Quote:
ORIGINAL: deroche117
Having difficulty shooting my T/C High Plains Sporter sidelock. What a great little gun if I could get it to shoot consistantly. I can fire two or three shots before I have a hang-fire/mis-fire then have to pull the bullet with the dreaded ball puller. I keep it real clean, have gone to the larger musket caps thinking it was a primer problem, used both 777 pellets and loose powder, all with the same problems. Any suggestions? Should I send it back to T/C?
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Pellets do not work in that style of breech. The fire channel has turns and bounces the spark around too much. I am sure any ignition you had with pellets was inconsistent and the accuracy was probably second rate at best. Loose powder should have worked fine, so we need to examine the rifle and then your cleaning procedures.
Are you a bore butter user? Do you leave large amounts of bore butter in the bore of the rifle or do you remove it before shooting? When is the last time you gave the rifle a real scrub down, boiling water, take no prisoner kind of cleaning? How old is the nipple? Is it a hot shot stainless steel brand?
Also when you shoot it, do the caps always go off? Or is the hammer hitting and sometimes not setting the cap off? This could be a sign ofa worn hammer spring. Something T/C would have to fix.
If it were my rifle, I would take the musket nipple and throw it out. I would then purchase a new T/C stainless steel hot shot nipple #11. I would get some leather gloves, and put the tea pot on to boil. Get a metal coffee can, add some dish soap, and then boiling water. With this, put the bolster completely under the water line and start to pump soap and boiling water through the rifle. If you're a bore butter user, look for chunks of brown crud to come out the barrel. That is old bore butter. After I had ran a couple patches through that I would take the barrel outside and pour some more boiling water down it to rinse anything else nasty in there, out.
Then take some solvent and a brass brush and really scrub that barrel.If you have a .22 caliber bore brush and cleaning rod, wrap a patch around the brush. Then dip that in solvent, and push that to the bottom of the breech and turn in a clockwise motion. This will help scrub the cone of the rifle out. After that solvent patches, finally some dry patches. The barrel will still be very hot, so now is a good time to put some quality gun oil on a patch and swab the bore.
After that take an air compressor and shoot forced air through the nipple opening into the bolster. Make sure that is nice and blown out dry. Try pushing a pipe cleaner through the bolster into the breech fire chamber. If your rifle is clean it can be done. Also the pipe cleaner will pull moisture and crud if any, out of the bolster.
Now put the new nipple on and a quality #11 cap like a CCI Magnum. Next would be the powder selection. If you can get it, use 3f black powder. Goex is good.This will light off the best of anything. If your still having problems, I would not know what else to do. I guess I would call T/C.
T/C High Plains Sporter
Al
thats what im tryin to say...
