Old Spanish/CVA/Jukkar flintlock problem

[Barry Myers]

A boy brought by an old Spanish made flinter.  He had a stuck ball with no powder.  I would have made fun of him, but I have done it too...

Anyway, I tried to get the breach plug out but I couldn't grasp it with anything I had.  I got the ball out by dribbling some powder down the touch hole and igniting it with a lighter.

The breach plug had a barrel matching surface about 1/4" out of the barrel.  Nothing below the tang as I am familiar with.

Does anyone offer a tang wrench for this type of breach plug?

[Dave Patterson]

My best suggestion would be to gift your friend a set of hand-made wall hooks:  drop some silver solder down the barrel, heat the barrel pretty good, and hang that thing on the wall.

My first experience with muzzleloaders was with a friend's dad's old .45 CVA/Jukar:  it shot well, with no apparent issues, over a long 8-9 hours at the range; took it home and cleaned it thoroughly, and he put it back in the safe.

His next session with it, he ran a couple cleaning patches down the barrel, loaded 'er up and touched it off... and was a little surprised to see powder smoke issuing from out of the barrel channel, just in front of the rear lug mortise. 

Closer inspection revealed the lug mortise had been cut to within a few thousandths of breaking into the barrel; time, use, and a lot of cleanings had eventually caused the barrel to rust through from the outside, under that pin lug's base. 

A thousand or two bucks for a good benchmade repro might sound expensive right off the bat, but it's one heckuva lot cheaper than reconstructive surgery. 

[Scota4570]

Removing the breech plug and successfully reinstalling is near impossible because of the design on percussions guns.  They may have installed a vent line in the same way to deliberately block the plug threads on flint guns.  Short answer, do not try to remove the plug on a CVA-Jukar.   

[Hungry Horse]

The drum and nipple assembly threads half way  through the breechplug, and the channel does a 90 degree turn, and ignites the powder from the center of the breech. Indexing this during the removal, and reinstall, is no walk in the park. There is a reason CVA/Jakar doesn’t cut wrench flats on their powder drums ( they don’t want you taking them out).

  Hungry Horse

[Hungry Horse]

 Sorry, had a senior moment. I realize now that I reread this thread, that the gun in question is a flintlock. Not sure if CVA/Jukar did anything weird with the flinters in their respective lines. If you get it running again, you will need to put a touchhole liner in it to make it perform at its optimum.

 Hungry Horse

[hanshi]

On a flintlock, removing the breech plug shouldn't be a problem, as long as it was a flintlock from the start.

[Daryl]

I will not stand on a firing line with one of those things.

"Dave hits the nail on the head imho. "My best suggestion would be to gift your friend a set of hand-made wall hooks:  drop some silver solder down the barrel, heat the barrel pretty good, and hang that thing on the wall. & A thousand or two bucks for a good benchmade repro might sound expensive right off the bat, but it's one heckuva lot cheaper than reconstructive surgery. "

Kinda says it all.

I thought the JUKARS were made in Japan, some even with 2-piece barrels - as sectioned and pictured in NAPR magazine in the 70's.

[Hungry Horse]

The later CVA’s and Jukar’s are made in Spain. And even though they are near the bottom of the scale in the quality department, they are not at the bottom. There are a heck of a lot of replicas more dangerous than a CVA/Jukar. And no Daryl these were not the guns with the two piece barrels. Markwell Arms, and Century Arms, along with most replicas made in India are built like pipe bombs. From a safety standpoint I feel the CVA/Jukars are one of the safest of the cheap guns. My gun club used an old CVA Kentucky that someone gave to me, for their canoe shoot at our Rendezvous. That old CVA shot all day, wound up on the creek bottom a couple of times, and shot a near perfect score for two women that decided to team up, and beat up the boys.

  Hungry Horse

[walks with gun]

   While inexpensive, the old CVA guns are a pretty dang good buy for a starter gun and most shoot very well.   I've found to remove a stubborn ball it's much easier to oil the bore a bit, motor oil or tranny fluid works great and to use a pointed tip of a grease gun.   One peron holding the pointed tip against the flash hole and the other pumping the grease gun.   Walks even the most stubborn balls out.   Some cleanup required.

[Iktomi]

   While inexpensive, the old CVA guns are a pretty dang good buy for a starter gun and most shoot very well.   I've found to remove a stubborn ball it's much easier to oil the bore a bit, motor oil or tranny fluid works great and to use a pointed tip of a grease gun.   One peron holding the pointed tip against the flash hole and the other pumping the grease gun.   Walks even the most stubborn balls out.   Some cleanup required.

 My first BP gun was a CVA Mountain Rifle flintlock I bought when I got out of the service in '83. Around $200.00-$250.00 IIRC at Big 5. Rather (very) crude and clunky compared to a gun built by one of the good gunsmiths around but that darn thing shot well for me and was very reliable once I learned the hoops to keeping a flintlock happy.

[Hungry Horse]

I paid $80.00 for a brand new CVA Mountain rifle  kit from Dixie in about 1976. I shot seventeen pounds of powder through it in three years. The nipple threads, and the nipple drum threads, were gas cut and when I sent the barrel back to CVA they said  the barrel was worn out. So, if these guns are dangerous I should be dead. I would feel a lot safer shooting next to a CVA than some “custom “ gun built by a nimrod with that just thought he knew what he was doing.

  Hungry Horse

[Dave Patterson]

I paid $80.00 for a brand new CVA Mountain rifle  kit from Dixie in about 1976. I shot seventeen pounds of powder through it in three years. The nipple threads, and the nipple drum threads, were gas cut and when I sent the barrel back to CVA they said  the barrel was worn out. So, if these guns are dangerous I should be dead. I would feel a lot safer shooting next to a CVA than some “custom “ gun built by a nimrod with that just thought he knew what he was doing.

  Hungry Horse

Good point!

I don't believe ALL of 'em are; from what Mr Roller and a few others have posted about the price-point factory muzzleloaders, my assumption is that a lot of their inherent reliability depends entirely on who assembled the individual weapon, and on the owner-operator knowing their design quirks, & loading, cleaning and inspecting accordingly.

The failure I reported earlier in this thread was obviously an issue created by the assembler, not a basic design flaw as such.

The Bride has a T/C Cherokee I've "customized" for her; and I've still got my first ML, a Lyman GPR:  we've seen threads here reporting issues with both.

[Hungry Horse]

CVA/Jukar make a cheap gun that is almost stupid proof. The breech system is crazy strong. The attachment points for the barrel are plenty strong. If you blow one of these up, you are way past slipshod, and way over into stark raving nuts.
 My gun club wanted proof that muzzleloaders were safe enough to use their range. So several of us decided to show them what it would take to blow a CVA Kentucky up. We couldn’t do it with black powder. Even a couple hundred grains of powder with two balls didn’t do it. When we just short started the second ball, it bulged the barrel out to round in one spot but didn’t rupture. I doubt many custom guns could withstand this kind of abuse.

  Hungry Horse