A Touch of Modernity

Modernity can set you back.

Awhile back, my uncle sent me a replica muzzleloading rifle that he built from a kit some years ago.  It’s a Hawken plains rifle, and in 1833, it would have been the finest gun a mountain man could have hoped to carry.  It is still an aesthetically pleasing rifle.  It is short but well-balanced, so that it seems to rise naturally to your shoulder and remain steady when aimed.  It has a blued octagon barrel, graciously-shaped hammer, filigreed lock, a dark wooden stock and brass trimmings.  Small wonder that the Hawken plains rifle (like the Model 1894 Winchester that I wrote about last month) has become an American classic.  It is often said to be the most copied weapon in the history of firearms.

The lock on the Hawken.

But if a gun won’t shoot it’s nothing but a bulky paperweight, so the first thing I did was load up the gun and start blasting lead into the trees in the yard.  And the Hawken can do that effectively.  It is fun to shoot.  With blackpowder, there’s a gratifying ka-pow sound, unlike the sharper crack of a modern rifle, and a big plume of smoke and the smell of rotten eggs.  When you shoot a blackpowder rifle, you feel like you’ve done something.  But with repetitive firing, the drawbacks of a muzzleloading gun were quickly evident.  It was taking me several minutes after firing the gun until I was ready to shoot again.

Loading and firing the Hawken.

Shooting the Hawken at night.

Part of the problem, of course, is inherent in a muzzleloader.  It takes time to measure powder, pour it down the barrel, set a patch and ball on top of the muzzle, ram them down the bore, cock the hammer, and replace the percussion cap.  An experienced rifleman in the 1800s, using pre-measured powder, could fire 2-3 shots per minute.  But I wasn’t even coming close to that.

Another part of the problem was that blackpowder, in addition to sounding really cool when it explodes, making awesome clouds of smoke, and looking totally sweet when you shoot it at night, creates lots of barrel fouling.  Instruction manuals on shooting muzzleloaders note the problem.  After firing, the powder sticks in the bore – that is, the inside of the barrel – and it’s hard to ram the next patch and ball down the barrel because the stuck powder effectively diminishes the diameter of the bore.  In most rifles, that meant that after every 3 or so shots, the shooter had to use the ramrod and a piece of cloth to wipe the bore clean.  With a particularly tight-fitting patch and ball combination, the shooter might have to wipe the powder residue out of the bore more often.  I had to clean the bore every other shot, and even then getting the second ball seated atop the powder charge was difficult.  I ended up swabbing the bore every time I pulled the trigger.

Blackpowder, I had read, was also highly corrosive.  After every shooting session, you had to clean the bore completely.  That meant disassembling the rifle, submerging the barrel in soap and hot water, pumping a cloth up and down inside the barrel to clean it, then rinsing the barrel out and, after it dried, running a solvent-covered patch down the bore.  That process, I found out after sinking lead balls into the trunks of the nearest trees, took a long time.  Twenty minutes or so.  And that set me to thinking: I don’t believe the mountain men did this.  They kept their rifles loaded almost all the time.  Many of them slept with their rifles.  They were not near bathtubs with hot water taps, so I know they weren’t unloading the guns for cleaning every night.  But I’d never heard of a mountain man’s barrel rusting out.  Moreover, when hunting buffalo or fighting with Indians, the mountain men often fired several rounds in succession.  I had never heard of them pausing to swab their bores while galloping in the middle of a buffalo herd or hunkered behind a fallen log with arrows flying overhead.  It didn’t add up.

So it was an ah-hah moment when I read about non-petroleum-based solvents.  Apparently what really causes the extreme fouling that I had experienced in the Hawken was not simply blackpowder, but the way that blackpowder interacts with petroleum.  Blackpowder only fouls the rifle so badly as to require swabbing between shots if your bore is coated with petroleum, and only becomes so corrosive as to require daily cleaning if it interacts with a petroleum-based lubricant.  With non-petroleum-based lubricants and solvents you don’t have to follow such an aggressive maintenance schedule.  The mountain men didn’t have petroleum-based products because the purportedly superior oils hadn’t been invented yet.  I ordered some non-petroleum-based material from Thompson-Center, the manufacturer of the rifle.  In keeping with the unacknowledged sexual innuendo that pervades the argot of blackpowder shooting – “before you cock the gun, put the ball just inside the hole and push really hard with the ramrod” – the substance was called, apparently without a sense of irony, “Natural Lube 1000 Plus.”  Most muzzleloader shooters, I guess, are above making sophomoric jokes about the language of their sport.  But in any case, the modern stuff was disadvantageous and the old-fashioned lubricant works better.   It makes it easier to slide the ramrod all the way in.