarge the pilot hole for the liner and cut new threads so that you get a really tight fit when you screw in the new liner. I even like to put my liners in with a drop of anaerobic sealer (like Locktite) just to make sure there’s no chance of a gas leak or even any chance of bore cleaner or such getting into the threads. And while we’re on the subject I just say that, hands down, the Chambers White Lightnin’ touchhole liner is the best commercial liner available today – they even sell the right sized lettered drill and tap to go with it so the installation is good and tight.

And if you ever take out the breech plug, look it over for any sign of leaking or rust encroachment into the threads. Breach plugs generally seal up tighter than most of the touch hole liner arrangements I’ve seen, so they aren’t nearly so susceptible to gas cutting problems, but I still like to seal them up with Locktite or even lithium grease when I take them in and out.

You percussion shooters with drum and nipple set ups will want to pull the drum out of the barrel and check for the same sort of gas cutting. You can also at the same time check for stress fractures in the neck of the drum where it screws into the barrel and make sure the hole from the nipple through the drum and into the chamber is nice and clean and free of crud and corrosion. A drum left a little wet and dirty over the winter can turn up completely full of stuff growing in there – so full that you may actually have to drill the hole out to get it cleared.

Our buddy Paul Griffiths (an infamous and incorrigible percussion chunk shooter) was so fanatical about keep-ing that channel through the drum clean, he installed a knurled thumb screw on the end of the drum so he could take it out and clean inside the drum between shots.

One more thing for flint shooters… replace that greasy, thin, burned up piece of leather holding that flint in the jaws with a nice new one.  Cut a divot out of the back so you can snug the flint in closer to the top jaw screw if you have to.

Bevel Up: The next thing I do while I’ve got the lock out of the stock is pull the set trigger out. It has a spring and some moving parts that are subject to the same kind of rust and wear and interference as the lock so a quick disassembly, cleaning, and inspection is worth an extra 20 minutes.

After that I go over the stock and hardware real close. Stresses and strains get applied to a gun over the course of a year that we don’t always notice or appreciate. That’s especially true if you tend to travel by car with it packed in the trunk or the back of a truck.

I usually take all the hardware off and take the barrel out of the wood at least every couple of years just to see if there is anything bad happening in there out of sight. General-ly, I find nothing remarkable, but once in a while I find something that makes me glad I looked.

The weakest part of a traditional muzzleloader is in the lock mortise. Look for cracks and breaks on the underside where the trigger plate is inlet (especially if you are using a set trigger, because that requires the most wood removal), and at the nose and tail of the lock. Cracks tend to develop and grow in those areas with little or no provocation.

Bevel Down: I once had a crack develop up at the nose cap that was threatening to grow the length of the fore end. I was able to stop it with some glue and a couple of neatly applied little wooden pins, but if I hadn’t been look-ing really close it could have turned into a really nasty split down the length of the ramrod channel. Another good reason to take everything out of the wood is to check how the fastenings are holding up. I’ve discovered more than once that a barrel pin has been lost somewhere along the course of the year. And I’ve also found barrel staples that have come loose and are just being held in place by the pin through the stock. None of that is conducive to good accuracy.

Bevel Up: The last thing I always check is the sights. Sometimes you’ll find that banging around in the back of the truck, or just pushing a gun into a rack or bumping it into a wall or something will move one of the sights sideways in its dovetail, or bend it out of line a little. Just a little bit of a bend or twist in a sight can make the differ-ence between a hit and a miss, so check them really close.

And then, while you’ve got the barrel out of the wood

so it’s easy to clamp in a vise, you may want to consider moving that rear sight out a little further on the barrel where you can see it again. I’ve noticed over the years that the rear sights on guns I built back when I was 40 or 45 tend to have somehow moved too close to the breech so that I can’t see them so good any more. This is a good time to cut a new dovetail out there closer to the front sight and just move things out into clearer territory. The old dovetail can be filled with a nice piece of silver or gold from one of your old shooting medals or maybe a piece of a buffalo nickel or something for a nice decorative touch.

Bevel Down: That’s it for the gun, but I also give my shooting box a once-over. Mostly I just make sure every-thing is in there that’s supposed to be. Invariably at some point over the winter I will have grabbed the screwdriver or pliers I keep in there to fix something right quick and then forgotten to put it back. Usually the powder can have about three shots left in it and the only spare flints in the can are the “educated” ones I’ve tossed in there to be used again another time.

And here’s one last thing to do:  take every single item out of the box and turn it upside down. I was amazed one time how much powder fell out of there. It looked like half a teaspoon! I don’t know how it gets in there – I assume a little here and a little there sticking to your hands or inside a funnel or your measure. Regardless, it all adds up and I suppose it would be possible for a stray spark to fly into the box while it’s setting open on the bench - and then you might have a fire on your hands.

Bevel Up: One more thing while you’ve got all those pieces and parts out where you can see them it’s good to give everything a good scrubbing. I like to use a brass wire brush with some cleaning fluid to scrub off all the accu-mulated powder gunk and dirt, then wipe it all clean with a shop rag and some cleaning patches, then oil everything down real nice with Ballistol or some other light oil.  We’ve found that WD40 works fine for some things, but not guns. It will tend to dry out and gum up locks and triggers, so try to use a specific gun oil or Ballistol.  

For cleaners we use either the old Moose Milk formula (one part water soluble cutting oil, two parts Pinesol, 20 parts water) or a 50/50 mix of water and Simple Green.  You can use the commercial aerosol blaster cleaners but they’re more expensive.

Hope that helps. If it doesn’t help your shooting it will at least help keep you busy some rainy weekend.