To pin or not to pin a wooden ramrod?

Just looking for advice and experience - should a wooden ramrod be glued and pinned or only one or the other? This is on a 50 cal.

Both...

I pin and glue my .45s and glue and pin my .50s.

Epoxy and a brass pin.

Close fit and a steel pin.

What Mr. Coffins said.
Though, I add a touch of hot melt ferrule cement just to be sure...

Thank you to all for your experience and advice. It is such a pleasure to have this resource!

Frontstuffer3491 said:

Just looking for advice and experience - should a wooden ramrod be glued and pinned or only one or the other? This is on a 50 cal.

Click to expand...

Imagine pulling a ball for a friend. You are using the brass end to secure the ball puller. The pull is stout, very stout, you have to hook your RR on a fence post and use full body language to remove the ball. Want to leave it all in the bottom of the barrel??
All my RR ends are pinned/glued and they all have been put to the test.
Larry

Larry (Omaha) said:

Imagine pulling a ball for a friend. You are using the brass end to secure the ball puller. The pull is stout, very stout, you have to hook your RR on a fence post and use full body language to remove the ball. Want to leave it all in the bottom of the barrel??
All my RR ends are pinned/glued and they all have been put to the test.
Larry

Click to expand...

Thank you.

I always glue and pin.

Broken record. Glue & pin, always.

Same here, glue and pin, and use a threaded steel rod to pull stuck balls.

Yep , both ....

Both.

It's called a redundancy . It's why you see things bolted and welded when one or the other we be enough; if one fails the "redundancy" prevents total failure.

Both for me….Learned the hard way, long ago!

Seems like it would only happen once to make THAT decision.
Half your rod, load, ball and patch stuck in the barrel???

Lost me with Rail Road

What are you using to pull on the stick with?

Davey Boy said:

Lost me with Rail Road

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ram rod???

I hate to think of a ramrod tip coming off in the bore. When Virginia introduced ML season in the 70s, I bought a really cheap inline. I promptly got the ramrod stuck. Full charge in the bore because I thought you had to wipe before you shot. Tried and tried to pull it out. Finally I capped it and fired off the load and rod holding the muzzle straight up. I could not believe how high that rod went, much higher than I could shoot an arrow. I learned later how stupid that was.

I learned to sand the inside of the tip with coarse sandpaper to give the epoxy some bite, but drill and pin also. Before you do, look at the end grain of the tip of the ramrod. You want to check the orientation of the growth rings. They should look kind of like this: (III) . Drill the pin hole perpendicular to those growth rings. If you don't you can pull the pin right out of the wood if yanking hard enough.

I had that happen once on a used CVA Mt. Pistol I bought. It came with two free .50 maxie balls in the barrel but no powder. They had been there a while. I managed to pull one before the pin tore out of the wood. That pistol rod was one of the first I built decades back, and I did not think of grain orientation a the time. I cut off the boogered wood, rotated the tip so the existing pin hole was perpendicular to the grain and reinstalled it properly. Almost 10 years later that tip is still fine.

My $0.02. You get what you pay for.