I bought this Rifle in the middle 1980's FOR A $180.00. The action is a black powder action stamped 1856 the lock is stamped 1847 so it is quite old. Overall shape was real good. It had a 20" barrel. I already had all the paraphernalia for casting and loading. My only mold at the time was a Lyman 292gr. RFN. I loaded up some rounds with 10 grains of Unique giving about 1000 FPS. Range results was poor to non existent. Could not hit a 5 gallon bucket at 50 yards. Took it home and slugged the barrel, it slugged at .463 What to do. I came up with the Idea to Teflon tap the slug to make it some what larger. Back to the range, I could keep the shots within about 5" group. Still not good enough, the Teflon helped but it was tedious work and the results was way off from what I wanted. I decided to bite the bullet and have a new barrel put on it. The new barrel is 27". Another $180.00, at the time that was a good chunk of change. Turned out it was a good investment. My groups shrunk to 1 MOA at a hundred yeards. That 292gr slug shot well at a hundred yards but as I started shooting at 150 plus the groups opened up quite a bit. My next mold, a Lyman 320 gr. hollow point, with my alloy it actually dropped boolit at about 340gr. That boolit shot 3" groups at 300 yards, beyond that it was lacking also. My next mold a Lee 500gr that kind of looks like a spear point but has a small round nose. This boolit worked great on the 500yd buffalo. The buffalo is 4' by 2' not including the head. This was my objective all along. I was getting ready to shoot the long range Cowboy shoots and the Cowboy action 4 gun shoot. I had at that time retired from work. I was some what young so I was able to shoot with a club for a number of years. I have been very fortunate to do so many things since I retired.