BLACK POWDER

Five shots, five 10s for Nesbitt and his trapper on a pistol target at 25 yards.

of just 35½ inches with an empty weight of 6 pounds 14 ounces. That’s a handysized little rifle, for sure.

I knew trouble was in store for me if I tried to shoot the trapper with the factory rear sight, mainly because I could just barely see it. Even so, I did try. Just a few shots were fired and those, so it seems, were shot mainly to enjoy the sound of those black powder loads, firing a 205-grain cast bullet with 35 grains of Olde Eynsford 2F powder, as they reported from the 16-inch barrel. That was fun, but the performance of the short carbine simply underlined the fact that I needed a peep sight on this gun.

That was no real trouble because I already had one of the new and very nice Lyman (lymanproducts.com) 1A tang sights for the Uberti ’73 Winchester waiting for the gun. However, the gun did need to have the forward sight mounting hole drilled in the tang and tapped. That was done for me by Allen Cunniff, who actually did the job while I waited. Then the sight was mounted and shimmed in order to put it “in line” with the existing sights before the carbine’s rear barrel sight was removed. There, now the trapper had a rear sight I could look through but didn’t need to look at.

The only other tiny modification that was made to the sights was to take a flat file and cut the back of the front sight at a 45-degree angle for a little bit just at the top. That gives me a small shiny “bead” at the top of the black (or blued) sight, something that can be seen by these old eyes, even in the dark shadows of the woods. With that, this trapper was ready for action.

THEN THE GUN was ready to be tried on a paper target, shooting from a bench rest. This isn’t a long-range gun, so a target was posted at just 25 yards. The weather was what I like to call a “mackinaw and mittens” day, very chilly after a fresh fallen snow. That didn’t interfere with the shooting at all and the first shot just barely nicked the bottom of the target. A second shot was tried after raising the rear sight just a “guesstimated” amount. With a 6 o’clock hold, the next shot hit the bottom of the black, right where I was holding. Then the next shot scored a nice and welcome X.

With the gun hitting like that, a second target was quickly posted and that one absorbed five shots, fired fairly rapidly. All hits were 10s on the standard pistol target, with four shots cutting one jagged hole. The group was just slightly to the right of center, but I won’t complain about that, at least not yet. Let me get to know this gun just a little better before I try to do any finetuning on the sights to move the group just a tiny bit to the left. I shouldn’t need to say this, but the accuracy of this trapper carbine with the black powder loads pleases me quite well.

That concluded the “paper work” for getting the carbine sighted in, but my shooting partner Jerry Mayo and I were not ready to quit. We headed down to another range where gongs and silhouettes were hanging, and we both gave the gun a good try at targets from 25 yards to 100 yards, shooting offhand while running ammo