An old friend, a custom muzzle loader, and putting a few miles on the Z06…

Yours truly in Nor Cal last weekend.

I rolled up north in my Corvette last weekend to spend a day with my buddy Paul, a guy with whom I’ve been friends my entire life (literally, my entire life…we were next door neighbors back in the Land of Tony Soprano when we were kids).

We had a great time visiting, tasting Tequilas, telling tall tales, talking about the sad state of politics in the land, and of course, sending lead downrange at the local gun club.

Paul and I grew up in a different time.  We could shoot guns in our backyards, which ended where the woods began.  It’s not that we were rich or anything.   It’s what working class blue-collar guys (our Dads) did in those days.   They bought a couple of acres and built their own houses out in the boonies (the ‘burbs hadn’t been invented yet).  It was a great way to grow up.  Our Dads were both world class trapshooters, hunters, reloaders, and gunsmiths.  These two apples (Paul and yours truly) did not fall too far from that New Jersey tree.

Paul was just finishing up a custom muzzle loader, and his new creation is awesome.  It’s art…a thing of great beauty.   It’s one of the reasons I went up there…I wanted to see it.   Paul builds these custom black powder rifles from the ground up, starting with a barrel, a maple plank, and not much more (other than a hell of a lot of talent).   The amount of craftsmanship that goes into a custom rifle like this is overwhelming.  Here’s an idea of what my good buddy Paul does to create one of these muzzle-loading masterpieces:

• He fashions the stock with a saw, files, chisels, sandpaper, and linseed oil.
• He cuts, files, crafts, and fits the metal pieces together.
• He beds the barrel and the action in the stock.
• He does the rust bluing.
• He casts the fore end tip of silver.
• And a whole lot more.

You get the idea.  Paul was approaching completion on this .50-caliber beauty, and I got to help at the range as he finalized the rifle’s fixed sight adjustments.   This is a rifle with hundreds and hundreds of hours of hand labor, and it is a world-class work of art.

Check out some of these photos, folks…

A custom-crafted black powder rifle. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Custom hand-fitted maple quilted maple, with 10 coats of linseed oil.

Loading a muzzle loader takes time.  It’s one shot at a time here, folks.  It’s all about skill.

I had the Nikon with me, of course, and I grabbed the above photos and a video of Paul in action.  Here’s a cool video of the first shot fired through Paul’s latest custom creation…

I asked Paul what inspired his interest in black powder firearms and crafting custom muzzle loading weaponry.  I knew Paul was a history buff, but he surprised me when he told me it was the Davy Crockett TV shows we watched as kids (and if that doesn’t date us, nothing will).

I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised.   Those old TV westerns and frontier shows had an impact on all folks who grew up here in America.   It wasn’t too hard to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys were, and the shows somehow managed to be entertaining (riveting, actually), without the boorish behavior and senseless violence that passes for entertainment these days.  It was a good time to be a kid, I think.

Those old cowboy shows were the same reason both Paul and I like the old single-action sixguns, too.   And yes, we both had ours on the range that same day.  I caught this very cool shot of Paul and his Single Action Army .45 Colt just as it fired.  If you look closely, you can see the thunder and lightning escaping from the barrel/cylinder interface in the photo below…

Good times, folks.   More to follow.   Stay tuned.