Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders Sears 50 cal. Hawken muzzloader.

TC used to have their manual for the muzzleloaders on line.
Don't know if s&w screwed that up also .

Get yourself a bullet puller - it's a small attachment for your ramrod. It has a self tapping screw at the end and a brass disc as a bore guide. Usually works fine especially if you have a good ramrod. And your bore isn't crudded up.
Also, if you need to load up the nipple pathway, use fine powder if possible.

Yup. If you're shooting sabots, you'll pull the bullet out of the sabot, then have to screw it into the sabot and pull that out, too. I know this, because. ....a 1:48 should shoot a 230-250 gr. XTP, very well. I have 1 that will shoot a 300, but found that most will not. Stick with the XTP, not the pointy bullets. Pointed bullets have not stabilized well, in my 1:48.

According to the March 1980 American Rifleman 'NRA Test', The Browning Mountain Rifle was made for Browning by Arms Technology, Inc. in Salt Lake City, Ut. The barrel was cut rifled but the maker was not identified.

The barrels were supplied by a guy named Cheney and guess who he was friends with?....Doc White of GRRW. Around that time 1975 Green River brought out the Plumb Center barrels which where cut rifled. Before that they used Douglas and some made on P&W machines bought from Bill Large.

Chances are very good they used barrels or blanks sourced through Green River. Toby Bridges makes the same claim but i got my info from calling ATI. https://www.namlhunt.com/ml-collecting.html

Sorry for the off topic but i got additional info from the owner of ATI back then...Actually his son got it from his father who is now 86.

The barrels came from a small company in Heber Utah. Sadly his father could not remember the name of the company. Bliss Titus had a shop in Heber much earlier but thats all i can find atm.

With a 50 cal. round ball and 60 gr. of Goex with a 28" barrel, what is the Muzzle velocity?

Just about everybody "dry balls" a smokepole eventually! I like the CO2 cylinder method of squirting the ball out of the barrel. Places like Dixie Gun Works in Union City Tennessee sell that little accessory with either flint or percussion adapters. My Traditions .50 caliber flintlock likes 75-80 grains of 3-F Goex black powder. Patch thickness is important also- - - -just going from a .015" thick "dry lubed" denim patch to .017" tightened up the group on my competition chunk gun from a 2" group at 60 yards to less than 1/2". We swab the barrel with alcohol and several dry patches between every shot, and weigh pre-measured powder charges down to 2/10 grain accuracy for those rifles. Another sneaky trick is to put a couple of 1/4" thick felt wads between the powder and the patched ball to prevent patch burn-through on the way down the barrel. A lot of the target tricks also work on a hunting smokepole, since one shot is all a deer is likely to give you time for! The first one better count!
Jerry