EASY to Clean?
A
perfunctory perusal of today's frontloader media quickly reveals
a common thread of focus: "easy to clean." Millions of
dollars are spent annually promoting propellants, primers, rifles,
and even bullets that promise less cleanup, quicker cleanup, easier
cleanup, or cleaning up with just water. The obsession with cleanup
is everywhere you look, and it is hard to avoid the continual questions
about how hard it is to clean, what to clean it with, how often
to clean, when to swab or spitpatch a barrel, and how hard it is
to load a sabot or conical-- after the barrel is fouled. The promise
of "easy to clean" imbues the muzzleloader brags in rags.
It must be important, for if it was not the bags of cash thrown
at this issue would not be squandered so readily.
The sulfur smell of
blackpowder is now that horrible, awful rotten egg smell. The comparisons
of the "blackpowder muzzleloader" to the "modern
muzzleloader" invariably portray the "blackpowder guy"
as the "Slob" from the from the old Mystery Date board
game. Our new nimrod that dares to use blackpowder is offered the
experience of being in a version of Godzilla Meets the Smog-Monster:
his vile and wretched coal mining suit an aversion to man, woman,
and beast alike. Just like "Pigpen" from the Peanuts comic
strip, blackpowder muzzleloaders are cast as a distinctly slovenly
bunch, carrying the "affixed dust of countless ages,"
as Pigpen explained to Charlie Brown on September 15, 1954--the
year of his Peanuts debut.
One very recent ad asks
you if you can shoot your muzzleloader 5,562 times without cleaning
it? I ask why you would want to, and believe you should hit what
you are shooting at a significantly earlier point than that. In
the same ad, Jim Shockey is shown with a Thompson / Center Encore
(not a typo, at least on my end) as this powder releases
"overwhelming power."
Hodgdon's Triple Se7en
cleans up with "regular tap water," though I know of no
muzzleloader that uses water alone to clean Triple Se7en. Shooters
have complained of the hard, slag-like "crud ring" it
forms ever since it was released in 2002. Back in 2002, I was assured:
"I have not heard of any media or writer in the field that
has had a bad experience with Triple Seven.
Regards,
Chris Hodgdon"
Well, anyone who has
used it extensively might not have the same identical version, to
understate it mildly. One friend tested Triple Se7en on his clean,
pristine muzzleloader rifle barrel to see how corrosion-free it
really was. The barrel reported was trashed within 24 hours, so
it seems extremely low-corrosivity is not exactly the case. To be
fair, Hodgdon never has called it "non-corrosive."
Scorched scopes, pitted
barrels, frozen breechplugs, and worrying about cleaning has never
added to any hunting experience for me-- and hunting is supposed
to be fun, after all. Alternative propellants are on their way,
several of which attempt to confine the cleaning conundrum. Again
and again, hunters have longed for non corrosive, clean powders--
and guns that need no immediate cleaning at all. That
alone makes muzzleloading a lot more fun. Equally important
to me is the ability to see the strike of the bullet, and the game
animal's reaction to it. That alone gives you first hand knowledge
of the anchoring ability of a load. More importantly, it allows
for more rapid game recovery. I don't have the numbers on exactly
how many animals have been lost primarily to obscured view of the
action after the trigger is pulled; but it is far from trivial.
At the critical time of the harvest, I've felt cheated when I didn't
see it all happen. That is a problem that has been adroitly addressed.
Cheaper to shoot than
a .22 WinMag, an accuracy promise that leads the industry, backed
by America's oldest gun maker that currently offers a muzzleloader,
when I hear that a gun shop has never "heard of it," it
is really hard to imagine where they have been.
Hardly brand new, it
is a continually proven approach for the last six years offered
by the multiple Shooting Industry Academy of Excellence award
winner, Savage Arms Company. 2003 was a heavily accoladed year for
Savage Arms: the Savage Team received "Manufacturer of the
Year" and the "Rifle of the Year" award. Brian Herrick,
VP of Savage Arms, accepted the rifle award on behalf of the Savage
Team in Orlando, Florida: it was the Savage Accu-Trigger Equipped
12BVSS short action heavy barrel varmint rifle. Al Kasper accepted
the "Manufacturer of the Year Award" at the same event.
What folks should know
is that the current Savage 10ML-II muzzleloader shares the same
manufacturing facility, same manufacturing expertise, same
heavy barrel profile, same Accu-Trigger design, same
dual pillar bedding, same ambidextrous three position safety,
and is based upon the very same revered Savage short action as this
awarded "Best of the Best" 12 Series Varmint rifle.
The 10ML-II is simply the muzzleloading
brother to the Shooting Industry's Rifle of the Year produced
by the Shooting Industry's Manufacturer of the Year right
here in the good old USA.
That's why the 10ML-II
is superior in design and materials, and truly delivers on the easy
to clean promises made-- but not exactly kept, by the rest of the
pack. It is the "Solution to Pyrodex Pollution"
as a friend of mine likes to state. This is not to say there are
no other muzzleloaders out there that actually work-- that would
be specious. The Savage approved Accurate Arms and Vihtavouri powders
truly deliver what to this date has only been promised.
It
is no stretch at all to say that the 10ML-II is the proven answer
for what most say they want, but have never found. I'll have to
warn you, though-- use of the Savage 10ML-II can indeed be habit
forming: it sure has been for me, and that's just no smoke. If all
this sounds like a sudden gust of enthusiasm, it well should. You
need to see what you have been missing.
©
October, 2005 by Randy Wakeman
