I was going though my reloading stuff and ran across a muzzle loading pistol I made in 1965 when I was a 14 year old teenager.
I was working for a local gun shop in Maryland and decided to build a pistol from scraps and parts from Dixie Gun Works.
Many Mauser rifles were cut down and pieces of barrels were in the trash. I took a 8x57mm barrel piece and made a breech plug. I made a flash tube and threaded it into the breech of the plugged barrel.
I bought a Dixie Gun Works lock that was from the later portion of the Civil War era. I drilled a hole through the hammer and drove in a ten-penny nail to use as a paper cap hammer. Pistol caps were expensive, more than I could afford at the time. Matel Greeny Stick-em caps were very cheap to buy. The paper caps set off the black powder charge of 15 grains of FFFG just about every single time. I was back then using O-Buck Shot as a projectile out of the 8mm barrel.
The pistol grip was carved out of Ceder wood from a forest close to my home. I made a trigger guard out of an old ice tea spoon. A copper strip was added for looks at the fore end. A cleaning rod/ram rod was made from a brass rod scrap piece.
I never did find a set of sights that worked and ended up just sighting down the barrel. I got pretty good with it for a couple of years until I got bored shooting the pistol after buying a .36 Navy revolver.
Today it has taken a long time to find paper caps. They are considered explosives for some reason and took a long time to be found and shipped into town. I will use a glue stick to keep a paper cap from blowing off of the flash tube.
I resized my cast .32 ACP bullets to .298 and made the bullets hollow base to expand like a mine' ball on my lathe.
For the first time in 56 years I fired the pistol yesterday. I felt like a teenager again and remember the fun times I had in the forest shooting the pistol.
I plan on shooting the pistol at the range to see if it will shoot accurately at 15 yards this week end.