And I say that as a big fan of hot biscuit. I picked this one up from GB. Used to be the rifles were far more expensive than the smooth bores, but now it's the other way around. Still I wanted one and bit the bullet with Aunt Sarah's bucks. Glad I did.
This is a 12 ga. old northwest style trade gun. It has a big Lott lock on it and a sturdy barrel. The mechanism is incredibly simple. In many ways it's like an 18th century AK-47. Used to arm the "insurgents" of the day. These things don't have a great rep for accuracy but even with undersized cast .690" patched roundballs I got solid results in test shooting. I am confident I can get solid accuracy out to 75 yards with larger size roundball.
There's really very little that can go wrong with it, compared with more complex caplocks from later eras. The barrel is a tube with a little hole in the side for the flames from the flash powder to go. When the soot builds up, you just push a piece of copper through the hole and clean it out. I didn't make enough balls to torture test it but I will have a bunch more next time.
