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Joined
Mar 2, 2023
Messages
51
Reaction score
56
Location
Actual Northern California
Good Day!
New here so I figured I'd do the needful and introduce myself before I start asking silly questions elsewhere on the forum. First things first, I'm not new to the world of black powder but am returning after an extended hiatus. Born and raised in California to "semi firearms tolerant" parents, I got my first exposures to the world of shooting sports through my Grandfather and the Boy Scouts. I took my first muzzleloading shots at the age of 13 in the mid 1990s at a scouting event and I was immediately hooked. I asked my parents if I could get a muzzleloading rifle but times weren't great and money was thin, so this request was deferred. As luck would have it, my father the land surveyor literally found an old rusty rotten rifle in the dirt with a pipe locator and traded it to some old fella for an unfinish Hawken kit. My memory is hazy but I think it may have been some sort of Sharps carbine pattern rifle, but regardless I finally got my rifle! I built my first rifle at 15, bought my first brass framed reproduction Colt 1851 Navy in .44 at 16 (shhh, don't tell!) and several more revolvers followed.

Some years later after some unfortunate downsizing at the company where I worked, I found myself seeking gainful employment and was free for the summer. Out of the blue, an old Scouting friend contacted me as they were looking for "responsible adults" over the age of 21 for leadership roles at the camp where I used to work, and I found myself as the Shooting Sports Director at said Boy Scout Camp. I was trained up as an NRA RSO and Certified Instructor for Rifle, Pistol, Shotgun & Muzzleloading. The camp where I worked did not have a formal muzzleloading program, but I had a rifle and the certifications to do it so I put together a little introduction to blackpowder as part of the Rifle Shooting Merit Badge course I was already leading. I ended up working at that camp for 12 summers, and was a full time employee of the local Scout Council during the off-season.

That's enough words, so here's a picture:
RifleHZ.jpg


This is the Armsport, Miami stamped .45 caliber Hawken I built from a kit some time in 1995. My understanding is that this is most likely an InvestArms knockoff of a T/C Hawken? It has an [AE] proof mark on the barrel which may indicate a 1979 production date. This rifle has fired probably thousands of "first shots" for who knows how many Scouts over many years, and hopefully, maybe, some of them got bit by the bug as hard as I was. It originally had a dual triggers, but the set trigger was removed for simplicity and unfortunately, was lost. As you can imagine, the action on this lock is very worn, to the point that you can drop the hammer from full cock by lightly pushing on the hammer spur. I'm not confident in its ability to safely hold full cock so I stopped shooting it some time ago.

RifleProofs.jpg


It disappeared from my life for a couple decades as I thought it burned up in a house fire, but a family member recently put it back in my hands so here we are. It was very rusty which someone tried to remedy with a scotch-brite pad, so now its missing a bunch of blue and shows a pitting. Miraculously, the bore is great. The stock work could have been much better and many mistakes were made by 15yo me. None of the brass fits up very well and I don't really think the spray on gloss polyurethane is the best finish ever, but at least I've got the rifle back. I've contacted the fine folks at Track of the Wolf and they have been incredibly helpful in directing me to potential replacement parts, so I'm getting an order together to maybe get this rifle back up and working. The urge to purchase a complete L&R lock and Davis trigger set is very high, but really not in the budget at the moment.

My original reproduction 90's Pietta and Uberti Colt revolvers are long gone, but I did manage to purchase another Pietta 1851 Navy .36 about 10 years ago and never fired it, and scored a smaller Pietta 1851 Navy .36 with a 5" barrel earlier this year. I've been shooting them with a tin of caps and a bottle of Pyrodex P that's been lost in my garage since 2014. I managed probably 75-100 rounds yesterday through the 7" at the range while dodging rainclouds, the first 50 of which were 17gr combustible paper cartridges I made from a Guns of the West cartridge kit.

PXL_20230305_012237880.jpg


I bought the birdshead grip and trigger guard from a guy who blew up a Pietta 1851 .44 snubnose with smokeless powder. He came out OK but the rest of the pistol did not, these may have been the only undamaged parts. I tell people these are the 1850s equivalent of a Glock 17 and 19 😅

Anyway, that's me. I'm hoping to maybe get some tips on refinishing this rifle, or perhaps salvage its parts and re-stock it into a full stock Hawken. I see TotW has a replacement full stock for the InvestArms STK-IAF-15-M1 or Thompson Center STK-TCF-16-M3 which might fit the bill, but we'll see. Don't expect to talk me into a Kibler kit as I don't have anywhere near that kind of budget and almost non-existent woodworking skills. ;) I also have zero access to real black powder so I don't see a flinter anywhere in my future.

Any questions or additional information please ask away, and thank you all for sharing your experience here on the forum. :thumb:
 
Welcome to the forum from Sunny Southern California USA 🇺🇸. And may I say Boy Scouts are where I found some life long friends. Some of us still get together every year to go camping. It's been 50 years. Working on some of them to shoot some black powder, they'll come around. Enjoy.
 
Good Day!
New here so I figured I'd do the needful and introduce myself before I start asking silly questions elsewhere on the forum. First things first, I'm not new to the world of black powder but am returning after an extended hiatus. Born and raised in California to "semi firearms tolerant" parents, I got my first exposures to the world of shooting sports through my Grandfather and the Boy Scouts. I took my first muzzleloading shots at the age of 13 in the mid 1990s at a scouting event and I was immediately hooked. I asked my parents if I could get a muzzleloading rifle but times weren't great and money was thin, so this request was deferred. As luck would have it, my father the land surveyor literally found an old rusty rotten rifle in the dirt with a pipe locator and traded it to some old fella for an unfinish Hawken kit. My memory is hazy but I think it may have been some sort of Sharps carbine pattern rifle, but regardless I finally got my rifle! I built my first rifle at 15, bought my first brass framed reproduction Colt 1851 Navy in .44 at 16 (shhh, don't tell!) and several more revolvers followed.

Some years later after some unfortunate downsizing at the company where I worked, I found myself seeking gainful employment and was free for the summer. Out of the blue, an old Scouting friend contacted me as they were looking for "responsible adults" over the age of 21 for leadership roles at the camp where I used to work, and I found myself as the Shooting Sports Director at said Boy Scout Camp. I was trained up as an NRA RSO and Certified Instructor for Rifle, Pistol, Shotgun & Muzzleloading. The camp where I worked did not have a formal muzzleloading program, but I had a rifle and the certifications to do it so I put together a little introduction to blackpowder as part of the Rifle Shooting Merit Badge course I was already leading. I ended up working at that camp for 12 summers, and was a full time employee of the local Scout Council during the off-season.

That's enough words, so here's a picture:
View attachment 203380

This is the Armsport, Miami stamped .45 caliber Hawken I built from a kit some time in 1995. My understanding is that this is most likely an InvestArms knockoff of a T/C Hawken? It has an [AE] proof mark on the barrel which may indicate a 1979 production date. This rifle has fired probably thousands of "first shots" for who knows how many Scouts over many years, and hopefully, maybe, some of them got bit by the bug as hard as I was. It originally had a dual triggers, but the set trigger was removed for simplicity and unfortunately, was lost. As you can imagine, the action on this lock is very worn, to the point that you can drop the hammer from full cock by lightly pushing on the hammer spur. I'm not confident in its ability to safely hold full cock so I stopped shooting it some time ago.

View attachment 203388

It disappeared from my life for a couple decades as I thought it burned up in a house fire, but a family member recently put it back in my hands so here we are. It was very rusty which someone tried to remedy with a scotch-brite pad, so now its missing a bunch of blue and shows a pitting. Miraculously, the bore is great. The stock work could have been much better and many mistakes were made by 15yo me. None of the brass fits up very well and I don't really think the spray on gloss polyurethane is the best finish ever, but at least I've got the rifle back. I've contacted the fine folks at Track of the Wolf and they have been incredibly helpful in directing me to potential replacement parts, so I'm getting an order together to maybe get this rifle back up and working. The urge to purchase a complete L&R lock and Davis trigger set is very high, but really not in the budget at the moment.

My original reproduction 90's Pietta and Uberti Colt revolvers are long gone, but I did manage to purchase another Pietta 1851 Navy .36 about 10 years ago and never fired it, and scored a smaller Pietta 1851 Navy .36 with a 5" barrel earlier this year. I've been shooting them with a tin of caps and a bottle of Pyrodex P that's been lost in my garage since 2014. I managed probably 75-100 rounds yesterday through the 7" at the range while dodging rainclouds, the first 50 of which were 17gr combustible paper cartridges I made from a Guns of the West cartridge kit.

View attachment 203389

I bought the birdshead grip and trigger guard from a guy who blew up a Pietta 1851 .44 snubnose with smokeless powder. He came out OK but the rest of the pistol did not, these may have been the only undamaged parts. I tell people these are the 1850s equivalent of a Glock 17 and 19 😅

Anyway, that's me. I'm hoping to maybe get some tips on refinishing this rifle, or perhaps salvage its parts and re-stock it into a full stock Hawken. I see TotW has a replacement full stock for the InvestArms STK-IAF-15-M1 or Thompson Center STK-TCF-16-M3 which might fit the bill, but we'll see. Don't expect to talk me into a Kibler kit as I don't have anywhere near that kind of budget and almost non-existent woodworking skills. ;) I also have zero access to real black powder so I don't see a flinter anywhere in my future.

Any questions or additional information please ask away, and thank you all for sharing your experience here on the forum. :thumb:
Welcome to the forum, lits if good ML stuff going on here..
 
Welcome from New England, your post takes me back, my three sons were Scouts and I was a Scout Leader in the CBSI in Ireland,
Whilst we didn’t do formal shooting we did do safety days at which the Garda Sargent and I gave talks and safety demos, including MLs on my part, we also did safety with bows and cross bows.
The Sargent, incidentally, was President of our local gun club and a keen hunter.
 
Thanks everyone for the kind welcomes!
Welcome to the forum from Sunny Southern California USA 🇺🇸. And may I say Boy Scouts are where I found some life long friends. Some of us still get together every year to go camping. It's been 50 years. Working on some of them to shoot some black powder, they'll come around. Enjoy.
That's fantastic! I spent probably half of my life somehow involved in something related to Scouting, and some of my oldest and dearest friends are Scouting friends. The program now certainly isn't what it used to be, but the friendships never change.
Welcome! Great story and history!
Thanks! I thought some people might enjoy it. So many of these intro threads are so short, so I figured I'd give something to chew on.
Welcome to the forum, lits if good ML stuff going on here..
Yep, that's why I joined up! There is so much good knowledge here, I'm hoping to not ask too many silly questions and I promise to use the search feature before posting ;)
Welcome from New England, your post takes me back, my three sons were Scouts and I was a Scout Leader in the CBSI in Ireland,
Whilst we didn’t do formal shooting we did do safety days at which the Garda Sargent and I gave talks and safety demos, including MLs on my part, we also did safety with bows and cross bows.
The Sargent, incidentally, was President of our local gun club and a keen hunter.
Very nice! The International Scouting program was always so different and always intrigued me, but I 'aged out' before I got a chance to do any Scouting related international travel. I finally made my first trip to New England in the fall this last year, and now I get it. I'm only slightly jealous of your 'real' seasons, but not necessarily the snow.
Welcome from snowy Northern California
Thanks! How far north are you, north of Redding? I'm interested to find out if you've found any good suppliers up this way for powder, etc. Things have been a little light on the ground outside of Sportsman's Warehouse, which isn't my favorite.
 
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