Neat stuff.

Anyone with a modern shotgun and some 209 primers and some fired shotshells, a dowel or metal rod the fits in the bore and is long enough to reach the breech, black powder and any number of small bits like air rifle shot or even small brass nuts or in a pinch even steel nuts or screws and some side cutters has the makings of a muzzle loader. Other options for shot are heavy copper ground wire or solder wire or similar stuff attacked with the side cutters. Not to mention legitimate sources like shot molds and such. In a chokeless gun, a heavily patched steel ball bearing will do for a single ball. And of course any scrap paper can be used for wadding. One just primes the hull, seats it, then loads the rest of the stuff from the front. Of course, one can just load the stuff into the shell and glue a top wad in as well, or any other form of combination thereof.

When I was in Zaire in '80, I hunted monkeys with an African fellow who had a home-made BOLT ACTION muzzle loader. It worked on more or less the exact same principle found in the later "cutting edge" Knight Modern Muzzle Loader. He used two 45 caliber balls another guy cast for his Ruger Old Army revolver. It worked. Really, the options for making something go "BANG" are pretty endless!

PS: Check out Laotian Hunting videos on youtube. Some very interesting traditional guns there with a strange operating mechanism.

In Frederick Spencer Chapman's famous book "THE JUNGLE IS NEUTRAL" he describes an incident while fleeing pro-Japanese police in Malaya where he is shot in the ankle while on his bicycle. It turns out to be a handloaded nut fired from the cop's shotgun. That wound caused him a lot of problem from then on.