Friday morning I watched Ethan Yazel's video where he finally opens his Chambers New England fowler after it sat quietly for two years, and it felt oddly perfect, because I had spent the previous evening contemplating getting one of my own and decided I'd sleep on it. Yesterday, I pulled the trigger.

I'm pretty excited to finally share my New England Colonial Fowler / Militia Musket, built by Cory Joe Stewart. It's exactly the kind of honest, workmanlike piece that keeps pulling me deeper into this period.

Paired with it is a plug bayonet by Nathan Allen, which absolutely completes the martial side of the story, and a beautifully done woven strap by Shayna Matthews that ties the whole thing together (literally and aesthetically).

There's something special about seeing a project come together from multiple skilled hands. This one feels right at home in the colonial / militia world, and I'm looking forward to putting it to use.

Grateful for the craftsmen keeping this tradition alive.

Photos courtesy of Mr. Stewart.

Another cool video mark
 Just wish you would buy a left handed gun, probably see you scores increase 
Kevin

I'm too old now to sell all these RH guns & look for LH ones. They are VERY tough to find at a reasonable price.
They "ain't" cheap anymore ..!!! LOL
Thanks for watching....

Very well said Eric. I guess if that WD-40 stuff is good enough for a rocket, it surely ought to work on a smokepole. And there's one thing for sure, if someone hands you a muzzleloader, it sure doesn't take long to figure out if it had TLC, or it was neglected. I vote for TLC.

One of these days I need to try WD-40, which I hear so many good things about.

~Kees~

You really should give it a try. I used to wipe my guns down liberally with WD-40 to remove fingerprints and would even spray it directly onto actions and trigger components. Later, a locksmith set me straight- she hated the stuff because it can purportedly gum up and varnish over time- so I stopped using it as a lubricant. Can't say I ever experienced that in the many years I had used it, but her warning was enough to make me rethink my process. That said, WD-40 shines when it's used for what it was actually designed to do: displace water before proper lubrication and protect against rust.

I really like to utilize it for my lock cleaning also. I run my locks under the sink with a drop of dish soap and scrub them with a toothbrush. After that, I blow them dry with compressed air, give them a light spray of WD-40, and blow them off again. Once the moisture is fully displaced, I follow up with a very light mist of Ballistol and a small dab of grease on the moving parts. Done deal-- ready to go. Probably sounds more involved than it really is-- in reality, it takes all of about five minutes, if that.

For anyone who isn't aware, WD-40 was originally developed to protect the outer skin of the Atlas rocket (the first ICBM) from corrosion. Used in the role it was intended for, it works exceptionally well.

There are about a million and one ways to clean a muzzleloader, and just about everyone is convinced their method is the right one. In reality, most of those methods work just fine, because they're all trying to accomplish the same handful of critical tasks-- just in different ways.

At the end of the day, effective muzzleloader maintenance really comes down to three fundamentals. First, you need to neutralize and remove the corrosive black powder residue. Second, you must make absolutely sure that any water used during cleaning is fully driven out, especially from the breech area and other tight recesses where moisture loves to hide. And finally, you need to leave the metal properly protected with an appropriate oil or grease for long-term storage. Pretty basic stuff.

How you get there- hot water or cold, soap or no soap, patches or dunking the barrel- is largely a matter of personal preference and experience. What matters far more than the specific ritual is that these three goals are met every single time. If you accomplish that, your muzzleloader will stay clean, rust-free, and ready to shoot, regardless of which "best" method you swear by.

Whew! I'm sorry... that was a novel.

On this day in 1830, Jose Antonio Diaz de Leon, the last Franciscan missionary in prerepublic Texas, reluctantly complied with the Mexican state government decree that missions be secularized--that is, turned over to diocesan authorities.

Diaz de Leon had been appointed ad interim president of all the Texas missions in 1820, three years before the Mexican government ordered their final secularization. Diaz de Leon declined to comply without instructions from his superiors in Zacatecas, the first in a series of delays that lasted seven years. Diaz de Leon surrendered the San Antonio missions to the Diocese of Monterrey in 1824. In 1826 he was officially named president of the Texas missions. But Anglo settlers wanted the mission properties, and in 1829 the town of Goliad (formerly La Bahia) obtained a new decree to enforce secularization. Diaz de Leon continued to resist, but on February 8, 1830, he finally surrendered the last remaining missions. The mission lands, as he had expected, were soon made available to colonists. The bishop of Monterrey assigned him a parish post in Nacogdoches. Diaz de Leon was murdered on November 4, 1834. He was the thirty-first, and last, Zacatecan missionary to die in Texas. In 1926 the German author Robert Streit published a historical novel about Diaz de Leon; the work remains untranslated.