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For many this topic is a moot issue but for many who are starting out and planning to hunt this may help. With hunting seasons starting to ramp up, these questions also start popping up.
I hunt all in-lines and use the same practice on each gun. I live in a city of about 135,000 and within sight of the Mayo Clinic. For several years I'd just wait until dark the night before opener and put a small charge of BH209 in the barrel with a plug made of paper towel, sneak out the service door of the garage and point the gun in the air and let it rip. Some neighbors got a little testy with this procedure after seeing me do this, so I took to just popping off four primers out in the garage with the gun pointed in a waste paper basket. Things are much better on the neighbor front now.
With the wonderful shortage of everything black powder these days I won't use the Winchester primers I have the guns dialed into for fouling the barrel so I picked up a couple flats of regular cci shotshell primers to use for this, but I honestly think any primer including the lower heat muzzleloader specific primers will work for this too. It's fouling we want, not necessarily the heat.
For side locks I think the same method of fouling a clean barrel for hunting can be used only with one's choice of caps. For the range one can just run a light load down range to foul things. I don't know why but my sidelocks don't seem to shoot a wild first shot in a clean barrel when using T7 granular and that's all I use in them.
I'm not a fan of letting a round off in the dark at the end of the day either. I'll pull the primer, give the gun a wipe with an oil impregnated cloth and case it up. A simple primer the next morning and I am good to go. Unless one has been in some serious wet weather, charges within an inline gun should be just fine. If you suspect that the charge might be moisture compromised, pull the plug at home or camp and dump it, cleaning the plug and wiping out the barrel before reloading using a new sabot....the bullet will be fine to re-use. Sidelocks are another thing and I'll let someone more in touch with possible damp load issues offer advice on them.
I hunt all in-lines and use the same practice on each gun. I live in a city of about 135,000 and within sight of the Mayo Clinic. For several years I'd just wait until dark the night before opener and put a small charge of BH209 in the barrel with a plug made of paper towel, sneak out the service door of the garage and point the gun in the air and let it rip. Some neighbors got a little testy with this procedure after seeing me do this, so I took to just popping off four primers out in the garage with the gun pointed in a waste paper basket. Things are much better on the neighbor front now.
With the wonderful shortage of everything black powder these days I won't use the Winchester primers I have the guns dialed into for fouling the barrel so I picked up a couple flats of regular cci shotshell primers to use for this, but I honestly think any primer including the lower heat muzzleloader specific primers will work for this too. It's fouling we want, not necessarily the heat.
For side locks I think the same method of fouling a clean barrel for hunting can be used only with one's choice of caps. For the range one can just run a light load down range to foul things. I don't know why but my sidelocks don't seem to shoot a wild first shot in a clean barrel when using T7 granular and that's all I use in them.
I'm not a fan of letting a round off in the dark at the end of the day either. I'll pull the primer, give the gun a wipe with an oil impregnated cloth and case it up. A simple primer the next morning and I am good to go. Unless one has been in some serious wet weather, charges within an inline gun should be just fine. If you suspect that the charge might be moisture compromised, pull the plug at home or camp and dump it, cleaning the plug and wiping out the barrel before reloading using a new sabot....the bullet will be fine to re-use. Sidelocks are another thing and I'll let someone more in touch with possible damp load issues offer advice on them.