Editor’s Note: Carlos Vilorio of Vass, North Carolina, works as an assistant manager and salesman at Ed’s Gun Shop. When Vilorio sells a CVA rifle, he often will take the rifle out, sight-in the rifle for the customer, bring the targets back to the shop, and show the customer the group the CVA rifle has shot. Then he lets the targets speak for themselves.

Carlos with CVA Accura

Question: Carlos, how did you get started hunting with blackpowder rifles?

Vilorio: I watched Jim Shockey on TV take a number of big-game animals shooting a Thompson/Center. So, I decided to try blackpowder hunting and purchased a T/C Encore Endeavor. The first deer I ever took with a blackpowder rifle was at 225 yards, and I’d never seen a blackpowder rifle that would shoot accurately at that range. I never was too excited about CVA because in the early days, the company only had low-end rifles that weren’t known for accuracy at long ranges. But a couple of years ago, the factory representative for Browning and CVA, Tillman Britt, approached me at Ed’s Gun Shop where I work after he’d heard me talk about blackpowder rifles. He started telling me about CVA rifles and the new Bergara barrels. I said, “Listen, Tillman, I’ve heard about CVA rifles, but I’ve never shot one. If you’ll let me shoot one and see what it will do, I’ll tell you what I think.” Three days later, I received a package from Blackpowder Products, Inc. (BPI), CVA’s parent company, with a CVA Accura muzzleloader and a Bergara barrel for my T/C rifle. I tested the Accura and the Bergara barrel on my T/C Encore Endeavor at the range. I couldn’t believe the accuracy of both products and how easily the Accura loaded. I also was very impressed with the trigger on the Accura. Most of the T/C triggers I had tested had 4- to 5-pound pulls, and most of the Accuras I have in the store have 2-1/2-pound pulls straight from the factory.

Question: Tell me what happened the first time you took the CVA Accura to the range to shoot it.

Vilorio: I didn’t know what to expect from the Accura. I’d never shot a CVA rifle, so I didn’t have very-high expectations. The first time I shot a group of three shots, it measured 0.485. I hoped these target results weren’t an accidental fluke – the first three shots out of this Accura were at 100 yards. So, I fired that gun 40 times that day, and every time I fired three shots, I consistently got 0.485 groups. What’s even more amazing is that I didn’t clean the CVA Accura, until I took it home after firing it those 40 times.

CVA Accura at the range

Question: What scope did you use?

Vilorio: I used a Bushnell Dead On Accurate (DOA) 250.

Question: What powder did you use?

Vilorio: I shot Blackhorn 209 powder, which was one of the reasons I think the Accura kept delivering those types of patterns without having to be cleaned. When I saw the unbelievable accuracy from the CVA Accura, I called Tillman Britt and said, “Hey, we’ve got to start doing business. We need to get these CVA Accuras in our store.” I was truly amazed at the accuracy of this rifle right out of the box.

with Mark Hendricks

Editor’s Note: Mark Hendricks, vice president of Technical Development for CVA, helps with product design, manufacturing, production, quality control and bringing new products to the market for CVA. This week, Hendricks will tell us what to expect from some of CVA’s new 2010 products.

Question: Mark, how has the CVA Wolf been redesigned this year?
Hendricks: The CVA Wolf always has been an inexpensive starter gun for most muzzleloading hunters, and it’s the rifle most blackpowder hunters purchase first. Too, the Wolf always has been our bestselling muzzleloading rifle. We’ve redesigned it in many of the same ways we’ve redesigned the CVA Optima. We wanted to build into the Wolf all the features our customers requested at a price they could afford. However, the newly-redesigned Wolf only is available with the blued finish. We’ve gone back to the more-traditional stock design for the Wolf, but it now has the CVA Quick Release Breech Plug (QRBP) and Delrin-lined thimbles. The receiver design is very similar to the new Optima in that there are no visible pins and screws, giving the gun a more-clean look. Last year’s price for the Wolf was $180.95, and the price for the new Wolf, even with all the new features we’ve added, is $220.95. So, you get a better rifle with more new features for only $40 more. We’ve listened to our consumers and built the features into the new guns that our customers wanted at an affordable price. The changes we’ve made throughout our lines of guns have been consumer driven. We try to respond to the muzzleloading public’s rifle wants and needs. We then incorporate these suggestions in the next generation of muzzleloading rifles we introduce.

Question: Did your company redesign the CVA Accura?
Hendricks: Yes, we did, even though it’s the most-popular muzzleloader in the CVA line. The Accura is more or less the flagship for the muzzleloaders. In the past, the Accura has been available as a blued gun, but this year, all the new 2010 Accuras will be stainless steel. You’ll also see them with longer, 27-inch fluted barrels. We’ve learned that our consumer tends to want longer barrels with their more-expensive blackpowder rifles. The Wolf, our introductory gun, has a 24-inch barrel. The Optima has a 26-inch fluted barrel. The Accura has a 27-inch fluted Bergara barrel, which is a premium barrel. Ed Shilling, one of the nation’s leading benchrest shooters, set-up our quality-control inspections and tolerances. The Accura is available in either .45 or .50 caliber.

Question: CVA introduced the .45 caliber a few years ago. Is the .45-caliber blackpowder rifle still as popular as it was when you first introduced it?
Hendricks: It’s extremely popular with the blackpowder shooters who understand the ballistics of the .45 caliber and know why it’s superior in many applications. However, the average muzzleloading hunter still prefers the .50 caliber, mainly because Jeremiah Johnson shot a .50 caliber. That movie probably promoted blackpowder hunting as much as any other promotional device ever. The movie “Jeremiah Johnson” entrenched the .50-caliber rifle in the minds of blackpowder shooters. The suggested retail for the .50-caliber Accura with a black FiberGrip thumbhole stock is $486.95. The .45-caliber Accura is only available in stainless steel with a Realtree APG HD thumbhole camo stock and is priced at $547.95. The .50-caliber with Realtree APG HD thumbhole camo stock also is priced at $547.95. Too, we’ve upgraded the stock, so the checkering pattern on the stock is rubberized, making the rifle more comfortable to hold.

For information on the CVA Optima Muzzleloader, Mark did an interview over at CVA Single Shot Rifles.

Editor’s Note: Mark Hendricks is the Vice President of Technical Developments for BPI/CVA.

Question: Mark, what are some of the new developments that CVA has in its muzzleloader line now?
Hendricks: The quick-release breech plug is one of our most important.

Question: What is it? How does it work? And what problems does it solve?
Hendricks: Right now, we have the quick-release breech plug on the Apex rifle. We were embarrassingly late coming to the market with a quick-release breech plug. Our competitors announced their new quick-release breech plug 2-years ago. However, we wanted to make sure we had the best quick-release breech plug that we could develop, before we brought it to the consumer. Quick-release breech plugs are faster and easier to remove than the old breech plugs if you have to use a tool when you’re trying to remove the breech plug.

We found that most breech plugs are easy to remove, until you fire the gun. We went to enough blackpowder shooters to learn if the quick-release breech plugs are just as difficult to remove after they’ve been fired as the old breech plugs were, which required a tool. Many of these quick-release breech plugs used today still required a tool to loosen-up the breech plug before you removed it. We decided that if we were going to have a quick-release breech plug, we wanted ours to be completely tool-less. So, we put our engineers to work, trying to design a quick-release breech plug that would really do what it was supposed to do, to make breech plug pulling quicker, easier and tool-less. We discovered that to get the performance out of the quick-release breech plug that we thought it should have required much-more time and engineering than many breech plugs that were already on the market. We went through a lot of prototyping and an awful lot of casting before we brought our quick-release breech plug to the muzzleloader hunter.

Question: Okay Mark, what makes the CVA quick-release breech plug better than what’s on the market today?
Hendricks: We learned that the way the breech plug seats into the barrel had an awful lot to do with how easy the breech plug was to remove after the gun had been fired. We knew we had to have a seal that would keep the gas flow and the debris out of the breech plug threads when the gun was fired. The gas and the debris were the two ingredients that caused breech plugs to stick and hang when you were trying to remove them. When we felt we had the design that would perform as promised, we tested our new breech-plug removable system at our factory in Spain, and then tested it again when we brought it back to this country.

We had our CVA Pro-Staff shooters test the design, and we received glowing reports from them. One of our pro staffers, Jim Kosier, called me after testing the quick-release breech plug system by shooting 98 shots from his Apex muzzleloader. Jim found a small-sized person at the shoot he was attending and invited that person to remove the breech plug. This small individual was able to remove the breech plug by using only two fingers.

Question: What type of oil or lube are you using on this breech plug to help it come out easier than conventional breech plugs?
Hendricks: We recommend the CVA Slick Breech Plug/Nipple Grease that CVA hunters and shooters have always used. It’s basically an anti-seize lubricant, similar to the lubricant that mechanics use when they’re putting-in spark plugs. Our lube is a high-temperature grease that keeps the threads loosened-up and is like the same type of compound that’s used on traditional-valve breech plugs. The regular breech-plug lube only kept the breech plugs from becoming permanently stuck. It didn’t make the breech plugs easy to remove. However, with this new quick-release breech plug, the threads hardly get any dirt in them. You only have to use the grease, whenever you clean the breech plug. And, now with our new quick-release breech plugs, you don’t need a breech-plug tool. One of the most-annoying problems we’ve found with hunters, is when they go to the hunting camp and want to clean their rifles. Often they can’t find their breech-plug tools. However, with our new quick-release breech plug, they won’t even have to wonder where they’ve put their breech-plug tools. In the past, getting the breech plug out was a major reason that hunters and shooters put-off cleaning their guns. Or at best, they grumbled because they had to clean their guns. However, with the new CVA quick-release breech plug, we’ve eliminated those issues.

Question: As the vice-president of technical development for BPI/CVA, what do you see out in the future of CVA muzzleloading?
Hendricks: CVA has new products coming out every year, and obviously, the direction we’ve taken in recent years is to develop blackpowder rifles that can be more versatile types of guns, like the Optima Elite, and the CVA Apex. Both of these guns allow the same blackpowder rifle to be used for the center-fire rifle or a rimfire rifle. This gives the consumer much-more versatility with his or her blackpowder rifle. With these rifles, they can now hunt during black-powder with either.45 or .50 caliber rifles, and at the end of blackpowder season, they can change barrels and hunt during the modern-weapons deer season. With one frame and stock, you have a tremendous amount of versatility for your hunting. You can attend a south-Alabama muzzleloading deer hunt one week, and the following week you can be hunting in Africa, with the same gun but a different barrel. Also, if you’re hunting during muzzleloader deer season, and you tag-out early, you can take your muzzleloading barrel off of your CVA rifle, put a rimfire .22 on, and go squirrel hunting. We’re trying to build more value into our CVA rifles by making them more versatile.