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Muzzle Loader Building

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Bill Raby's 4 Bore Rifle Build - Part 36

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Bill continues his 4 bore rifle build this week as finishes installation of the butt plate, and continues work on his ramrod. Bill is making the ramrod out of an ebony board, should look great!!

Watch the next episode today!

Help support this channel to keep the videos coming. Members get to watch the videos as soon as the editing is finished: https://www.patreon.com/BillRaby

National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association: https://www.nmlra.org/

American Long Rifles Forums: https://americanlongrifles.org/forum

This project is a flintlock 4 bore English rifle. It’s an elephant gun. These were the largest hunting rifles to ever be in general use. This one will represent one that would have been made around 1840. At that time the percussion rifles were much more common, but 4 bores were made in flintlock in small numbers right up until the time cartridges became available. I will be trying to keep it as historically accurate as I can.

I am not an expert at this. I am not going to show you the right way or the best way to do this. I am just showing you how I am doing it. There are a number of books and videos out there about how to build guns. Every one of them is going to show you a different way to do things. Study all of them and decide what way is going to work best for you.

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 8: Staining, Oiling and Finishing the Stock

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 8: Staining, Oiling and Finishing the Stock

With our hardware finished, we’re ready to move onto finishing out stock. In the previous parts of this series, we’ve done a lot to this stock to make it fit and feel right, but the stain and oiling is going to be the most dramatic change, so buckle up and let’s get to it.

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 7: Bluing your Barrel

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 7: Bluing your Barrel

Next on our list here is bluing the barrel, barrel rib, tang, and any other “white” iron pieces like screwheads. First though we are going to soak a cotton ball in some rubbing alcohol and wipe down all the pieces we want to blue. This is going to clean off any dust or dirt from the shop, but also remove any skin oils or other oils that may be on the parts to give us our best shot at an even blued finish.

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 6: Preparing your Stock for Stain

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 6: Preparing your Stock for Stain

When it comes to your stock finish, a lot of the process comes down to personal choice. For my kit, I’m going to do a little sanding, some whiskering, some scraping, and some burnishing. To start though, we’re going to get a nice even surface on the stock with some sandpaper.

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The Kibler Hawken Kit - Is there one on the way?

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Earlier today on the Muzzleloading forum there was a post about Jim Kibler sharing a Hawken kit. A Kibler quality Hawken kit would be a welcome addition to the Hawken kit market, giving many whos first muzzleloader was a hawken, the chance to relive their original building experience.

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 2 | The tools you'll need

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Part 2 | The tools you'll need

In this video, we walk you through all the tools you’ll need to build this kit. This video was made after the kit was finished so we could accurately show you all the tools used. The basic list provided by Traditions is enough to get started, but we found there are some more tools that can really help the building process of one of these kits.

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken

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Let's Build a Traditions St. Louis Hawken

In this series, Muzzle Blasts Field Agent Ethan cracks open a Traditions St. Louis Hawken Kit and builds it. These kits are a simple and affordable way to get started in muzzleloading, and kits are bigger than ever with COVID 19 keeping many at home.

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[VIDEO] Kibler Kit Assembly Class Day 4 - Easy ways to add detail to your Longrifles

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Day 4 of our Kibler Kit Assembly class with Mike Brooks and Wayne Estes has come and gone. Students spent the day rounding the final bend on their rifles, finishing additional carved details, and started tweaking ramrods to fit snuggly in their pipes.

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[VIDEO] 2020 Kibler Kit Assembly Class with Mike Brooks Day 3

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In case you missed it, we’re continuing with our video coverage of the Kibler Kit assembly class with Mike Brooks. During day 3, students begin staining their stocks, aging brass and we follow Mike as he helps a student repair a crack in their stock.

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The Twentieth Century Story of Two Extraordinary Frontier Guns, Part 1 Wallance Gusler

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The Twentieth Century Story of Two Extraordinary Frontier Guns, Part 1 Wallance Gusler

The '·pursuit of happiness" presents an endless array of opportunities. Over sixty years ago the pursuit of the 18th­ century American frontier became the major direction of my life. The two flintlock firearms that are the focus of this se­ries (figs. 1 & 2) are extremely important as landmark sur­vivals of the mid-18th-century frontier. They represent the conflict between Colonialism, becoming Americans, and the collision with American natives.

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Bill Raby's 4 Bore Rifle Build - Part 20

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Bill continues his 4 bore rifle build this week as he finished up the rivets on the barrel rib and bedded the barrel into the stock.

Bill notes that the bedding of the barrel to the stock diverges from the historical accuracy of the rifle, but the amount of recoil this gun will put off really warrants the modern bedding.

Watch the next episode today!

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New Discoveries Alter Old Perceptions of Indiana Gunsmith Washington Hatfield Part II

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Despite substantial information surviving on George Washington Hatfield himself, only a handfitl of his rifles were known until recently. This two part article re­examines the work of Indiana’s “Wash" Hatfield in light of two recent discoveries. In Part I we took a look at the two newest Hatfield Finds, in Part II we will take a look back at the other known Hatfield rifles to get a better understanding of the scope of his rifle building skills and his place among Indiana rifle makers.