Forums.NitroExpress.com

ovny,
I have never had this exact rifle, however I know a bit about this type of rifle. You will like the 209 shotgun primers that set it off, they hardly ever fail, and are hotter and have a longer period of fire to help set off stubborn powders.

You may be able to shoot patched round balls in your new gun but I don't know how accurate they will be. Your rifle is actually meant to shoot saboted bullets, that's why it has the loading relief cut into the muzzle, to make it easier to load the saboted bullets into the barrel. After you get done trying the round balls loads, I would suggest that you get some saboted bullets and try them also.

It appears that your gun also has a manually removable breech plug, and that is another nice feature, just keep it cleaned thoroughly and lightly greased and it will always be easily removable.
This can be really important if you ever forget to load the powder first, and yes, most of us who have used muzzle loaders for very long have forgotten at least once to "powder the ball", and it is not something you soon forget. The easily removed breechplug makes it possible to push the ball forward a bit and put some powder behind it, just be sure you reseat the ball firmly on the powder!

The main advantage of the breechplug is to make it easier to clean, and it does that very well. Since your gun has 1/28 rifling twist, a fairly fast rifling for a muzzle loader, that equates to longer bullets being loaded for it. If you don't especially like sabots, and I don't, you can buy a 50 caliber Lee REAL,(Rifling engraved at loading), bullet mold and use those. I use them in my Remington 700ML inline and like the 200 grain size a lot for deer hunting, they would be very useful in the 250 gain size for hogs. They are much cheaper and easier to load with and I have never had a failure to kill with them if I hit the right spot.

I don't know if you can buy real black powder there or not, but I greatly prefer it over most of the so called black powder replacements that are out there. I absolutely refuse to use Pyrodex as it is MORE CORROSIVE than black powder and the velocities vary a lot between loads of the same amounts. If you must use a replacement powder for black, I would recommend triple 7, it is cleaner burning and more even in the speeds it produces. Maybe the best feature of an inline muzzle loader is the fact that they are relatively waterproof and you don't have to worry about whether or not they are going to go off in a drizzling rain. Good luck with your new rifle. Bob