Editor’s Note: Russell Lynch of South Carolina, owns M.A.X. (Muzzleloader Accuracy Xperts, LLC), which produces videos and customizes Muzzleloader rifles to determine the best primer, shot and load for each individual Muzzleloader rifle he’s asked to evaluate and to improve shooting accuracy. A former sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps and shooter in matches and trainer of personnel in shooting for the Armed Services, Lynch learned to shoot accurately from 300 yards out to 1,000 yards.
There are two-different sets of rules to attain maximum accuracy in your Muzzleloader. The first rule is cleaning for accuracy, and the second rule is loading for accuracy. Let’s talk about cleaning for accuracy. The most-popular powder among muzzleloader shooters is probably Triple Se7en, which leaves a huge crust ring in the barrel when the powder is ignited by the primer and pushes the bullet out of the barrel. You usually can feel this residue when you push a patch down the barrel and feel that patch scraping, rubbing or hanging. When you’re cleaning for accuracy, you need to realize that using any powder, you’ll have a crust ring in the breech area of that rifle. If you don’t clean the residue out of the barrel, loading the next shot is almost impossible with some bullets. So, always go through a very-regimented cleaning process before firing your next shot.
At our facilities at M.A.X. , we put the Muzzleloader in the rifle rest or lay it horizontal to the ground. Next, we take three 2-1/2-inch cotton patches and saturate those patches with cleaning solvent. We then place the patches over the top of the barrel and put the cleaning jag on the patches. Next, we push the patch with a cleaning solvent down the barrel full length, being sure to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel. One of the mistakes a Muzzleloader shooter often makes is that he’s afraid to push that cleaning patch all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, because he’s afraid the patch will get stuck in the bottom. He knows he’ll have a hard time getting the patch out. But you’ve got to make sure you get that cleaning patch all the way to the bottom of the barrel, being sure not to stop short. At M.A.X., we want to push that rod with the cleaning patch on it seven times down the barrel and back it out of the barrel. Discard that patch, get another three-patch setup, and go down the barrel and back seven more times. We discard that second group of patches, make up three more groups of patches just like the first two and go down and back in the barrel seven more times. So, we’re actually making 21 down-and-up trips down the barrel with three cleaning patch strokes. Next, put two dry patches over the top of the barrel, go down and back inside the barrel with the dry cleaning patches three different times. I save those three dry patches for my next three sets of wet patches to use after I shoot. Using this process, we can almost guarantee that we have the same condition in the barrel that has been present when we’ve shot the first bullet.
I’m often asked why so-much cleaning is required. The answer is simple – black powder leaves a tremendous amount of residue in the barrel. I figured this out after I had fired a Muzzleloader rifle one time and tried to put the second bullet in the barrel but found there was resistance. I attempted to force the bullet down the barrel. But I realized there had to be a lot of residue in the barrel, especially in the last 6 to 7 inches of the breech area where the powder was ignited, and the explosion took place. There wasn’t just a little bit of residue there, but rather the residue was actually caked-up.
One of the things you can control to obtain maximum accuracy is to make the condition of the Muzzleloader barrel the same before every shot. If you don’t have consistent barrel conditions you can’t have consistent muzzle velocities. Until I learned this cleaning system, I was producing groups that weren’t satisfactory. I would have a variant of 90 to 250 feet in muzzle velocity from one shot to the next shot. I realized that I was having problems getting the second bullet down the barrel after I fired the first time and also the variant in muzzle velocity helped me determine that the condition of the barrel wasn’t the same after each shot. Only after making a thorough cleaning as described could I produce consistent velocities, consistently-tighter groups and consistently-easier loading. Using this process of cleaning drastically reduced the amount of variants in the groups shot. Because of this process and by using the same powder, the same primer and the same bullets, we kept our muzzle velocities down to as little as 25-feet per second of variance.
If we record more than 25 feet in velocity variance, I start looking for another problem. I’ve developed many loads for Muzzleloaders that only have 5 to 10 feet of variance in muzzle velocity in a five-shot group – something that’s hard to produce out of a centerfire rifle and especially with a Muzzleloader rifle. Using this process, each bullet should fly along the same course shot after shot and deliver the accuracy that M.A.X. wants to produce. This cleaning process will help you to shoot tighter groups.
