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Successful Hunt
Brookwood
Member, Moderator Posts: 13,771 ******
Took this big doe around 7:45 this morning. A neck shot with my trusty 45 caliber flintlock rifle at about 40 yards out. She dropped DRT the way I like it best!
Gonna have me some fresh venison liver & onions for dinner tonight! :P
Gonna have me some fresh venison liver & onions for dinner tonight! :P
Comments
I killed about a dozen deer and hogs with muzzleloaders. I tried a neck shot one time. I was staking out a scrape, about 25 yards away in a tree stand.
Here came a nice 4 pointer and he was in the scrape. Sunny October day. I aimed for the neck and he dropped like a rock!
I sat there, looking at my smoking TC Hawken, looking at the blue smoke in the air, the nice buck dead, and I thought, "I am the biggest bad * since Jeremiah Johnson."
Then, the dead deer began to twitch. Then, he raised up his head. I grabbed the powder canister and poured it in, quick.
He stood up. I put the patch and ball on the muzzle, and hit it with the short starter. I grabbed the ramrod, quick!
And I watched the deer run away.
Zero blood trail and I am a good blood trailer. It turned out, there was a 1 inch diameter grape vine, ten feet before the deer.
I cut that vine in two and the bullet went high, hit him high in the neck just under the skin, enough to stun him but not enough to break the spine.
I came back for the next 3 days, looking for buzzards, found none. I think that deer survived with a nice scar on the top of his neck.
After that, with the muzzle loader, I stuck with lung shots.
I do a lot of target practice all year long with my hunting rifle and know what its capabilities are very well. Also, I always wait for the perfect shot. Deer is stationary in a good silhouette pose. Never on the run. I find the aim small miss small thinking works well for me. If I miss, I rarely inflict a wound on the animal.
About the rifle I used, it is one I built several years ago out of a fairly plain piece of hard maple. The wood has some curl but not a lot. The barrel was one that was given to me as a Christmas present from my gun building mentor who passed away 11 years ago. Sadly, he didn't live to see what I did with his gift. I also had a good friend who was an antique collector. We were attending a gun show together and he brought along this antique brass patch box that he wanted to show me. The box originally came off an old Pennsylvania rifle made in the Lehigh County area some 200+ years ago. I talked my good buddy out of that box and put it back where it belonged!
The rifle has taken more deer than I can remember!
Nice gun
Nice hunt
Nice job
Congrats,,
I always take a photo of the dead animal with the gun only in the photo.
I really like the look!
I have a picture of a Nice big 8 point Wisconsin Whitetail with the rifle my Dad made the stock for laying across the antlers, blown up 8X10, framed, and hanging in my office. I love the picture!
Congratulations,
Ed
I built one of my rifles, from a Dixie kit. Tennessee Mountain Rifle. They no longer sell this kit. This is a .50 cal rifle, percussion.
The stock was inletted for the barrel. I had to inlet for the lock and trigger etc. It is supposed to have a "grease hole" but I put a patch box on it. I had to brown the barrel and attach the breech plug.
So, not as hard as your rifle, by far, but much more difficult than most kits. This is an accurate rifle and I took 3 deer with it and 2 hogs, really a nice rifle.
I bought this kit 35 years ago, get this. The barrel was Made in Japan. It said that right on the metal. I filed that off right away I didn't want to look at Jap writing while in the deer stand I was trying to channel Davy Crockett not Toshiro Mifune.
Any way, it was a good barrel, accurate.
Thanks Allen for your compliments on my rifle. I have seen and handled a few of those Dixie mountain rifles and know from others shooting experience that they were tack drivers. Those Japanese made barrels are actually very well made and I recall that they even made a few 3rd model Brown Bess's that are highly treasured and sought after by reenactors.
I started out building kit guns like the one you describe and know the project required a lot more skill and study than those almost finished kits offered by T\C , CVA , or Navy Arms. Getting a lock to fit just right and in working order from scratch takes a lot of prep work as well as the drilling through for your mounting bolts. I did my first couple of these jobs free hand until I found a nice drill press. That took some of the problems out of the equation!
Inletting a patchbox also takes a great deal of care to get things right I know! I can go on and share some about the old Lehigh I used on the rifle pictured. A very fine young gun builder I know by the name of Eric Kettenburg from PA first found and acquired that gunless patchbox and placed pictures of it on another forum I frequent quite a few years ago. Another collector friend talked Eric out of it for his collection. Years passed but I never forgot about it and when I was in the planning stages for this rifle, I knew I just had to have it!
There were issues about doing a good job of installing it without messing up the very old patina and the very fine engraving that are on that box! I could not do the job using the traditional methods of flush filing or fine sanding on the metal to wood fitting. I had to take micrometer measurements all over the inletting areas over and over again as I made all my cuts and chiseling. Correct depths in all places was paramount so no tool was used to accidently scratch the old brass. I learned a lot about patience in the process!
When I was building that Tennessee Mountain Rifle, the instructions said to mark the lock with lamp black, then hold the lock against the stock, and remove the wood that was marked.
I didn't know what lamp black was. I went to the old hardware store, I was living in Steamboat Springs Colorado at the time, and I asked the guys for lamp black. I figured it was like shoe polish.
The guy said he had heard of it, but they didn't carry it.
It took me about a week to find out what lamp black was.