Converting Muzzleloading Rifles

There have been many milestones in the development of firearms for both hunting and military use. Prior to the invention of the matchlock, it took the English years to develop archers that could both pull the famous longbow let alone hit anything with it. From the time a boy reached 13 years old he was given a longbow and by law had to practice with it every Sunday after church on the village archery butts along with all the other men.

All other games were outlawed because the development of the world’s best archers was a matter of national security (where have I heard that phrase before?). Sometime in the first half of the 15th Century some bright spark found a way to set off a powder charge using a lever that held a smoldering piece of cord and the arms race was on! The matchlock wasn’t really better than the longbow.

It was slower to load, not very accurate, and nearly useless in wet weather, but didn’t require the arduous practice necessary with the longbow. Besides, you couldn’t be a self-respecting, illustrious, potentate of a modern nation unless your troops were armed with the assault rifle of the age. It showed you were hip, upto-date, and anyone with lesser technology should fear for their crown. Well… not really. The well-practiced "savages" could easily put a dozen arrows in the air for every musket ball launched.

As with most military equipment decisions, the deciding factor was the ability to train musketeers in weeks rather than the years it took to train an archer, making more peasants available for the knights to stick with their lances in the name of chivalry. After a couple hundred years, firearms technology took a little side trip into the wheellock. However, these were so delicate and expensive even the kings couldn’t tax their people enough to equip an army with them.

Having a wheellock was akin to having your own business jet today. Sure, some folks have them but they aren’t common among soldiers. Around 1600, some enterprising person mated the flint and steel to the side of a gun barrel and invented When purchased, the gun had a percussion lock and double set trigger. the flintlock. The best parts of the flintlock were that it was simple, easy to make, and pretty darn reliable unless you found yourself fighting in a frog strangler of a downpour.

Best of all, it was relatively cheap. Even petty kings could arm their armies with flintlocks. For the next two hundred years, Europeans marched around slaying their fellow living things with flintlock muskets and rifles. Here in America, we didn’t have noble knights and ladies but we did have a parcel of odd natives foolish enough to think the land was theirs just because they got here

With the lock removed, you can see the drum and nipple of the percussion system is screwed into the barrel. first. We thought the flintlock was such a great invention we brought them all the way over from Europe just so we could introduce our red brothers to the wonders of modern manufacturing and kill them faster. The British looked at what we were doing and decided that us backwards, unruly, colonials needed some sophisticating and came up with the idea of gun control.

They heard we were accumulating guns in a couple of small towns and decided to go take them away from us. We didn’t take kindly to that notion and a guy named George and a few of his buddies invited them to leave. Being polite Britishers, they took their cricket bats and went home. Along about 1820, some minister saw the light and was sure, being a man of peace and all, that he could come up with a faster way to kill folks. So, he invented the percussion cap.

The percussion lock was exactly what everyone had been waiting for ever since the Chinese invented sliced bread, oh yeah, and gunpowder as well. Shortly after the invention of the percussion cap everyone simply had to have one. No longer would you be able to knap apiece of chert yourself. You would actually have to go to a store and pay money to shoot your rifle. Every gunsmith on the frontier became a custom gunmaker and started converting all those old flintlocks to percussion.

In the case of the traditional flint, the gunsmith is simply changing the lock, drilling out the flash hole, and tapping it for a drum with a clean out screw. The job presents few problems, except for making sure the lock screws are spaced properly. If you can find a lock with the same hole spacing for the mounting screws and the same

Holding a 2 1/2" x 2 1/2" piece of 1/8" steel in a vise, the edge is heated with a torch and the trigger face is forged with a ball-pein hammer. lock plate size and contour, the conversion is easy. If not, you will have to do some filling, inletting, and perhaps even make anew sideplate. The rifle pictured here is one I picked up at a local estate auction. Although pretty well done, it is a prime example of what happens when you don’t do your homework on what you are building.

The rifle is a .32 caliber Southern Mountain Rifle, also known as a "Poor Boy" in Yankee or "Po Boy" down south. These rifles were traditionally unadorned and as simple as possible. The tail of the trigger was heated and a pair of needle nosed pliers used to simply twist a decorative curlicue in the bottom of the trigger. As good a job as the maker did making a beautiful rifle, he did make a few slips in recreating the style. However, it was his rifle and he was certainly free to make a gun that pleased him.

The first miscue is a nickel silver sideplate that he engraved his name and year of manufacture on. This should have gone on a steel plate because the nickel silver would simply have been seen as an extravagance. The double set trigger is also rarely seen on these rifles. Given I was converting it to flintlock, I also forged out a trigger. The lock I had on hand was nickel plated and I buffed the plating off and browned it as well as the sideplate and the trigger with Birchwood Casey Plum Brown.

Upon disassembling the rifle I discovered one other common problem I often see on modern-built muzzleloaders. The front action screw was installed too low in the stock. Getting the ramrod to go under it required almost 3/4 of the diameter of the screw to be ground away and the ramrod tapered. When locating the front action screw, it should pass just under the bottom of the barrel to leave room for the ramrod. The gun sports a steel buttplate.

Although I have seen some with no buttplate, I have seen many more with buttplates salvaged from some other junk yard metal. Could be that it once was a fender from a 1951 Pontiac. The project was not a difficult one, mostly requiring I inlet the works for the available lock. Unfortunately, the new flintlock was slightly smaller than the percussion that came off of the gun.

My first thought was to inlet some wood around the edges of the inletting but I ultimately decided to leave it so I could convert the rifle back to percussion if I wanted. Using the original sideplate as a pattern, I cut and fit anew sideplate. This is where extra caution is needed as the screw holes must be in exactly the right places so the screws fit into the

It isn’t elegant but it is much faster than filing alone. lock. I have spoken to several others that have had the same problem with the front lockplate screw interfering with the passage of the ramrod. There are various fixes for this, from grinding the screw and tapering the ramrod to fit, all the way to simply soldering or gluing a screw head into the front hole in the lockplate and just holding the lock in place with one screw. I rather enjoy making simple triggers for my muzzleloaders.

I take a 1/8" piece of steel plate, cut into a 2 What you can’t afford in technology can be made up for with hard work and a few tricks. The trigger plate is reduced in thickness every place but where the trigger pivots. Inletting of the lock was left oversized to allow conversion back to percussion.

The alternative is to glue thin pieces of wood into the lock mortise and reinlet the lock. 1/2 x 2 1/2 square, secure it in my vice, heat it with a torch to red hot, and pound it into rough shape with the pein end of a ball-pein hammer. After smoothing the face of the trigger with a file, a hacksaw makes the needed cuts to shape the plate. I leave along, thin tail on the bottom of the trigger which is later heated with a torch and bend into a curlicue.

The trigger plate is made out of 1/4" steel cut to length and width and a series of holes are drilled in the middle. The material between the holes is cleaned out with a file, leaving a slot for the trigger to pass through. Then it is drilled for the trigger pin and drilled and tapped for the tang screw. In the old days most of the conversions were done from flint to percussion. If you have a simple drum and nipple, the conversion back to flintlock is just as easy.

Take a screw that fits the tapped hole the drum was in and cut it to length. Then drill it with a large diameter drill from the barrel side to within 1/8" or so from the pan side. Drill a 1/16" flash hole in from the other side and you are done. One word of caution. This will not be so simple on guns like the Thompson/ Center Hawken with the hooked patent breech. All that is left is to fit the trigger and reassemble the rifle.

If you have been careful and planned ahead, you can actually convert the gun back and forth from flint to percussion and back again. AG