Evilv

If you don't want the bother of the Black Powder Cert, you can just rock up and buy a tub of Pyrodex RS at your local gun shop. I paid £32 a pound for mine which is a bit pricey but not so much as to stop me dabbling with BP home loads in an old sbs. It works GREAT. I used to shoot BP in the 80s and had a BP Cert then and to be honest, the Pyrodex does the job just the same. You load it at the same volumes as BP. It is 30% lighter than BP for the same volume, so don't weigh out the measures unless you male the correction. I think most muzzle loaders and BP cartridge reloaders use a volume measure anyway. Give it a try. It would be great to have a real old heirloom like that. I remember when my old .58 Enfield musket misfired a couple of times and wouldn't go off, I just unscrewed the nipple, poked a stout pin down into the chamber to clear the passage, put a bit of fresh powder down into the passage, and poked out the nipple before replacing it and re-capping. The charge fired faultlessly after that.

I think this is a misunderstanding if you don't mind me saying so. You can't have a smoothbore gun with under 24" barrel except on a FAC. Cheers

Pity this didn't come up last week. There are about 200 greylags hanging about in a big crowd on my shoot. Now they are out of season. Is it proofed for steel shot?

Bargain. I have one of these on my FAC ticket. It has been upped in power. Pellet on pellet accuracy at 50 yards. Good price this.

This rifle will make someone very happy. If I didn't already have one, I'd be after this like a rat up a drainpipe. With a scope as well for £150? Why is it still here?

I had a .22Mag 30 years ago. Great rifle. Really whacked whatever you shot with it.

Hooligan!!! Thanks. Did you sell that lovely Tula yet?

What does it cost to get them opened up bruno22rf? Cheers.

ON slight external rust: I recently was given an old Zaballa by a farmer friend when my other gun started misbehaving. The gifted gun had some rust on the barrels. I worked on the bad bits carefully with some 00 wire wool until the steel looked smooth and then cold blued it with a bit of Birchwood Casey's Super Blue. It looks brand new. You can not tell it ever had the blemishes and it was easy enough to do. You have to get the gun totally degreased. I used isopropyl alcohol, and rubbed it down about five times with clean alcohol patches. The blue just rubs on, gets washed off with water and the process repeated. This worked even over the old blueing. I think the cold blue cost about a tenner. I don't know how it will hold up over time but it transformed the look of the gun.

Could have done with that barrel on my half and full choke sbs yesterday when I let fly in close cover with the half choke barrel at a hen pheasant that was 15 yards off. It was a reactive shot, not a thought out one and I haven't yet started preparing the corpse for the freezer, but she may be 'smashed'.

I know, but the bad news is that he is now a lot more expensive and you have to apply for a slot like you were buying festival tickets online. He's a great bloke though and the new prices are still reasonable for what you get. I think he charged me about £50 for that service believe it or not. One thing though - since the SWATCH group have ceased supplying spares for all their watches, which include Omega except to their own certified repair centres, parts availability for such watches as Seamasters and so on will be difficult now and in the future. they started this anti-competitive practice last year. You now can only get parts fitted by Omega service centres and a sky high bill. Fortunately, most services won't require parts although folk used to replace mainsprings on service in the past.

That isn't what Omega recommend at all though. I inherited my grandfather's gold omega bumper in 2010. He wore it for twenty years from 1946 to 1966 when he died and my old man inherited it. Then my dad wore it daily from 1966 to about 2009 when it stopped. Looking at the service mark inscriptions inside it it seems to have been serviced no more than three times in that period and there is very little sign of wear on the parts. My old man hardly ever took the watch off and he certainly wore it every day for almost 47 years. I have been told that my grandfather wore it daily when he had it. This is a detailed photographic report of the tear down and service it had in 2012. I'm amazed how well that watch has lasted. The photos are clickable for huge high res images if you want to see them. Useful for looking at the state of the pivots after a long life of work. http://watchguy.co.uk/teardown-service-omega-bumper-28-10-ra-sc-pc-350/

Naaa Figgy. A mechanical watch is a marvel of precision engineering. Watch this video and tell me you don't feel a sense of amazement. The screws this guy is manipulating so easily are about 1mm across the head with 1/2 mm shafts. I've tried this game and it is extremely difficult to manipulate the parts like he does.

Didn't think that would be there for long.

Glad it worked out for you. Hope the gun suits well.

That's like the way Carney claimed the lack of financial collapse post BREXIT vote was down to his 'interventions'. No evidence whatsoever. I had an explosives cert for the whole of the 1980s. Black Powder was cheap and easy to buy and there were no restrictions on transporting your allowance or bits of paper to allow you to do it. Nitro powders were sold without certificates of any kind. I was certainly never asked to show one. I made my own wooden box which was as specified fitted with brass hinges and kept it in a locked cupboard in my garage with the full consent of the police explosives officer. On discovering that my fellow BP shooter was a chemist, he encouraged him to make his own BP.... I don't think aforesaid pal bothered, but nobody I knew was ever hurt except the fellow who accidentally shot himself through the hand with a flintlock pistol while loading it. I bought pyrodex a couple of weeks ago and the showing of the certificate was simply a formality NOT REQUIRED by law. The sales chap said so and on a reloaders website doing mail order, the site information says specifically that they only sell powder on sight of an appropriate firearms / shotgun permit although NOT a legal requirement, but their own restriction. I have no doubt that such restrictions imposed by retailers may follow incidents like the Boston Marathon Bombing in which powders intended for reloading were used in making bombs. A firework factory or large scale outlet for the sale of explosive articles like fireworks carries a great risk if an accident occurs. They are rightly controlled as are any large scale storage of dangerous articles. Quite how that relates to an order for a 100 209A primers or musket caps, eludes me rather. Whatever next, permits and HAMAT for matches? Kitchen Knives? No wonder the Americans laugh at us. They can buy fifty pounds of BP, without permit or restriction. Maybe next time we see a forty tonne tanker of petrol bowling through town or doing sixty on the motorway we should remember that weight for weight, petrol contains more energy that gunpowder and that it is EXTREMELY easy to set alight. Any Tom **** and Harry can fill up half a dozen plastic containers with it without a question being asked and keep it in his house.

Cheers - thanks for the info.

I may have used the wrong term. Sorry. I'm trying to ask if the stock is right or left cast or straight? I'm a leftie.

Is this a straight hand, neither cast stock? I read somewhere that the number 3 were straight. What does it weigh please? Thanks.

Exactly. I especially would prefer a hammer gun for that reason - at least on half cock the thing isn't just ready and waiting to go - hammers back. In the average budget boxlock, if the seers are a bit worn or the hammer notches, and you won't necessarily know that, it may be nearer to firing than you think if it gets a knock or you trip over and bash it a bit. I was shooting my first shotgun a few weeks back that I bought second hand in 1975 and I fired the open choke barrel and BOTH went off absolutely simultaneously. I thought, 'That's a big recoil', and opened the gun to find both had gone off. That pheasant got 2 1/4 oz of shot and I got a tooth rattling wack. Won't be taking that gun out again in a hurry.

I'd like someone to provide me with the details of when there was last a disaster caused by transporting shooters powders about the country or when someone with the old style wood and brass furniture locked powder box ever blew up his neighbours because it wasn't made of plywood, divided into multiple sections and cost about £80. The issue here is that a perfectly proper pastime is being regulated out of existence or affordability by quango generated gobbledegook. You might be fine with that.

LOL - Tell me about it, but I did once shoot a young rabbit with mine. It might have been about 1981, I can still remember it. I was hiding behind a stone byre on the side of the Cheviots, and I saw this miserable rabbit begging me to take him away from the horrible Somme-like mud and wet. I aimed, pulled the trigger and the thing went off. After the smoke cleared and I got my bearings, there he was - dead as a door nail. I don't think that thing killed anything else, but it did encourage me to get the Enfield musket which would group easily at 3 inches at a hundred yards. I doubt I can do better with any rifle with open sights like those. Had a great day out today. Got one nice cock pheasant and missed another behind. Hoping to get my shot and wads soon from the suppliers.

Thanks bruno22rf. That's a kind offer. I am waiting for some wads to come from Clay & Game. I ordered a sample of 1kg of shot and wads last week. I'm not sure how long they take to post stuff out. No word since I paid on their site. I didn't want to commit to 7KG tub until I am sure I am going to continue with the black powder shotgunning. I still have my old 1980s black powder box, but like many things in this sport the rules seem to have changed and I may need a plywood one far more fancy than is really needed for a person to keep a couple of pounds of Black Powder.... The Pyrodex seems fine. It may be more expensive, but I can get it locally and If I was ordering real BP from Kranks, although it seems very cheap, I think the delivery charge would be ridiculous. I used the plastic wads because I was just experimenting with a cartridge that I dismantled while my shot and wad order was being processed. I just wanted to have a crack at it. I actually think the plastic shot cup helped make the pattern more dense than I would have got with fibre wads. I used to shoot a Parker Hale rifled musket in .577 thirty some years ago, and an Italian repro Colt Navy (might have been the 1858 or was it 1851 model - I can't remember exactly. I also had a .44 or .45 Kentucky rifle lookalike thing in smooth bore, but I didn't keep that for long. It was too small for a shotgun and too inaccurate to shoot at the rifle range at 100 yards. It was waste of money. Well - I'm off to the farm in about an hour so I'd better get going.... There is a fat cock pheasant waiting for me somewhere I am hoping.

@Captain Beaky I made up some 12bore 29 gram 'square loads' last week out of unfired pigeon cartridges. In case you don't know, 'square load' means same volume of shot and powder (pyrodex). Pyrodex is used at the same volume as black powder not weight. It is less dense than black powder, but volume for volume similar in power and pressure. I opened a new cartridge and extracted the shot and powder and disposed of the nitro powder and I weighed the shot at 29 grams which was dead on what it was supposed to be. I poured the shot into a used case to make my powder measure and marked it carefully at the shot level in the case. Then I cut the case off at that line and checked again that the volume of shot would just fit in the cut case powder /shot measure/ If you then use that case to measure your powder you have the 'square load' which a lot of people use. Same measure for powder and shot. THIS ONLY APPLIES TO BLACK POWDER OR PYRODEX TYPE SUBSTITUTES. Nitro powders never can be used like that. When I tested this Pyrodex load side by side with the original 29 gram un-tampered pigeon loads with nitro powder, it felt lighter in recoil than the nitro load, but was very satisfactory against the cock pheasant I shot with it at about 30 yards. If I was using an old gun, I'd certainly keep the shot load and powder load light and square loads like I describe and for sure test them in a modern gun. 29 grams is just on the ounce.

Great. A happy ending. Now I can stop being tempted to make a 900 mile round trip. It's probably nearer 950.