Black Powder Pistol My First Build

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Simple and plain to keep it easy.

This is my first black powder pistol that I ever built or owned as that goes. I built this black powder pistol around 1972 or 1973. I am a left hander but I shoot pistol with my right hand. I did not know at the time that I really would like the lock on the opposite side of my palm as this turned out. The black powder pistol here us built for a left hand shooter.

The pistol is a 32 caliber with the barrel coming from an old rife. The wood used is curly maple. It has no stain on it so the curl does not show up to well. It has a single trigger with a simple trigger gard around it. As you can see it is a cap lock type gun. The gun is made with no ram rod channel. I used a toilet bolt for the back sight and just soldered on a brass blade for the front sight. Here is a close up of the lock. It is a back action type lock with a plate added to the front to help protect the wood around the drum that holds the nipple for the cap to go on. The lock is an old (v) spring type. It uses a standard #11 percussion cap. I load it with about 25 grains of FFF black powder. The lock is in half cock. This is the way the gun should be carried when loaded. You do not want to put the hammer down on the cap when loaded. If you do and you hit the hammer the gun can go off.

This is a shot of the back side of the black powder pistol. As you can see that it is very plain. As this was my first muzzleloader that I built from scratch I did not want to make the job any harder than it was to begin with. The wood was just a rough sawn out blank. I layed every thing out from a center line and just started inlaying the barrel first. Every thing was put in the wood blank first and set so it all worked. Then you start to shape the stock as you want it to look when done. After you get it shaped the way you want it then you have to sand it all smooth. After you get it smooth you should take a wet cloth and rub the hole stock down to get it wet. Then very carefully take a propane torch and evaporate all the water off of your stock with out burning it. After you do this the stock will be very rough again. This raises the grain in the wood. You should repeat this till the grain stops raising. It will never stay smooth but you will see that it raises very little after 3 or 4 times. This is when you can stain and finish to the shade you want. Raising the grain also makes the wood harder so it will not dent as easily if you did not.

 After building this muzzleloader and shooting it, I bought a black powder revolver in 44 caliber. It was a lot of fun to shoot. But the main draw back to it was the grease that I used on the cylinders. You had to grease up the chambers so that when you fired the black powder revolver, the other chambers did not cross fire. The grease made one hell of a mess of the gun.

Now you can get greased patches to go over your black powder before setting the ball. This makes the cleanup a lot easier. When I was shooting them back in the 70’s I do not think that you could get them then.

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