I finally got a break in my spring work to do a little shooting today. I wanted to try some of the different projectiles out of the new Tradition's Woodsman Hawkins Flintlock. It has a 1-48 twist, so I wanted to try some conicals as well.

Since the range was set up at 75 yards I started there. I used roundball with 85 grains of Goex 2f, a moosemilk patch and Buffalo Bullet company roundball. In the lower left corner photo, the upper circled group shows how they hit. I noted to the right and some were a little high, but not all as bad as I thought. About this time, a neighbor stopped over to watch all the smoke and noise.

I then moved the bench up to the 50 yard station and shot group A. Group A was shot with 370 grain Maxiball on top of 80 grains of Goex 3f. I used my own homemade lube on the maxiball. There is a lot of power in that load.

The circle marked B is not really a group. The neighbor found a small chunk of wood while we examined the target, and asked if I could manage to hit that. He set the small block of wood, pictured in the upper left corner of the target, on a plastic ice cream bucket in front of the target. Using a roundball, I took one shot at it and it hit the block of wood and pushed that into the target causing the hole and the tear. Besides splitting the block of wood in two, it also broke the ice cream pail top that it was resting on. That seems like a lot of power for a simple charge of 85 grains of Goex 2f and a roundball.

I then shot three times at the upper corner of the bulls target at the small bulls eye. At 50 yards, this flintlock is pretty accurate actually. That is the upper right corner of the picture.

I then changed over to some 460 grain Bull Shop conicals in .503 diameter. They required a short starter to get them in the barrel but after that loaded just fine. I also lowered the powder charge to 60 grains of Goex 3f and put two 1/16th fiber wads between the powder and the conical. I think that powder charge needs some fine tuning, but this might turn out to be a good conical shooter.

Overall the rifle only acted up once. I fired pan after pan of powder and could not get the thing to go off. I then began to doubt myself as to if I even loaded powder. I pulled the barrel, pulled the touch hole vent, and added some powder in there. Using a vent pick I packed the vent, and replaced everything. And then it fired fine.

Because of my wondering what caused it, I swabbed the barrel at this time. This was about half way through the shooting session. I made sure the vent hole and liner was nice and clean and the rifle gave me no more problems. The flint which I have probably shot over 40 rounds off of finally became so flat and dull that I changed to a new flint. The first shot split the new flint in two... Should have left the old one in. It was still working. Another flint though, and I was back in business.