My new muzzle loader.

[JG12gauge]

I was at a garage sale and I saw an old Connecticut Valley Arms .54 cal muzzle loader for $25 so doing what just about any G&G member would do I bought it. Its in pretty poor shape but is shootable. The main thing is the barrel is washed out and pitted. Is is reasonable to get a new barrel for it or am I most likely better off using it as a boom stick for new years?

[wcassidy]

well, barrels run $110-godknowswhat depending on the maker and how finished they are and i'm not aware of any drop ins for a CVA only t/c. sure it can be done but you're probably better off playing with it until you stumble upon a barrel

[samuel]

Take a 20ga brush and a shotgun ramrod and put an electric drill on it and clean the bore until it shines.Use a penetrant,The clean the oil out thoroughly with gun scrubber and try it.Altho you might have to use a brush between shots,you may find a pitted barrel still shoots very accurate. ,,,sam.

[Dookiebutt]

I'd buy it from you for a wall-hanger at the cabin.

[wcassidy]

try soaking the bore in kroil too, can't hurt anything, you may be able to lap it and bring it back to a shootable accurate condition if you use oversize patches and balls at that point

[COYOTE10663]

This is interesting. No bs here, I bought a Traditions .50 in line from a pawn shop some many years ago. The barell had some bad pits in it, and overall the inside was rusty from breech to muzzle. I explained how this makes the gun virtually worthless and offerd the pawn shop owner $40.00 for it. (Mainly for the nice Bushenell scope it had on it.) He was aking $100 for it. I told him not to take my word for it, call around and ask some gunshops what it is worh with a rusted out barell. I left him my ph# and went home & thought nothing more about it.
Roughly a week latter, he called me back & said he would take $50.00 out the door if I wanted it. So it became mine.
It sat around for about a year in the corner. I had taken the nice scope off and used the scope on another rifle I had.
After about a year, I was bored one night and though I'd just try to clean it up & see what, if anything, it would do. I went to a local gun store & bought 3 cleaning brushes. I did not use a drill, just pushed back & forth through the barell what my shoulder felt like a hundered times a night, every night, over the next few days. I was using WD-40 as a cleaner / rust remover. I would saturate the barell over night & make a quick swipe with a rag in the morning & resaturate it untill I got home from work. When I got home from work I would, as stated above, push the brush through the barell many times.
At the end of the week, I was reasonably impressed with the way the bore looked! Shiny. Still badly Pitted! But shiny.
Now I will admit this: I did not try different bullets, powders & caps.
I went to Wal-Mart, bought some 300 odd grain maxi hunter bullets, a box of Powerdex RS FFg powder pellets, CCI #11 caps, and went to my range.
With a now installed old old Tasco 4x32 scope installed, dropped two pellets in, seated the bullet, and shot. 5 shots later, running a clean swab down the bore between each shot, I had a neat little 4" group at 100 yards.
I know 4" group is nothing to write home about. But 100 yards is about as fat as I was going to shoot this gun anyway, so "minut-of-deer" was good enough!
Moral of the story: Clean it & try it. You might be suprised!

[madcratebuilder]

Lot of used CVA barrels on evil bay and gunbroker.

[SwedeSteve]

What all does switching barrels entail ??

[matt760]

Originally Posted by SwedeSteve

What all does switching barrels entail ??

He didn't say if it was an inline or a sidelock. If its a sidelock, then to switch the barrels you would probably just pop the wedge pin out, pull the old barrel out, and slip the new one in. An inline, I would imagine, would be a bit more complicated.