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Thanks Daryl.
I make all my rifles to fit the customer who orders, so they all seem to "aim themselves" However that was how most British rifles were made to fit. Many other rifles were not.
T measure my clients for length of pull, drop at comb, drop at heel, drop at toe, cast off and pitch.
I do this for British rifle but I do the same for "Militiamen’s rifle" Jaegers, Indian Trade rifles and everything in-between.
I build from blanks, so it's just as easy for me to make a gun fit perfectly as it is to make it any other way.
It's one of the benefits to ordering a custom rifle.
Custom is often thought of as 'expensive" ------- but it's not necessarily. It simply means that you get one made to your specs.
It can be very expensive ($12,000) but I also build rifles for around the $1,400 too. I try to build to please my customers in every way I can.
The other benefit of ordering a custom rifle is that you need not pay for the whole thing all at one time.
So I find that MANY simple working men can afford a $3,000 rifle over 2 years and a lot of the same men can't afford a $1,500 gun in one visit to a sporting goods store.
My British style rifles start at $2200 and go up to about $3500 in calibers up to 66. Over 66 the price starts to go up a little bit, because I need to buy wood a bit thicker, and I sometimes have to make the breach plugs from bar stock. At 8 bore and up, there is another jump in cost, and the 4s and 2s cost much more because there are so few parts that can be purchased, so much needs to be hand made.

However, dedicated muzzleloader hunters find that 58, 62 and 66 calibers will cover 99% of all the hunting you’d ever do. 66 (16 bore)was the most popular caliber in India, the heyday of the British Empire and was also very popular in Africa.

I will make a 12 bore in the future as a hunting gun. It may seem huge to those that are not familiar with such guns, but we have many hundreds of thousands of hunter go afield every year in parts of the USA armed with modern 12 gauge slug guns, and they don’t see them as “huge”.
How powerful such rifle are is a function of powder charge. A 12 bore rifle with 100 grains of powder is very pleasant to fire.
Put in 200 grains and you have a real stopper. Recoil goes WAY up, but such a rifle will drop a buffalo without any trouble.
Even an 8 bore with 140 grains is very nice to fire.

I love the beauty of these old style guns myself.
Happy hunting.
Steve

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