Misfires with AL series huntsman

[crazyhick]

As the title states, I'm having misfiring problems with my huntsman. First time this happened, I had a nice sized doe dead to rights only to hear  "click". Not just once.... five times! after pulling the remains of the cap that never went off out of the nipple, I tried another to have it click twice before it went off. No smoke at all. Yesterday I was putting caps through it before I packed her away to see if it was just faulty caps or the gun itself. After 20 caps between two diffrent brands, only two went off with the first firing, and most went off with the second try.

Now my question is what could be causing this? Each time, the caps were pretty smashed against the nipple before the second try was made. So would this rule out the firing pan? Or is the nipple in need of being replaced because of being worn?

I just want to know which way to go so I can continue firing hunks of lead at deer and targets next season

[PHATINJUN]

It could be a few things one like you state would be the nipple also the firing pin gets crude in the action and although it hits the cap it could have some friction holding it up or the spring itself could be getting weak. "Fat pins" are notorious for the last 2 . Kurt

[PA-Joe]

How cold was it and did you have any oil on the firing pin or trigger mech? Maybe the oil thickened up and is slowing down the hammer.

[crazyhick]

It wasn't cold, maybe low 40's when was shooting at the doe and plain firing caps was out the back door . So i doubt it is due to thick oil, but i will checkout the crud issue when i get a chance to pull it all apart.

[OldSchoolRanger]

It wasn't cold, maybe low 40's when was shooting at the doe and plain firing caps was out the back door . So i doubt it is due to thick oil, but i will checkout the crud issue when i get a chance to pull it all apart.

How did you make out with the problem? Let us know, I'm curious what the problem was.

[crazyhick]

An update on the problem that is no longer a problem.
Turned out that the previous owner never really went through it. Last year was my first year with the gun and it had fired fine during pre-muzzloader. What happened was, the blowback residue was going right into the firing pin cavity and had formed "grease" (that's the best way to describe it) after years of gun oil being applied. Previous to cleaning, the firing pin was "sticky" and I had to pull it out. after the cleaning, I had to make sure i had the cross-pin ready to go in because the spring was just launching it because of the lack of friction. So problem solved and time to start practice shooting before the season gets here!

[PHATINJUN]

Thaqnks for the update glad you got it worked out. Kurt

[Oldguy78]

I sort of have been messing with FTF, etc. This is not going to be apples and apples even though I had similar problems with two recievers.
 I have an older AJ 58 cal that I bought new. Threaded breech plug. I recently bought a 12 gauge barrel for it and it wouldn’t fire, with new CCI #11 caps, but about 1 out of 5 strikes. I could get caps to go off with a brass punch, hammer, gloves, and safety glasses 100% of the time. I put in a stronger hammer spring that I bought. Still a problem.
I bought a newer AJ receiver. Same problem. Took firing pin out and cleaned it. Still a problem. Never changed the hammer spring. I plan to change both to 209 primers if I can ever buy any. I got tired of all the cleanup just for testing so I changed the newer receiver over to a 12 gauge M48 barrel and started trying shotgun shells. Still nothing. I could see a slight print on the shotgun primers but no ignition. I pulled the firing pin on the newer receiver, put it in a lathe and made a shotgun pointed end - still nothing.
I pulled all the wood off of the old and new Huntsmen and ran them through a parts washer with mineral sprits. I got some loose stuff off but the mineral spirits didn’t seem to get the BP residue out of the two actions. I could still get a heavy black deposit when I used a rag in the corners.
Today I washed out the newer receiver with a spray can of brake cleaner. I got lots of black out and the rag came back clean afterwards. I rinsed the brake cleaner off the action parts and plastic trigger guard and did a bit of lubrication by flooding it with some, oily, mineral spirits. After the brake cleaner, mineral spirits rinse, and shotgun tip on the firing pin, the older receiver set off the shotgun shell first try and left a normal dent in the primer.
My plan is to convert both to the 209 primers with #60 O-rings to seal the BP from the action. If I can’t find the 209’s, I may also order the 25 ACP ignitions. I’ll use the brake cleaner, or something similar, to clean the receivers one last time. If I was going to keep using the #11 caps, I’d start cleaning the actions with brake cleaner on a regular basis. I wouldn’t want to drive out those pins to disassemble a Huntsman very often to scrub out all the action parts.
Right now I think the Huntsman action gets gummed up with BP residue and you can’t get it clean unless you disassemble it completely. Brake cleaner seems to clean up the residue.

[gene_225]

Blow back in the firing pin hole is why I converted all my old style Huntsman to shotgun primers. Another potential problem that avoided was installing a nipple that is the wrong length, since nipple length has to be just right.

[Fixit]

I had one of those in the seventies, and ftf was a big problem for me. My solution, with my lesser knowledge, back then, was to scrape some of the priming compound in the cap the side of the cap. Not a perfect solution, but it did fire more often than not by doing that. It's possible that the fix might be to shim the breech plug. It's true that with this design, spacing for the nipple height is critical!

[Oldguy78]

I played around with nipple and breechplug depth on the way to my brake cleaner solution. I experimented with backing the breechplug out with a #11 cap only and safety glasses until I was afraid that I was close to setting it off when closing it.  I had measured 0.050” to 0.060” stick out of the firing pin and down to 0.010” of the cap “headspace” without getting dependable ignition.
That was one of my earlier tries so I’m sure it was before the stronger hammer spring and the mineral spirits only cleaning.
I’m sort of leaning toward the thought that flint- and percussion locks lend themselves more to BP shooting, and cleaning, than inline weapons do. Some flintlocks have an external spring and both flint and percussion weapons allow pretty complete access to the mechanism when you pull the lock. In-line weapons have a lot of stuff hidden in the action and some tight sliding fits that may not work well with BP residue.
Another possibility is that I don’t remember problems like this 15(?) years ago when I was shooting more often. It may be that sitting 10-15 years allowed the residue to set up more. I never took the action apart until now. I thought I cleaned everything I could see and it was well oiled. It just didn’t work when I pulled it out. Even when I was buying the stronger hammer springs, I was thinking that most springs don’t just go bad. I didn’t leave the gun cocked in storage. The spring was not extended past it’s range in any way. The spring was not rusted. There are a lot of 100 year old H&R smokeless shotguns that still have dependable ignitions. I think the Huntsman just needs a better sealed ignition, an occasional deep cleaning, or maybe just regular use to keep everything moving.