Is it stainless steel or blued? The blued is a little softer and breaks in faster while the stainless takes longer to break in, but wears much slower. The very first thing I do when I get a new muzzleloader is clean the heck out of it. The second is run a full package of copper clad powerbelts through it swabing between every shot. I've found that when shooting sabots, shooting a pkg of powerbelts helps smooth the rifling out and probably helps with my accuracy. All the rifles I have here have had this done to them. Knight Extreme, T/C Omega, Knight Wolverine, and Lyman Great Plains rifle all give me superb accuracy. I have to wonder if I just got good ones (all recieved through mail order) or if my slight break in procedure helped some. The only rifles I ever had problems with were a CVA Hunterbolt and Traditions Buckhunter. Both suffered accuracy problems with sabots but faired pretty well with various conicals. Since I generally dislike heavy conicals I sold them.