Patented Breach/Chamber shapes and makers, What's Best

[Patrick Chadwick]

Having dismantled and cleaned up a number of old BP guns, often getting fairly desperate in the process. I would advise you to

a) get a breech with a clean-out plug, as this really does make maintenance easier,
and
b) BEFORE taking a single shot, make sure that the barrel, breech and clean-out plug have been assembled with copper paste.

Whatever kind of grease you may put on the threads, after the rifle has been used a few times, that grease will be carbonized and the threads baked together. Copper-loaded anti-sieze paste enables you to disassemble the barrel/breech/plug at a later date without using brutal methods!

As to which breech is better - I really don't know. All makers/inventors claimed that their breech was better than all others. Many rifles, and all the target rifles I have examined, have an ignition hole that goes round a corner to enter the chamber pretty close to the back, but at the side. The bend makes it very difficult to clean the hole, hence the advisability of a breech with a clean-out plug.

I would definitely advise against the type of breech that has a chamber narrower than the bore. Those things are traps that can jam a cleaning rod so tightly that removing it becomes a nerve-twanging problem. One of my rifles, sold as a wall-hanger, actually had the remains of a cleaning rod and "button" in the chamber. Another even had a load of buckshot jammed in. It is on such occasions that you have to face up to the problem of unscrewing a thread that has been baked solid for a century or two (see above).