Hunting Forum

looking to get a 50 cal percussion. thanking hawken replica. what do people thank?

Good choice. I have 2 CVA Hawken .50" percussions. Great killing power, fun to shoot and carry, accurate, and cheap with round balls.

If you are thinking of going traditional you should also consider a very traditional flintlock. They are fun to shoot and hunt with.

Naw, PA. He wants to go modern, with a cap. We all know guns reached their zenith with the percussion cap. I have heard of some new-fangled thingamabob called a "repeater" which just sounds far-fetched to me.

Yea I just had to put a vote in for the real muzzleloaders of yesteryear. Besides you, I, Davy Crockett and ole Dan'l Boone couldn't all be wrong.

Crockett & Boone used them cause thats all they had. But I still like to use mine once in a while. Here in Ohio ML season is in Jan. so I use which ever one is best in the weather we`re having.

Hawkin or plains style replica's are way more fun than inlines plus you get to chose which type of bullet you want ,round ball or conical.

Its hard not to like a good Hawkins rifle. They are .. well what Shiloh said. The thing to consider is what do you want to do with this, and what do you want to shoot out of it. If your are looking for a roundball shooter and want to target shoot and hunt, consider a Lyman Great Plains Rifle in .54 caliber. Now there is nothing wrong with a .50 caliber but for hunting, I would take a .54 caliber any day of the week. They just seem to shoot better and the ball is 33% bigger then the .50 caliber. More mass, more knock down they claim. Also the Lyman GPR is about as authentic a rifle as far as looks or function as you will get to the early settlers rifles,

Thanks for all the input Theres going to be a blackpowder shoot on 7-14 at sacramento valley shooting range. So i'll go and see them in action. Thanks again.

Cayugad 's almost got it right The GPR is a good looking gun ,I have one , and there's nothing wrong a .54 although mines a T/C and prefers conicals a .50 does just fine for white tails. But if you can find one Austin Halleck made an excellent rifle with browned furniture and beautiful curly maple stocks. Too bad they went out business, I see Cabelas has one very similar in their catalog But its too pricey for me . you could check out Dixie gunworks and see what they have on hand .

I have a CVA "Mountain Rifle" I bought at a gun show still in it's kit box! This was 1998! I built it and shoot it and I like it a lot. It is a .50 cal percussion and a 1 in 66 twist barrel. Now for the real scary stuff....IT LOVES 370 grain conicals! I tried to shoot balls in it, but just can't seem to get them to fly right. I checked in the Lyman Blackpowder Handbook and it shows a load of 90 grains of Pyrodex "P" for the 370 grain conical as max load. Shoots real nice. I use a Lyman mould for the bullets.

With a ball you really need to drop the charge off tat 90 grs load. It is pushing too fast for the thin bearing-ring of the patch/ball to hold the lands and the ball is skipping out eratially. That is a common issue I have seen over the years from customers that complain their rifle won't shoot balls. They develop something they call "my hunting load" with 90 or so grs. and do not like the accuracy. I tell them to back the charges down to the 60 grs range and slowly work around that to find the best ball-charge. They like the results as far as accuracy but then try developing that 'hunting load' yet again and can't unerstand why accuracy once again falters. Fact is when pushed by 60 grs accurately a ball is a far better 'hunting load' than an inaccurate ball pushed by 90 grs. That 'poky lil' ball' as I often hear it derided will punch clean through a deer at medium ranges when powered but 60 grs or 70 grs.

Good point Shiloh, it seems sometimes that even people using front stuffers are afficted with "magnumitis".

Yep. I am always bewildered by even supposed knowledgeable gun-rag writers touting the 'known absolute need' to break 18 sound barriers with a round that costs $3 per shot and inverts a dimension with its recoil to ethically kill a deer. I have to wonder then if ol' Darwin was really onto something and the deer over the past 50 years or so have evolved to be non-magnum proof. I figure if you can punch a poky little ball with a 1/2" diameter through 2 lungs even on a bronosaurus it will not long inhabit the earth.

I recommend the "Lyman Blackpowder Handbook". It has a lot of good information AND load tables for different bullet/barrel combinations. Hard to find a loading manual for black powder, but there it is.