Hunting Forum

Loyalist Arms has them. I will attach another link when I find it that sells them much cheaper. You have to have the vent drilled but they work great. I live-fire my own of these India-made ones and it is reliable and accurate even.

http://militaryheritage.com/muskets.htm
This is where mine came from. Same guns as used in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. You have to mark and drill a 3/16" vent yourself. Mood to metal fit is not great and the wood is teak I think. But, springs are good and they do work fine.

Posted By Shiloh on 23 Dec 2012 09:57 PM
Loyalist Arms has them. I will attach another link when I find it that sells them much cheaper. You have to have the vent drilled but they work great. I live-fire my own of these India-made ones and it is reliable and accurate even.

Shiloh..   when you say reliable and accurate, do you mean like they go off as well as say my T/C Hawken Flintlock?  And accurate..  with a Brown Bess, what do you call accurate?  The reason I ask is I had a smoothbore .62 caliber for many years.  And I tried everything under the sun to get that smoothbore accurate.  The best I ever got for "hunting accurate" is 40 short steps..  maybe 35 yards.  After that it w{1}**** and miss.  For instance, I once shot at a brown paper grocery bag five times at 75 yards, aiming for the center.  I hit once in the upper corner.  I do not call that accurate. In fact it made a good shotgun, but not something that was throwing a .600 or .610 ball.  So I sold it.

Yet I have read posts from other Brown Bess owners that hunt with the musket and "claim" they are accurate out to 75 yards.  See, I would never have dreamed of shooting at a game animal that far.  Also I watched a program about the history of the long guns on the Discovery Channel I think it was.  A historian, also a gun buff, shot a Brown Bess at a 3 foot target at 75 yards and missed the center of the target twice, by at least two to three feet.  Yet with a Kentucky rifle (the one he demonstrated next because it had a rifled barrel) he did very well.  He was shooting free  standing.


Last question for you...  my niece is getting into Civil War re-enacting.  She's a confederate.  She asked me if I had any rifle that would be period correct she could "borrow" a.k.a. never return.  Something about learning to march in formation.  Why a woman wants to do this is beyond me.  Anyway, while I have a lot of muzzleloaders I don't have something "period correct."  What would a southern foot solider be carrying at that time.  Also I would like it to me a rifle, as they do have shooting matches at these camp outs she goes to.  I figure it might be nice to treat her to something like that.

thanks..

Thanks for the imput. I have found sveral between $525-$650. OUCH! There goes the AR-15.

Mine, with an unpatched .735" ball and 80 grs of FFg is accurate enough at 25 yds to hit the 8" pie-plate just about every shot. I had to really learn how to aim it though. At 50 yds I am sure I can hit the deer but precisely where is impossible to say. So, I have hunted with it and know to make it a 25-30 yds max range gun. I have never gotten to shoot it at a deer though. I am confident that with a light paper or cloth patch and some more load developing and maybe adding something on the back of the barrel to help aim better it can be a 50+ yds gun. As for reliably going off, after perhaps 200 shots, both live and blank fires, it has yet to give me so much as a hangfire. Pan goes off with the FFg priming charge and the gun fires almost simultaneously. Now, keep in mind, this is a 3/16" military vent, a military pan and a military flint. It was made to go off reliably. Makes a dern big show of it as well!

Posted By Shiloh on 25 Dec 2012 01:59 PM
Mine, with an unpatched .735" ball and 80 grs of FFg is accurate enough at 25 yds to hit the 8" pie-plate just about every shot. I had to really learn how to aim it though. At 50 yds I am sure I can hit the deer but precisely where is impossible to say. So, I have hunted with it and know to make it a 25-30 yds max range gun. I have never gotten to shoot it at a deer though. I am confident that with a light paper or cloth patch and some more load developing and maybe adding something on the back of the barrel to help aim better it can be a 50+ yds gun. As for reliably going off, after perhaps 200 shots, both live and blank fires, it has yet to give me so much as a hangfire. Pan goes off with the FFg priming charge and the gun fires almost simultaneously. Now, keep in mind, this is a 3/16" military vent, a military pan and a military flint. It was made to go off reliably. Makes a dern big show of it as well!

Thanks Shiloh..  So I was not far off with the ability of my .62 smoothbore.  That's good to know because it drove me nuts. When others told me they were shooting 75 yards with them and hitting what they aimed at..  well it put a bug up my you know what.  Mine was a Green Mountain Barrel with rifle sights on it, that I admit did help a lot.  And when I said shot a good groups at around 40 steps.. that was off a bench rest.  The year I did deer hunt with the smoothbore, I promised myself.. nothing further then 30 yards off my shooting sticks.  My best load was 80 grains of Goex 2f.  And I was testing that load on firewood.  It was amazing the penetration that ball got. 

I really considered getting a Bess.  Just because of the ball size and the history of the musket also.  When reading about the revolutionary war and diary told of the ball hitting the first man in line, passing through him and still killing the second man in line..  Always amazed me.

I sure am glad this question was asked.  I have been scouring that site over but good.  And doing some reading, for my niece's rifle, a Enfield seems to be the one to get.  I believe it was called a three band in .58 caliber.  Sounds fun to shoot.

have been shooting smooth bore for 30+ yr. 24 ga. it will shoot a good group out to 100 yd. with he right ball and patch combo. min. of deer my load is 70 gr.3f with a .562 ball and a .010 patch with a 50/50 mix of olive oil and beeswax for lube or mink oil the kind you put on your boots

I am a big fan of the pattern 1853 Enfields - (3-banders) and is what I carry re-enacting almost always. These are rifled, usually about 1:72" today. Back then they were described as 1 turn in 6 feet, but usually were actually 1:78". They had progressive depth rifling, 3 lands & grooves deeper in the breech and shallower at the muzzle. They were made specifically for .573"-.575" Minie' balls powered by 60 grs of FFg. At 500 yds they could penetrate 5-6 1-inch pine boards and were capable of hitting men at 1,000 yds and doing damage. I have hunted with mine many times but only got a shot once while using it and that was a miss because I misjudged the distance and skinned a nice buck's back hair off him. The sights are "combat" measured so the lowest setting is to be about right at 200 yds. They have a serious rainbow arc so you really have to practice at various ranges to learn where it hits. You will find that you cannot over power it by much and expect accuracy. If anythiing, drop down 5-10 grs to find better accuracy with the shallow grooves.

Oh, regarding penetration of those old muskets, I was doing research on the 9th KY and found a Surgeon's report on 1 man that wrote about the man's injury; "bone protruding from flesh - not his own." Those big slow lead slugs often plowed through the front rank man and blew bone fragments along with the deformed tumbling slug into the rear rank man.

The relative "accuracy" of smoothbores is probobly the reason for "buck and ball" for hunting and definaltely the reason for the miltary formations of the time, they wern't very accurate so they tended to want a lot of bullets in the air. Or as someone put it, "as long as I have lead in the air, I'm dangerous".

Yes, the tight formations in part was brought abt by the lack of pin-point accuracy. But it was more due to the need of the officers to control the troops in the era of voice or at best musical commands. It was carried over from the older times of the longbow. The lack of precise accuracy and need to control firepower meant the archers, and then musketeers had to be bunched together. During the Crimean War and our own Civil War, the introduction of rifled arms mean the men were able to hit targets they actually intended to. Thus, the lines moved back and then they started developing tactics that released men to fight on their own like we do today.

You can also try a company called Middlesex Village Trading Company. Reasonably priced and I use mine for both reenacting and target shooting.