50 Cal Blue Ridge Mountain Flint Lock

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

afternoon folks I'm Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school went out to a local flea market this morning with iris and saw this pet Rizzoli 50 caliber Mountain rifle flintlock version sitting on a table and this is not often that you find a flintlock firearm at a flea market to begin with let alone at a decent price and I looked it over pretty good and it was tagged three hundred and fifty dollars on the tag which is probably less than half of what it sells for new to begin with and I looked it over really good and I thought about it and I walked away from the table a little bit and I called my buddy Steve critter Davis and I said hey man so I think I found a gem here and told him about the gun and his response was you don't know any yet so I walked around a little bit more and thought about it and I walked back over and talked to the gentleman looked a gun over again gave it a little quick inspection we'll talk about that a few minutes in the video here and ended up getting in for $275 so this is a pet rizzoli fifty caliber flintlock Mountain rifle very typical from the period of 1760 to the late 1770s for sure all along the eastern frontier very much a Pennsylvania style type rifle as far as the drop butt goes but it was called the Blue Ridge or Blue Ridge Mountain rifle is what they called us by pet Rizzoli a very very nice clean design like I said it's a heavy-duty 50 caliber octagon barrel should be a good shooter but what we have to do now is now that we've inspected the outside of it and bought this firearm when you take it apart clean it inspect it and make sure the safe before we attempt to fire it now so we're going to do right now stay with me guys okay guys so we've got a couple things going on here we have taken the lock mechanism completely out of this firearm and you can see it's got a lot of rust on it in here we're going to have to clean all that up it is working very very well it just needs to be cleaned up and to rust up a little bit now my next worry was that I didn't know what was in the bottom-of-the-barrel I dropped the ramrod down into the gun and it made a pretty good thud but it didn't really bounce like it was all the way to the bottom of the barrel so I feared that there might have been some type of a load or charge stilling the gun so at this point what I've been doing is pouring hot water down the barrel and you can see by the color of this water is coming out it's almost black most likely there was some powder residue of some kind down inside so now what I'm trying to do is get it to run clear through this touch hole picking it out as I go once I get that water running clear through there then I can continue to start making sure that this firearms a good working order that I picked up today okay you can see how I've got water just comes straight out of side of that touch hole and it's clear now that tells me that at least that gun is clear now and it will fire no problem as long as the lock mechanism working properly and everything is clean and dried out that guns going to fire when I try to fire them so now it's a matter of drawing the gun out letting it drain turn it upside down swabbing the barrel cleaning that out real good cleaning up the barrel oiling it up real good

and then we'll work on the lock okay so the next thing I want to do is I want to clean this lock up and I've got this rust eraser they use sometimes on knives and things like that and that will take care of most of the surface stuff on here I want to scrub to make sure that I get the prison really clean discussing surface rust on it but I don't really have any pitting on it so that just makes it look more Brown more antique more used and I've got some steel wool here as well and I'll use that too and I generally in the field will use some type of a vegetable based oil to take care of all my firearms tools knives things like that but when I'm at home or at the cabin whatever the case may be when I'm doing an initial cleaning like this of something that I have purchased I'm going to go ahead and use a rim well on that

to make sure that I get the best cleaning I can get on it the first time around you can see how black this thing is it's just filthy dirty but right now I'm just kind of wiping everything out first and then I'm going to go in spray down with a will and wipe it down really good again with a rag right now I'm just trying to get all the surface rust off of anything that may have surface rust on it then I'll go back and oil it to keep it from rusting any further and this gun already had a flash pan guard on it right here it just keeps sparks from flying out of the pan and what those were generally for was soldiers back in the day would line up in lines right next to each other side by side so when you spark this the sparks would come flying out the side of this thing and to keep the sparks out of your buddy's face you would have this on your firearm wouldn't necessarily been something that was used too much along the frontier but it's already on there so I'm not going to take it off it gives us some nostalgia I don't think the gun came with that on it when it was new I've looked up the Petters Oly front tier model firearm front tier model flintlock on the internet on Petters always website it definitely didn't come with that to begin with once we get this cleaned up really good then we can oil it down initially with just some rim well like I said you're just going to spray the whole thing down really really good and then I'm going to wipe it down really good with the rag to give it an initial oiling additional coat of protection and then later on like I said in the field I'll use a vegetable based oil and fixing wax and things like that will you stick some wax on the stock here when we get to cleaning that up and we get to wiping it down to make sure that this weapon you know we want to make sure before we even attempt a mess of this thing or fire it that we know it's safe that we know everything is operational that we know the weapons safe it's hard to be able to tell those kind of things especially

with some type of a flintlock firearm like this without taking the thing apart so sometimes when you're buying these things you're buying them a little bit on trust I mean you can drop the ramrod down make sure it goes all the way down by measuring it in to the firearm to make sure it does have a load stuck in it or something like that and you can you know operate the lock mechanism while it's on the firearm to make sure it's sparking well the springs are tight the mainspring is tight and things like that but other than that there's not a whole lot you can do check trigger pull things like that trigger sets and things this is going to set the trigger on it make sure that stocks aren't cracked and all things all the things like that and the barrels not got a lot of pitting it and things but you're pretty much at the mercy after that of trust until you can get home and pull the thing apart actually and see what you're dealing with okay so that makes our lock pretty well clean now I've had this gun standing upside down for quite a while I'm not going to do a whole lot to this barrel I'm going to scrub it down with some steel wool here real quick just to take any surface rust off of it that might be on it and then I'm going to wipe that down and oil it as well I'm going to oil the wood initially the other thing that I always want to check when I were looking at this firearm is to make sure that number one there's no cracks in the stock anywhere they're going to affect how well this barrel holds down to the stock and things like that we know now that water flows directly down the barrel and through the touchhole which means that the water goes in and out sparks are going to go in and whatever is in the barrel is going to come out so we're good to go there now we just want to give it an initial cleanup job and protect it to make sure that it's going to be protected initially before we start to carry it in the woods and like I said I'm using a REM well for this in in a situation where I'm at a base camp or my cabin or whatever the case may be out here on the porch of my cabin but if I were in the woods maintaining this gun I would just use natural oils talos fixing waxes things of that nature and I'm putting a couple coats and REM oil on here just to make sure that it gets down into the metal really good okay folks so we've got our 50 caliber Mountain rifle all put back together oiled up dried out should be ready to go now what we want to do is obviously we want to fire this weapon but before we're going to load a ball down this barrel we want to fire kind of a fowling load out of it just to make sure that it's going to function properly what I mean by that is we're going to just put half of the load in we're going to put a measure of powder in about three-quarters of what I would normally use and then we're going to just put a wad in front of that and then fire the wad out of the gun and nothing else to make sure everything functions properly the reason I'm doing that is if something doesn't function properly and I have to remove that load from the barrel of this gun it's going to be a lot easier to do that if I don't have a ball in there if I go jam a ball down the barrel of this rifle and I'm going to pull the ball out that's a whole different ball game than trying to just get a passion wad and powder out of there so what we're going to do is we're going to take our rifle we've got a powder measure in our kit here and we're going to load it up with powder and like I said you know we're not going to load this thing up completely we're going to give it about a three-quarter load so we'll dump that down the barrel I always tap it a little bit as I go then what we're going to do is we're going to take a patch and basically a pass just means that we're going to cut a piece of material that we carry with us that's been lubricated we're going to cut that off now this material has been sitting on the shooting bag for a little while and it's not very well lubricated so what I am going to do is I'm going to open up this tin that I have a fixing wax and I'm going to watch this pass really well before I shove it down that's going to lubricate the barrel on the way down as well so I'm going to do that before I shoot this fouling load out as well before I'd want to shoot a bullet out of this gun I'm going to want to lube my patch as well because it makes it a whole lot easier to load into the firearm in the end and typically you'd be using this enough that your patch material wouldn't dry out it would stay pretty well greasy so we've got this greased up and again you know we've got a fiber ramrod here it's not a wooden ramrod and for the 21st century long hunter mentality that's not a big deal how we're trying to get all period-correct with this thing I'd want to wooden ramrod but the fact is this ramrod is going to last a lot longer it's got tips on both ends you can put cleaning implements things like that on so it's not a bad ramrod I may hang on to it for a little while now I've got my load in the gun I'll move this flash guard out of the way so you can see what we got going on I'm going to put the gun on half cock and I'm going to prime the pan and I can find the pan with the same powder that I'm using from my horn but I carry a smaller horn with me that's generally got a finer grain powder in it that I use for priming and all I really want to do is fill that divot up that's in the pan and I showed that in the past video how to do that and then I'll shake a little bit of it toward the flash hold there close the pan down and we should be ready to test this thing out see if we're going to get this filing load to shoot out of this firearm at this point remember we've got set trigger so we're going to pull the hammer back to full cock once we pull on the back set trigger now that trigger set and it's set for a very low poundage of pressure so let's go ahead and try to shoot this fouling load and see what happens

okay now we know we're in the money now we know this thing is going to shoot beyond the shot of a doubt we're ready to load some ball ammunition in here okay guys real quick let's talk about one more thing that is beautiful about the flintlock first of all what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and get our measure of powder set up so that we can shoot ball ammunition out of this gun so we'll get our powder measure filled to the right capacity here and I'm going to fill it about 3/4 of the way up this is the same powder measure I used for my 20 gage which is 62 caliber generally speaking you want to use about the same volume of powder that you're using that your calendar is so 50 caliber would you start with about a 50 grain load 62 caliber a 62 grain load and so on and so forth this is set up for a 62 caliber firearm so I'm pulling about 3/4 of the way up for a 50 caliber that'll be a good starting load now let's get this in here and then let's talk for a minute about one of the things that's beautiful about this gun this is a 50 caliber weapon I do not have any 50 caliber round balls because I don't own any other 50 caliber guns I do have 45 caliber balls so that means they're going to be quite a bit smaller than this so what I'm going to need to do is to be able to make this thing shoot fairly well is I'm going to take a fairly thick piece of patch and I'm going to double it up so that my normal patch thickness is doubled over and I've got this thing nice and greasy now and I'm going to double that patch over and put that ball in the patch with the sprue straight up and the sprue is where you cut the ball off at there's a little nipple on there where you cut that off in the mold if you you probably saw that if you go back to some of my older videos that have us show making round ball you'll see that so now we're going to make this a little bit thicker so then we put it in here it will still run down the barrel and that passing is what's going to catch in the rifling so basically we're building around here I'm going to shove this down in the barrel get that all the way down next to the powder just less - now we're ready to prime the pan and fire the weapon for real so let's go set something up okay so I've set up a target out here I've zoomed in on it that's like because we're going to back up behind the camera to about 30 yards and we're going to try to shoot this piece of round plot that we have this cut off from a stump we've got a light spot in the middle of it that's a willy mat and we'll see how this rifle does stand by good

you can see we knock this big chip out of it so we're a little bit well I don't know we were low right left it's hard to say I didn't pay attention much attention to what the orientation was of this thing so we'll give it a shot clock it this time so we know where we're at just like that you

kind of guys if she is blown in half alright guys I appreciate join me for this video today on the Blue Ridge Mountain rifle Pat Rizzoli 50 caliber flintlock like we got to cleaned up and ready to rock and roll looks like she's in primo shape she's hitting pretty well from a fairly short distance we'll see how she does out 50 60 70 yards but you know anywhere from 15 yards back to about 30 she's pretty close again we were using a 45 caliber ball which is actually about 0.43 this is a point 500 barrel so we doubled over a heavy patch and lubed it up well with fix and whacks as long as we get that patch tight in there it's going to get in those grooves and spin that ball but it's still not going to be as a KERS it should be but it's close enough and that's what counts when we're talking about gathering meat close enough counts for sure so again versatility of the flintlock weapon and I got to have powder but just about anything I can get down that barrel is going to come out the other end even if it's not exactly the right size ball I can compensate for that somewhat you just can't be too big right now I've got some 45 caliber mold so that's what I'm going to roll with I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for anything you do for me for my school my family all the Pathfinder affiliates I'm adopting another video soon as I can thanks guys you