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It's time to stop thinking and start doing

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sleek:
Been wanting to build one since I learned about muzzle loaders in school. I'd spend hours daydreaming of designs, building, and killing deer from impossible distances. Well, im scheduled for a hunt mid December and it's a muzzle loader. Time to fire out what im gonna do and get to it.

Now my last name is Hawkins so that's an obvious influence on what will be my choice. I want a long gun, hex barrel and powerful enough to really reach out but not to the point of being painful to shoot.

I need suggestions on kits. Budget is around 1500. I obviously am under a time crunch but I do have 4 hours a day every day to work on it. Another consideration I have is, are primers and power available? I've heard they are not. What's the best way to guarantee availability of ammo?

Eric Krewson:
I have never built one but all the experts say a Hawken is the hardest gun to build, they are not particularly long and have a large straight barrel that is heavy. Google images of Samuel Hawken guns for reference

Remember there are kits and there are kits, Lyman and Traditions are pretty much bolt together. A Lyman planes rifle kit would be a good choice but it is said the quality has gone down lately.

 Kibler are only made in flint but give you a historically correct kit that is perfect for the beginner with no experience, you still have to fit stuff into the stock but the stock shaping is done.

All the others are parts kits, the stock is rough shaped, none of the parts fit, none of the holes are drilled or tapped for screws. These kits are pretty complex and require some gunsmithing skills.

Here is one parts kit for a plains rifle;
https://www.trackofthewolf.com/Categories/PartDetail.aspx/615/1/KIT-CARSON-HAWKEN-RIFLE-PARTS-LIST

sleek:
I appreciate the info. The link you listed, I like how it looks, but I don't understand any of the particulars. Now im ignorant of how difficult a Hawken will be to build in comparison to any other model, and I want to use that to my advantage.  Many things I have done I would never have done if I had known how hard they would be in advance. 

So, if you think that model is a good one, and a guy with reasonable to advanced fabrication skills could make it inside 5 months with steady 4 hours a day effort, then I'll get it. What caliber should I get for big white tail and long distance open sight, and while I'm at it, how many yards is one of these good for?

Eric Krewson:
My deer rifles are .54s, I shoot 80 gr of 2F and a 226gr patched round ball, at 100 yards my bullet energy is the same as if you put a 45 auto against the side of a deer and pulled the trigger, lots of stopping power, my load is good to about 200yards. You can load up to 120 gr of powder and reach way out there, I chose the most accurate combination for my gun.

There are two different kinds of barrels you can put on these guns, one with slow (1 turn in 66") twist rifling made for shooting patched round balls or one with a fast twist rifling (1 in 28" or 32") made to shoot a large conical bullet. I don't like the big conicals because of the severe recoil, these things can be brutal.

As far as completing one of these guns from a parts kit it depends on your patience, reference material and tools available to you and knowing how to use them. The problem with precarved stocks is the precarver makes mistakes, some really bad ones that you have to be able to correct.

I have made two guns from precarves and two from a stock blank, it was actually easier to make a gun from a blank than to make one from a precarve because the precarves were off center and poorly inletted and it took me more time to fix the flaws than it would have taken to shape the stock myself.

Here is a common flaw, a precarve lock inlet that is not in the right place, the pan should center my X mark on the barrel, in this case it is below the side flat of the barrel and just won't work. I had to glue in a shim in the inlet and drop the barrel deeper in the barrel channel to get the lock up where it is supposed to be, this took me at least a week.

Other flaws on this precarve were a ramrod hole that was improperly drilled that went to low in the forestock and had a bow in the channel and gouged out place in the forestock that I had to patch. This is on a kit that had $1100 worth of parts in it, unacceptable.

Eric Krewson:
On a plank build I recommend having the barrel channel and ramrod hole drilled by a professional, the layout and shaping is fairly easy, the first thing you do is install the buttplate which gives you buttstock dimensions then move forward inletting parts as you go. The buttplate gives you length of trigger pull and any cast off if you want it.

I use full sized plans, make a pattern and transfer it to the stock blank. The plans will give you cross section cut outs to show you how to round and shape the stock at different points from one end to the other. you can see these cutouts above the buttstock of the pattern I am transferring to a piece of cardboard for a pattern to lay on the stock blank and copy.

Another biggie, the parts shown on the plans like the lock probably won't be the same size as the ones in your kit, trace around your parts on the stock, don't rely on the pictured part for an inlet because they may throw off the location your part actually needs to be in. I learned on my first build that the lock sear and the trigger geometry were way off if I followed the plans to a "T" in regards to lock location.

The other picture is the finished gun that I made this way, a 12 ga English fowler turkey/ deer smooth bore. This build took me about a year.







This is the way I got the blank back after I sent it off to have the barrel channel cut and ramrod hole drilled.

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