Using the H&R 12GA for a Muzzeloader

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Video Transcription

okay guys so what we're talking about today is we're talking about a couple different things in this series the 21st century long runner number one we're talking about what things can we adapt or types of equipment that they used or the modern equivalent to effectively make kits like the long learners carry that will sustain us and improve our survivability what we're talking about today is we're talking about shooting black powder from a modern-day 12-gauge in a single-shot 12-gauge is what I choose to be my equivalent in the modern era to a flintlock musket or refusal or Fowler that they would have used back in the day because of its versatility one of the versatility factors is that you can shoot black powder through it and that's what we're going to talk about today so I've got a high brass cartridge here from a slug and it's important that you use a high brass cartridge okay it'll last a lot longer that way and it's got a spent primer in the bottom of it which means it's been dented and it has ignited the powder inside and blown the slug out the front of the barrel okay now what I'm going to do with this instead of throwing this away is I'm going to take my multi-tool which in my kit would be very equivalent to some of the tools that they would have carried like turn screws mainspring vices ball pullers all of those types of tools are made up in one tool with a multi-tool and I'm going to cut this plastic completely off the brass and just leave the brass

okay almost got away from me there now I got to make sure that I don't damage this brass so I'm going to clean up all around it and pick it out the next object that a game that I have to do to shoot black powder or make my modern-day 12-gauge a muzzle loader is I have to knock the primer out of this to replace it alright I have a magnet right here that I keep on in my kit basically it is a multi-purpose item number one it will magnetize a needle for me Mack magnetize a needle will not hold forever okay I can use this to magnetize my cloth sale needle in a pinch and it will magnetize it enough to give me an improvised compass to give me general direction the other thing is because this magnet has a hole in it I can use it to sit this on top of and you can see it even sticks to it because steel casing and then I can line up that primer hole right in there just like that so that when I turn it over and set it down on a stump or something it's now ready to be knocked out okay so now that I've got that primer set in there and it's even what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my multi-tool and turn the plier end down and put it right on top of the primer the old primer and then I'm just going to beat on it a couple of times a piece of hardwood until I feel it slip once I feel it slip you can see once I pull this off

that little primer stuck to that magnet and there it is okay there's my old primer

there's my empty casing my magnet alright and my multi-tool my baton now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a new primer I'm going to seat a new primer in here alright and to do that I'm going to use another tool that's already in my pack that's multi-purpose what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this box of primers up and these are 209 shotgun primers that you can buy any Walmart or anyplace like that they come 102 a box I would suggest that you carry these probably in some kind of a film canister pill bottle type configuration maybe so you don't have to carry this big box around then you're going to set that primer and seat it as hard as you can with your fingers inside the brass you can see I almost pushed it all the way in there just with my fingers very simple now I'm just going to turn this thing over on a flat surface like

log I'm going to take this Lansky's sharpener that I carry all the time it's a diamond rod I've told you guys before in other videos that's why they used to sharpen everything from my axe to my knife because I believe in honing you sharpen one time and you hone that tool for life this diamond rod does that for me again

multi-purpose if I close this up and open the back end and loosen this up a little bit to drop the diamond rod out I now have something that's a quarter of an inch in diameter or pretty close to it but it fits directly over the top of this primer and I'll set that down on top of it feel around to make sure I'm in the right spot just like that and again I'll take my baton and I'll baton it so I know it's seated I'll turn it over and look at it as long as it's flush that's good and in there it's seated and ready to rock and roll now I can do that with four or five of those shells or four or five of those empty casings and I would have four or five at the ready if I were to choose to shoot black powder out of my weapon so now with just a couple simple tools and things that I already carry and I just take a piece of Bank line and throw that magnet on it and throw that sharpening tool aren't like that just tie a knot in the end of it I throw it in my pack and I forget about it you know it's always there when I need it just like that so now I've got those two items though that little magnet takes up no room and this sharpener doesn't take up the room of a heavy stone throw those my bag I always have my multi-tool with me and I'm set now I have a reloaded 12-gauge cartridge now comes the trick of shooting black powder making a muzzleloader out of this weapon if you think about it a modern-day muzzle loader 2:09 shotgun primer inline muzzle loader basically is nothing more than some a jacket of sorts that you can shove it to a nine shotgun primer and that's exactly what we've done with this and we're going to seal the breach by plugging this into the breech just like we'd load a normal 12-gauge shell and closing the breech and now we have a seal then we can become a muzzle loader and that's what it's all about versatility of the weapons they'll stay with okay so now that we've got our primer replaced in our brass and we've got it in our gun or in our shooting bag or whatever the case may be we need to set up our shot you can set these up ahead of time I don't recommend just doing this stuff on the fly unless the drop that emergency because you can get hurt I mean you can get killed I can blow the breech out of your gun so you've got to be very very careful with this stuff and kids if you're watching this video and you talk to your parents before you attempt anything like this at all what I'm using here is just pyro decks muzzleloading propellant okay it's a black powder I'm actually using Daisy Premium steel shot slingshot ammo again multi-purpose okay and I've got two film canisters here one is black one is clear the clearing one is for powder and patch the black one is for shot okay I've got a line drawn across the bottom of this at 75 grains with a black marker what I'm going to do for this load is I'm going to go ahead and set this up for a hundred grains now the first time you do this you set these canisters up you're going to need some kind of powder measure this powder measure cost about twelve or thirteen bucks at Walley world or any sporting goods store but you only need to really use it the one time that you're setting up your shot I've got it pulled down the plungers pulled down to 100 grains right now I'm going to push it over and then I'm going to open my powder I'm going to fill it up to the top with a hundred grains you can use a funnel for this it's less wasteful that way I'm dropping a few greens of powder here and there doing this but I'm being pretty careful and once I get it filled up to the top okay if I scoot this over it'll knock anything off and make it level and I know I've got a 100 green charge now what I'm going to do is replace the cap on my powder because I don't want it to spill obviously and set it off to the side put my moisture barrier back in there when I'm done I've got my hundred grains of powder and I have my clear container so now I'm going to put my hundred grains of powder in my clear container just like this and you can see it's not much higher than that black line so there's a very fine line between 75 and 100 grains all right so I need to do my best to level that out and draw a second line if I can and it's barely above that of the line so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this thing on a flat object like a stump I'm going to shake it all level in here look at it a couple times to make sure and then I'm just going to draw drawing line where that powder is at on that canister just like this you can see that line is not very much higher than the other one just a little bit but it doesn't take much in a film container this big to hold up quite a bit of powder sometimes people don't realize how powerful black powder is so I've got two measuring lines they're a 75 Green Line 100 green line now when I'm done with that what I'll usually do is I'll take some cotton material just cotton cloth again multi-purpose I've probably got it in my kit already anyway and I've cut myself a couple of pre-made patches and there's really no need to lube these patches unless I'm going to put roundball down the barrel of this gun then I might want to lube a patch otherwise I'm not worried about it I'm going to put one patch on the top here and I'm going to cut one more patch about the same size and put it on top of the other one and I'll explain that when we get ready to load the gun but this is just for ease later on down the line cap that off now what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure my shot and generally speaking you can use a shot load that is the same weight okay in grains as your powder so a lot of times I'll just use the same measure sometimes I'll be honest with you I guess especially if I'm shooting rocks I'm out of the creek bed or something like that but you'll get used to that over time when you do this in the beginning you need to make sure you measure everything so I'll open up this shot this is some heavy shot okay this is sling shot ammo this is not some stuff that you'd be out hunting squirrels with this is like I can get shot or almost like buckshot it's pretty big okay but we're going to use it for this demonstration anyway because it's multi-purpose and I could kill a rabbit or squirrel with this easy enough and I'm going to fill that up exactly like I did a minute ago just like I did my powder to the top and that gives me approximately the same amount of shot as I have powder and that's a good starting point then I'll take my black container and just dump into that and now I have a shot that's ready to go I have my powder my patches and my shot all measured out and ready to go now I can put these in my shooting bag or my hover sack or both or whichever one I choose to carry my loading equipment in and then I can at that time when I get ready to shoot I have these ready and I can load them I'm going to show you how to do that right now okay guys so here we are we've got our brass back in the breech of our gun with a new primer in it a new 209 shotgun primer at this point we've made this gun a muzzle loader it's ready to be loaded down the barrel the reason you can't shoot modern-day powders out of muzzle loaders is because they build up too much back pressure too fast because they're a fast-burning powder black powder is a slow-burning powder as long as I have this brief shield and I don't overcharge it I don't have to worry about it blowing up the gun like I would vice versa shooting modern-day powder through a black powder gun so what we're going to do with this now is we're going to make sure that our trigger isn't pulled back so there's no way the gun can go off well grab our makeshift ramrod in this case I've just got a dowel rod here that I'm using you could use any sapling that would fit down into the muzzle of the gun all the way to the bottom where the shell is out okay at this point what we'll do now is we'll take we'll reach into our shooting bag here we have two containers remember we have the white and we have the black the black is the shot it's going to go and last keeping them in two different containers keeps you from miss loading the gun but if you miss load the gun the beauty of this gun is that you can open up the breech punch it right out you don't have to go with the ball puller and all that business so you have to do a black powder guns that are made to shoot black powder so what I do usually is I'll take my two pieces of cotton batting and I'll just stick them in my fingers just like that and then I will cut that over and pour my powder down the barrel make sure I get it all in there and I'll take one patch and I'll shove it in the barrel like that and I'll save the other one put my other container away and grab the container that has the shot I'll take my ramrod I'll Ram this first wadding all the way to the bottom okay and bottom it out that pushes the powder against that primer now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my shot and do exactly the same thing I'm going to load it down the barrel put my container back in my shooting bag and then we're men on the frontier that could do this stuff in you know seconds take my second wadding or my second patch whichever you want to call it Ram it down that will hold mine that will hold my shot in place on top of the other wadding on top of the powder that's against my two an iron shotgun primer at this point the gun is ready to fire all I have to do is pull the hammer back and pull the trigger okay so now I can carry this gun around in the woods and whatever I see something I could shoot out what we're going to do today is I have a cutout of a rabbit here this is just made out of some styrene material type stuff that you use for floor matting that I bought it like a big loss for 4x4 sheets for like twelve dollars and then we cut a bunch of little targets out of it for sling bows and slingshots things like that for my nephew and my sons so we're going to take one of these rabbits we're going to put it over here in the woods we're going to blast them and see how effective the shot would be at a rabbit at about 15 to 20 yards okay there's our little rabbit close up I've got the camera about eight or ten feet away I'm going to step off some paces here and go back about 20 yards most people we can do

okay guys you can see I opened up my breach now barrel still smoking and now what I'll have to do like I said this to a nine or this brass did not come out of the gun out to punch it out with my ramrod and then I'll have to start the process over again okay but let's go look at our rabbit remember I said that shot was really bigger than what you want to use for a rabbit but even with that said we've got two holes right in the heart lung area of that rabbit here we have another one at the spine area up here and we have one that's at the top of the head in the ears right here so you've got at least three of those shots that hit that rabbit right in the kill zone that's a dead rabbit there's no question about it and it's meat on the table okay guys so like I said once you open this up it's not going to eject the brass we just shot our mock rabbit here and I'm just going to shove this right down the barrel and you'll see it knocks out out really easy there it is still got powder smoking out of it okay and there goes my ramrod going through my barrel and that is the beauty really of shooting black powder through a gun like this number one it's very easy to accomplish number two they're easy to clean you know you don't have to flush it like you do a modern-day black-powder rifle or even an antique black-powder rifle where everything goes through the touch hole you've got a flush hot water down with soap or whatever dump it back out with this thing you can just break it open and clean the barrel out straight through and I'm going to show you how to do that with black powder in here get some of that fouling out right now okay so we're done shooting our muzzle loader now our muzzle-loaded modern 12-gauge and we know we found the barrel up pretty bad it's time to clean it so that's the great thing about these H&R new england arms single-shot twelve gauges they come apart very easily all i have to do is grab my multi-tool again in my kit already not a problem find the right size screwdriver unscrew one screw that's in the bottom of this forearm guard and I could probably do that with a penny if I didn't have a screwdriver because it's not in there very deep get all over my fingers here pull that off take that arm guard off break it back open and the barrel comes straight off of it now I can take this barrel straight down to the river and dunk it that's exactly what I'm going to do to flush a lot of this black powder out hot water works best but cold water will work too you're sitting around camp and you got hot water that's great if you don't have hot water use cold and I'll show you how to clean this thing out and clean your barrel out with equipment that you've already got in your pack and just some bad guys I'm down here by the creek and what I'm going to do it then it says don't get Barrel in the water to flush it you see the block coming out of it believe it or not I'm going to put sand down the barrel all right put it down from this end keep it away from the mechanisms I'm gonna plug this hole with my finger putting it down sorry the creek and pull it up and shake it and use that sand to help me clean that barrel do I'm just going to flush it again

you see they're still black coming out of it then that water's run clear after I've done that a couple of times I look at my barrel it looks pretty shiny on the inside clean which it does looks real good actually I'll see if I can give you a picture of that then I'm ready to go dry it off and swap it out hopefully you guys can see down that barrel fairly good and you can see how clean she is now we just got to go dry it off and swap it out okay guys so back from the creek what we're going to do is we're just going to take some of our cotton material that we've got and we could use our bandanna we could use anything we wanted to for that and I'm going to dry the outside of the barrel off first dry the mechanisms off real good all the metal moving parts down here at the bottom which are very few and that's why I like a 12-gauge single-shot so well because it's hard to screw them up they don't have a lot of moving parts moving parts usually equal problems alright now what I'm going to do with this is I've got a I'm going to grease that up in a few minutes before I do that I want to dry the inside of the barrel off and what I've got here is I've got a piece of heavy Bank line right here the a t-handle on one side of it and I use this for a lot of things number one I can use it for a trapper snare number two I use this to drop down inside my god designed bottle when it's on the fire and when I pull up it hooks on the shoulder so I can pick my bottle up out of fire I can also hang my bottle over the fire with this and it'll hang there and boil as well and then just pull it off when I'm done but the other thing that this T toggle will do is it works just like a bore snake okay on the other side of this thing I've always got a loop and as you see I put a piece of steel wool on here okay I just want to make sure I get that barrel swapped out one time really really good before I dry it so I've just taken my loop put it around the piece of triple hot steel wool again multi-purpose fire-starting material that I already had to clean and I can use it to clean my gear okay or clean my firearm so I'm going to tuck that in there real good wad it up then all I'm going to do is drop this T toggle right down the front of this barrel it's heavy so I'm going right down through there all I have to do is just feed it down just like that and this is longer than you really need but I keep it long so I can use it for multiple purpose things like snares and there it is at the end and now I'll have to do is pull on it and it's going to pull that steel wool right through my barrel just like that I'll do that a couple of times when I've gotten done doing that a couple of times I'll take that off I'll take a piece of my cotton material I'll take a swatch of cotton material here doesn't have to be anything spectacular and again I can use this later for making char cloth or patch either one just because I'm using it now for something doesn't mean I have to get rid of it that would make a couple of really good patches for the next load but right now I'm going to use that swab out my barrel so I'm going to feed that through my loop tee it off just like that and do the same thing again and feed my makeshift bore snake right down the barrel and pull that drying patch down through there and once I get done with that I will take a little bit of tallow and wipe it on the patch

for a third run and that will grease the inside that barrel for me to keep it from rough okay not bad not bad it's got a little bit of black on it but it's not horrible now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take the same piece of patch that I've got here and I'm going to get some tallow and put on it I'm going to grease this barrel on the inside the outside I've got my ten italo right here you can melt some of this towel you know into a smaller tin and put it in your shooting bag you can pour it into a film canister if you wanted to this is fairly soft because I melted it down not very long ago to put another coat on my firearm earlier so now I'm going to wad this up with the tallow out like this put it back in my bore snake make sure I get a good coating that tallow on there rub it in real get into the cloth now at this point I want to keep that off the ground so then we'll grit getting in there I was late on my pack while I slide this down the barrel very important that you keep your weapon or your gun or your firearm whenever you want to choose to call it clean and service well okay this time I went the opposite direction I'll do that a couple of times I'll smear some more towel on there set that off to the side and do it again just to make sure I get a good coating inside that thing if I get some of that stuff on my hands I'm going to put it on the barrel later anyway so I can do it now not a big deal

now while I've got this gun still disassembled them I'm going to take this greasy patch that I've been cleaning that barrel with and I'm going to go ahead and wipe down all the mechanical moving parts on this firearm while I've still got it apart clean the breech out real gear the breech seat out real good clean the breech face out real good right here go ahead and get that oil in there and I can always dip a little bit more towel on the same rag to wipe it down with as well but cleaning your firearm or cleaning your weapon is a very important part of self-reliance and I can't over stress how important it is to take care of something like this and these are things that you can do at night while you're sitting around the campfire well guys I'm Dave Canberra at the pathline school I hope you've enjoyed this second in the series on the 21st century long hunter shooting black powder from the modern day 12-gauge in my opinion a 12-gauge is the most versatile gun that was ever made and I think that all the frontiersmen of the 17th and 18th century would probably agree with that there is no doubt that even the mountain mint laid into the 1840s usually carried a shotgun with them along with a rifle if they have the choice and in the early days of the American frontier the shotgun was the choice without a doubt for any man especially the common man securing meat and putting food on the table for his family and a modern-day 12-gauge will do the same thing for you I appreciate your views I appreciate your support thank you very much you