Muzzle Loaders

I'll get back to Uncle Ken's topic later, right now I want to answer Old Dog's muzzle loader questions.

I have not heard of the Savage 10ML-II until now. I will be going to the Savage website one of these days to look up some of their other guns, so I may learn more about their new muzzle loader in the process. Most modern muzzle loader shooters use a black powder substitute, called "Pyrodex". Well, Pyrodex is a brand name and there are others, but it has become a generic term for all of them like Kleenex has become a generic term for all facial tissues. I think the advantage of Pyrodex is that it burns cleaner and is less corrosive than black powder. Other than that, it is supposed to be the equivalent of black powder, measure for measure. It is important to precisely measure your powder charge each time you load, not only to prevent exceeding the safety limit, but also to insure consistent accuracy. Different guns and different bullets shoot better with different powder loads, so you need to experiment to find the optimal load for your particular gun. Modern smokeless powder burns much faster than black powder or Pyrodex, which is why it is not recommend. Shooting a muzzle loader gives the illusion that it's more powerful than it really is because it produces visible smoke and a sound that is more of a boom than a bang.

As the name implies, you load a muzzle loader from the muzzle. First you pour in your measured powder, then tap the but of the stock on the ground a few times to make it settle in. Then, if you are shooting a round ball, you place a cloth patch on the muzzle and push the ball down into it. The sabot bullets don't need a patch because the plastic sleeve does that job. Either way, the purpose is to make the bullet fit tight, but not too tight in the barrel. Then you push the bullet down the barrel with your ramrod until it makes firm contact with the powder charge at the bottom. A certain amount of compression is required to make the powder burn quickly and uniformly.

Now you need a source of ignition. The old flintlocks struck a spark with the hammer, and this spark ignited a small amount of loose powder in the "pan". The fire was then supposed to travel through a tiny tunnel called the "touch hole" and ignite the main charge in the barrel. It didn't always make it, giving rise to the expression, "A flash in the pan". The next generation of muzzle loader was called a "cap lock". It replaced the flint and the powder pan with a percussion cap that fired when struck by the hammer. This cap fit snuggly over the touch hole on a device called a "nipple". It was more reliable than the flintlock, but you still got the occasional misfire when the spark didn't make it to the powder charge. The next generation, called the "in-line", improved that by eliminating the hammer, relocating the touch hole to directly behind the powder charge, and having the cap struck by a spring loaded bolt that traveled horizontally. About the time I bought mine, another improvement came out that made it obsolete. The percussion cap and bolt was replaced with a modern shotgun primer and  firing pin. The primer was loaded into a breach plug the same way you would load a shell into a break-open single shot, but the powder charge and bullet still had to be loaded from the muzzle.

About this time, a school of purists arose and branded all muzzle loader improvements beyond the cap lock as heresy. They say that shooting a modern gun that still technically qualifies as a muzzle loader is an abomination before the Lord. I can see their point, but I think that life, and deer season, is too short to fool around with unreliable guns like that. Mine still goes boom and makes smoke, and that's good enough for me.