Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders Storing your muzzle loader

My protocol is to snap a couple caps and then swab the bore with acetone before leaving the house, to clear oil out of things. When loading before stepping into the woods I'll dry fire it again and then load it. I figure the greased patch will leave enough protective coating for a day of walking (stumbling) around.

For storage I merely use CLP in the bore and have never had an issue in over 40 years since I started using it.

Once I CLEAN my M-L, when it will sit a while(months) I go a little heavy on the oil in the bore. I will patch & dry everything before I load again.

Most of the times it’s just extra Hoppes 9 inside.

Don't blame the cleaning storage regimen...caplocks are notoriously unreliable as everyone knows.

One things for sure, everyone has their own "method"!

I do the same except with a dry patch pushed down in the barrel. Holds that fire right in the nipple and snail where I want to make sure no oil is at.

Bore Butter works very well if you use it very correctly. Anything mis-used tends to mis-function. I've been using bore butter since the mid 90s with no problems. You're supposed to snap some caps on the nipple before loading to be sure the nipple and "channel" are cleared. If you did that at all, your results prove you did it poorly. Since I don't like leaving potentially corrosive residue in the gun, I do something a little different. I clean with hot water and #13, then swab the inside .. and outside .. of the bore with bore butter while the barrel is still so hot the bore butter melts .. then after it cools, I wipe off the excess and swab out the excess with patches. I clean the nipple separately with boiling water and paper towels, etc to be sure it is clean, then use a little bore butter as anti-seize on the threads before reinstalling the nipple. When that is all done, my extra step is to "squirt" some CO2 via a silent ball discharger through the nipple to clear the channel. When it is time to load the gun to hunt, I run 1-2 more dry patches through the barrel just to clean up anything that I missed before and I repeat the CO2 treatment to clear the flash channel without getting residue from popped caps in there corroding things. May not be the very best but it is the very best I've found and it **works**. I can't think of the last time I had a first-try misfire with a clean gun. I'll get maybe 1-2 per 100 shots with a slightly dirty gun (I do a fast wet-swab + dry patch between shots) which I attribute to either not seating the cap firmly or some other moron stunt. The first one goes bang, always, always.