Howdy fellow BP shooters,
I originally posted this on the Muzzleloading Forum several years ago and thought it might be of some interest here now.
I joined this forum a while back and have read a ton here but haven’t been able to contribute much because of my limited actual shooting sessions over the last 25 years, or so. Before that I had a lot more free time and used to shoot quite regularly. I am grateful for all I have learned from you folks and hope to put some of this knowledge to good use this coming year. I tell myself that I am semi-retired now and hope to spend more time at the range shooting in the many areas of my interests, which includes BPML and several other unmentionable activities regarding shooting/reloading for accuracy.
I don’t shoot competitively and seldom get an opportunity to hunt, so my enjoyment of shooting is trying to ring as much accuracy out of any gun as I can. To me, plinking is generally a waste of time and ammo because you can’t really learn anything from it, but I have been known to do it too on occasion. I am the sort of guy that strives for everything I can control to be as consistent as possible when I go shooting. One step in loading a ML that has always seemed inconsistent to me is the general manner in which a PRB is seated on the powder. You all have no doubt seen as many, or maybe even more, squirrely methods of doing this as I have, so no need to dwell on them here! I know that the virtues of some kinds of loading rods and techniques have been discussed here before, but I wanted to just throw this out there for others curious about this, like I was.
I remember that years ago, around 1999, there was an all brass segmented loading rod set offered for sale called a KaDOOTY. It had a weighted coaxial slide hammer feature built into one of the rod segments. It did not have a spring, as others have mentioned here before. You lifted the cylindrical hammer up the shaft of the rod and let it fall one or more times against a stop to get the desired compression on the PRB. It wasn’t cheap either, selling for between $130 and $150, at a time when that was close to the cost of some new ML rifles and kits. For just a loading rod, that was a little too steep for me back then, so what I did was to use my range rod to seat the ball on the powder, then I placed the rifle’s butt plate across the middle of my boot/shoe and pressed down on the rod firmly just until I felt the bones in my foot give. That was as consistent a pressure gauge as I had available back then, which seemed to work OK. I got to thinking that there had to be a more consistent way to accomplish this step easily and at minimal expense. I freely pass on my ideas to those of you that wish to experiment along these same lines! None of this patented or even patent pending!
Some years back I decided to see what could be done with a coiled compression spring and a secondary knob located on the loading rod shaft itself. The use of a metal lathe will come in very handy for these modifications.
Above are the two versions of the rod modifications that I came up with. The upper one above was added to a stainless steel loading rod with a free-spinning non-detachable wooden ball/knob that I used to seat the PRB initially. This rod was about 6” longer than needed to load my .50 caliber percussion GPR normally, so there was room to add the components beneath the wooden ball/knob. The lower loading rod was only just long enough for normal loading, so it’s modification was made to fit as an extension between the handle and shaft of an aluminum loading rod for a .50 caliber unmentionable ML. I know that these loading rods may not be legal for use in some competitions, but since I just shoot for my own enjoyment and experimentation, that never entered into my consideration.
The upper stainless steel rod modification (shown spread apart above) was the easiest to do, requiring only five parts total, with three of the five components coming from my local ACE Hardware Store. I found a suitable large wooden knob and a coiled compression spring* and flat washer that would both slip loosely over my 3/8” diameter SS rod. The last part I had to make out of a short section of 7/8” diameter brass rod, a stop collar, if you will, cut to any convenient length from 5/8” to ¾”. A center hole was bored through the brass stop collar on the lathe to slip-fit onto my loading rod. Then a 1/8” long step was turned on the lathe to form a lip that the coil spring could slip over, keeping the spring centered on the loading rod. A hole was drilled and tapped into the side of the brass collar for an 8-32 Allen head set screw I had on hand (if you don’t already have one, you will need to add this to your ACE list). The flat washer needed no work. The large wooden knob needed a through hole drilled for a slip fit onto my loading rod.
Assembly was pretty easy, with the knob going onto the rod first and up against the wooded ball/knob, then the flat washer (used so that the end of the spring did not chew up the face of the wooden knob), then the coiled spring, and lastly the brass collar. I moved the brass collar up the rod and tightened it at a place to where it just barely touched, and started to compress, the coil spring.
(I had to split this post in half, too Long, so second half follows in my next post.)
