Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders How long do you keep your flintlock loaded during hunting season?

When hunting season starts (and barring hunting in the rain) how many days will you leave the powder and ball in before changing them if you cover the flash hole when not hunting?

I keep It loaded until I either shoot it or the season ends. Unless I have gotten into rain, or other moist area where I think it may have drwn moisture. I just make sure to keep the touch hole clean and a fresh prime in it.

I clear at the end of a day and load fresh the next time I go out...deer season runs from early October through January 1st.

Season here means a 2-day weekend so I leave it loaded for the entire season...

muzzleloaderman,
How long is your season?

deer is the 9th-30th of november and elk is 2weeks

I am new to muzzleloading. I don't own a flinter, but have a friend who has. He says in a fouled bore chamber(not wet with lube), and loaded with real Black Powder, you can keep it loaded a long time if precautions are followed such as keeping it in a dry place when not hunting. He pushes the quill end into the flash hole to plug it.

I left my Hawken 50 cal Perc. loaded for 4 months. I fired the gun a couple times just before going hunting to foul the bore and loaded the gun. I put a wad down on top of the charge and the lube from the patch seasoned the bore down to the ball so it wouldn't rust. I lowered the hammer down on a piece of leather over the niple.

When I shot the gun a couple weeks ago (I live in Idaho, the temp was then about 10 deg.), the gun went off right now, just like it always has with a fresh charge. That was with 777 which I have found to be nearly as fast to light up as Black powder.

I'm curious too to see how you Flinter shooters care for you Flintlock rifles, as I want to buy one. Looking right now at a Lyman Great Plains Flinter 54 cal. Are they any good for the money? I hate to out lay lots of money on a custom job. Ross Seyfried says a good Flinter goes Bang everytime and goes bang right now!

CM

Ross is right...ignition speed is everything.

I dont know much about the 777 or any of the other brands besides true black powder. Its all I have ever shot. Is there much of a difference?

Real BP is the fastest, most consistent powder...ie: Goex is outstanding...and it's about half the price of BP substitutes.
I will say that I used to use Pyrodex-RS for a few years in TC Hawken percussions until I switched to Flintlocks & Goex.
I found Goex to be so much better and 100% reliable that I switched all my percussions from the substitute to Goex.
One thing about real BP is finding someone locally who sells it...people sometimes have to mail order it (I order it by the case, $9/Lb delivered price and can afford to shoot a lot more)

in our black powder club we can order goex through it.

I have a Lyman Deer Stalker .54 flinter and it has a very fast lock time. I recently found that a new frizzen plate helped make it more reliable and quicker. I think I scraped through the hardened surface on the old one?? Can anyone verify my findings. Buy the trade rifle, you will not be unhappy. Mark.

With todays rifles, normally a frizzen is hardened thru & thru, not a surface hardening. Some guys do the Kasenite thing but I have never found a reason to do it. IMHO your old frizzen was most likely not hardened well in the beginning or it was not the same geometry as the new one, as a very slight difference can make a world of change.
Sometimes on old rifles you see a frizzen shoe (new face) sweated onto a frizzen. Most of the time this was not to give it a harder face, but rather to replace the removed metal from thousands of firings, thus putting back the correct angle of the face of the frizzen to make the lock perform properly.

I have a Lyman GPR with over 5000 shots from the same lock & it is all original. It looks like H but it still fires each time & I will continue to use it til it dies, then I will buy a new frizzen for it.

One thing that will help the life of your frizzen is to reposition it about every 20 shots & use the entire face of the frizzen by moving the flint back & forth so it hits different places on the frizzen. If the flint gets to tracking in one place all the time, you get less sparks & all the wear in one area.


Getting back to the original post & question....... I have left my ML loaded for a week at a time with no ignition problems (years ago) but now I try to shoot it every evening after the hunt. I have left it loaded 3,4,5,6,7,days & it has Always went off when shot, it is just that I feel I need all the practice I can get off hand, so when I come in from hunting at dark, I turn on the spotlight at the range & shoot at a small spinning target. Or I may take a shot at the 100 yard dinger plate just for fun, but I like to shoot the rifle at least one time a day...... If I am hunting someplace where I don't have a target, I just pick a leaf on a bank or something before dark when I can still see..... At that late it is too dark for me to make a sure kill shot on a deer with open sights anyway & I dang sure don't want to track one at night, so I would rather work on the marksmanship.

Birddog6

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