Re: Ugh. What have I done? Apparently I’m in the club now.

27
The barrel has obviously been "coned" for easier loading. I have been to the Cody museum in Wyoming and they have Liver Eating Johnsons Hawken on display, I believe it weighs 13.5 pounds, very heavy.

Too bad the seller didn't include some paper with data on the rifle like rate of twist, it could have a fast rate of twist for stabilizing conical balls like a minnie. At the end of the plains rifle era gun makers made rifles with 48" twist or faster to stabilize conicals, and with similar sights for long range buffalo hunting. I would guess your rifle was inspired by the Henry Leman half stock plains rifle
by the looks of it.

Re: Ugh. What have I done? Apparently I’m in the club now.

28
Ok, an update (sorry it’s taken a while). The good news is it works. :yahoo: The somewhat frustrating news is I’m not sure how well yet. I measured the twist and it kind of worked. I’m having a hard time trusting the “test it with a patch” method. A lot of times the ramrod didn’t turn around. But I did get one “good” time when it move 180 degrees in 27”. So I said, 1/54 (I tried it again today though and I got 1/52 so this is pissing me off). But I got some .440 balls and a .015 patches lubed with wonder lube. It was a pain in the ass to find actual black powder. But I got some fff GOEX. And another 100 worth of crap. Today we shot it at my neighbor’s. I figured out that even though it doesn’t have a half cock, the brass fitting on the lock slides to make a kind of safety when it’s cocked. It was having a hard time setting off the cci #11 caps (which may mean I need a new nipple or softer rws caps ?) but when the cap went off, the gun went off. And the ball went nicely into the bullseye at 25 yards. Yippee. But then we moved back to 50 yds and this time it was beautifully directly under the bullseye. And then it all went to hell. My neighbor-a gunsmith btw- told me we needed to lower the rear sight. And thus progressed a lovely line of holes in the target underneath the first ones. Lol. I did manage to hit a steel plate (again right in the center below the middle) at 75 yards though. So it seems to be accurate. Kind of. I went home and cleaned it, then I figured out what we were doing wrong. And of course as I tried to put the sight back to where we started, my innate inability to deal with complex peep sights kicked in and I now have no idea where it will hit the next time we try to shoot it (apparently we’re going to bore sight it first though).

So it’s mostly a success so far. And it was a ton of fun.

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