Defective ramrod !

Normally I use wood or fiberglass range rods and have a bunch of them with different sizes of jags attached. I had one that was a factory built hollow aluminum rod with a brass end to screw your jag into. I put a nice chunk of antler on one end and made it into an attractive and usable rod. It worked well until the other day when I was sighting in a TC Hawken at my range. I got the rifle sighted in and was patching out the bore a little to clean it up while the fouling was fresh, before I got it home for a good cleaning. One patch was pretty tight down by the breech plug end, and when I bumped the rod a little harder to get it to come out, the brass end detached itself from the rod. I managed to get it out by working some powder through the nipple hole and shooting it out ( it buried itself about 4 inches into the sand by my feet ?)
looking at the end piece, it had a shallow groove around it that I guess was where the rod must have been pressed into, but it wasn't really even pinned on. This sort of product is totally unacceptable to me !

Yeah, that needs a pin. If the shoot out didn't damage it you can easily pin it along with a little epoxy.

Ruff up the insert and the inside of the shaft, then epoxy it back in, then cross drill and install a pin.

Carbon 6 said:

Ruff up the insert and the inside of the shaft, then epoxy it back in, then cross drill and install a pin.

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Carbon 6 said:

Ruff up the insert and the inside of the shaft, then epoxy it back in, then cross drill and install a pin.

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A little late for that....I put it under my knee, bent it in half and threw it into the trash ! I saved the antler handle and put together a new fiberglass one....with pins through it !

Stony Broke said:

fiberglass !

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Oh my ! The F-word.

Carbon 6 said:

Oh my ! The F-word.

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Sometimes it is the "F' word. some times it is the "E" word, "EMERGENCY ROOM".

No big deal and an easy fix but a bit of an overreaction on trashing the rod.

I simply don't trust the tips on any rod that I buy pre-made, or that come with the rifle/gun, unless they are pinned. I regularly install a pin on rods with tips that I have acquired, with the exception of two forged steel one-piece rammers for muskets, and a brass range rod. Too many times the ones that I got, or the ones that I made without adding the pin, have come apart, and Murphy's Law applies to muzzle loader failures too.

OH and Pedersoli Bess ramrods with the "button tip" added at the end of the rod....that often fails and I have to silver solder it back into place to make it stay.

LD

Loyalist Dave said:

I simply don't trust the tips on any rod that I buy pre-made, or that come with the rifle/gun, unless they are pinned.

LD

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That's the right idea.

Get rid of that rod and buy or make one with threaded ends. The buy a screw in jag. Thus way you won't lose it again.

I've made bunches of range rods over the years...I normally have a different one for every rifle. I always epoxy on the tips and then put a brass pin through them. This rod that gave me the problem was something that came along with a rifle I bought one time and I just assumed it was pinned since it had a small shiny spot on either side that resembled a pin. I want my stuff like this to work...without problems, and resurrecting the defective hollow rod just was not in my nature. The new rod I made up will last me for the lifetime of the rifle without giving me problems.

Loading with a defective rod can cause one to miss a deer at 50 yds.
(That's my storey and I'm sticking to it.)

I don't know about plastic rods or "defective" rods. Learned the hard way that leaving a jag attached to your under-barrel ramrod so that the jag extends beyond the muzzle can change the strike of your ball when you fire. I was hunting on a ranch up on the Pedernales, carrying my .54 J&S Hawken for her first hunt. She'd been well sighted in at 25 and 50 yards with the load I was using. When I swabbed the bore dry and loaded that morning, I left the jag attached to her ramrod simply so I wouldn't have to dig around in my possibles looking for it if needed. A good-sized buck came to me about first light and stopped not more than 30 yards away. He was facing me on a slight angle, quartered to my left. I rested the rifle barrel on a post with my ol' hat as a cushion and squoze the trigger, holding on the front of his left shoulder. Rifle went "BANG!" and I grounded the buttplate, reaching for my horn, and waited for that deer to fall down. Instead he went galloping off through the scrub as I poured another charge down. By the time I got reloaded my hunting buddy wandered up from his stand to help me dress out the meat --- he said he heard the shot. We went up to where the deer was standing and sure enough, there was his track. Couldn't find a trace of blood or hair, and from the tracks that buck was still gaining speed when he went over the rise. Later that day, I scrounged a piece of rusty roofing tin from a tumble-down shed nearby, propped it on a bush right where the deer was standing, and fired at a rust spot the size of my palm, shooting from the same spot with the same rest. The ball hit about 16 inches directly below the rust spot! I duplicated that result on the range several days later, then removed the jag --- only because it was the only thing different from when I sighted the rifle in --- and hit my mark. I was bumfuzzled! Got in touch with another friend who was also a college professor, showed him the results, and he looked surprised: "Well, naturally. The hot gasses from firing reflect off the surfaces of the jag and change the spin of the bullet." So I said, "Okay -- But what would the effect be?" and he thought for a minute and then said,
"Well, It would make the bullet drop more rapidly, like putting back-spin on a billiard ball." "Huh!" says I. So since then I'm careful to remove the jag from the ramrod I keep in the barrel thimbles --- which is hickory, by the way, with a pinned tip.
I do have a loading rod, longer than the one under the barrel and slightly greater in diameter than that one. It's also hickory. I have two steel range rods that a buddy made for me, with t-handles for strength. One is small diameter for the bores that are .36" or less, and one larger for the .45's and up. I don't use any of those f-word rods, nor plastic either.
Tanglefoot