Getting Started
One thing I think is important when getting into muzzle-loading rifles is knowing what you are getting into. When I got started I was very uninformed, just a kid that liked watching Jeremiah Johnson and Last of the Mohicans. I wanted a Hawken or a Long Rifle. I didn’t even realize there were any other choices back then. Just a few years ago the choices in rifles was much simpler than now. You were getting into a blackpowder rifle with just two choices: traditional or inline.
Those two choices were about the firing mechanism, type of priming, and the path of the priming initiator to the powder. In traditional guns you chose between flintlock or percussion guns. The inline guns were largely synthetic stocked bolt action or break-open although a few other designs exist.
Traditional :
Inline:
Both the traditional and the inline were limited to using blackpowder or a blackpowder substitute powder like Pyrodex, Triple Seven, Black Gold, etc. Every one of these guns (modern manufacture that is) says so on the barrel but are NEVER TO BE USED WITH SMOKELESS POWDER. These powders are low pressure and low velocity. More than that they are corrosive. That is one of the things that pushed me away from them.
The other thing that pushed me away from them was bullets and the sabot. I truly did not know the sabot was the limiting factor until about 2011 (more about that later). My first muzzleloader was a Tradition’s .50 caliber Hawken percussion clone. I tried sabots with pistol bullets first and failed miserably. I knew nothing about sabot to bullet or sabot to bore fit at the time. I was just stuffing bullets and sabots in the gun and shooting them. Years later when I worked through high school and college in a gunshop I moved to Knight DISC rifles and while I knew nothing more about sabot selection I had much better success with Knight’s bullet and sabot offerings. They shot great (1 MoA or better) sometimes and not so great (3 MoA) other times. Now I suspect that it was mostly due to shooting too fast, generating heat, and sabot failure.
Eventually I moved to shooting full-bore lead conicals from Bull Shop and No Excuses in those guns, a T/C Omega, and a T/C Renegade fitted with a pair of fast twist .458 and .510 Long Range Hunter barrels with globe front and vernier rear sights I put together for western hunts. That transition fixed a lot of my problems: precision, accuracy, and consistency. The trade off was that the ballistic coefficient of the big slugs was no better than the Knight bullets, they were slower, and they generated much more recoil. Even though they shot much better I still hated cleaning them.
Around the spring of 2011 I was working for a guy who was dedicated to hunting big whitetail bucks in Tennessee and Missouri where he had previously been stationed. Those installations did not allow the use of centerfire rifles, just shotguns with slugs or muzzleloaders. What I did not know was that there were muzzleloaders that shot smokeless rifle powder, did not use sabots, or that they were legal for use anywhere much less where I was hunting. When he told me he used a smokeless muzzleloading rifle that shot bullets at 3000fps my reaction was, “ You are doing WHAT?”
The next day he brought in his Bad Bull Muzzleloader and a Savage ML-II for me to look at. The Savage looked like I was used to in a muzzleloader: used a non-4473 type action, used shotgun primers, was .50 caliber which required sabots, and the only difference was it used smokeless powder. The Bad Bull on the other hand was built on a Remington 700 centerfire action, was barreled with a Shilen barrel, used rifle primers, had a muzzlebreak, used a sizing die to fit the bullet to the bore to get rid of the sabot, and also used rifle powder but much slower powders and lots of it. Shooting them on the range at lunch was a game changer for me.
I spent the next several months researching these guns. The choices at the time were to buy either the Savage factory rifle, a NULA M209, build a gun based on either the Savage ML-II action or a Remington 700ML action as a DIY project, or spend considerably more (like twice as much) to have a gun built on a centerfire action. Being the type of guy who needs to tinker, test, and evaluate I decided one of each was the right answer. Knowing the centerfire was the most expensive and likely the slowest to acquire having built a number of custom metallic guns over the years I decided it should be last so that I could buy parts. Having dealt with NULA before when I “needed” a .257 Wby Mag I knew I would wait a bit before it shipped so placed the order with Mel for the M209 as it was pretty affordable compared to the centerfire based muzzleloader. While I waited on the NULA ,and began to decide exactly how I wanted to so the centerfire gun, I bought a used Remington 700ML rifle on GunBroker and stripped it to build a gun to work with in the interim.
More on gun choices next time and how they led to the BOMB.