Editor’s Note: Carlos Vilorio of Vass, North Carolina, an assistant manager and salesman at Ed’s Gun Shop, sights-in CVA muzzle loader rifles for customers.
Question: Carlos, you’ve mentioned that you can shoot 1-inch groups at 200 yards with a CVA Accura. You’ve also mentioned that you can shoot groups tighter than 1 inch at 100 yards with the Accura. How do you load the CVA Accura to get groups that tight?
Vilorio: I use 110 grains of Blackhorn 209 powder with a Barnes Spit-Fire T-EZ bullet and a Fiocchi primer.
Question: Why do you like the Fiocchi primer?
Vilorio: I read an article by Russell Lynch where he reported that primers can develop a lot of pressure when they’re fired and push the load forward before the powder ignites, which can affect your accuracy. Since I like to try to shoot as accurately as I can, I decided to conduct my own primer test. I put the ramrod in the barrel without a bullet or a powder charge and placed some packing behind the rod in the barrel. I wanted to measure how far the primer would push that ramrod up, which would tell me how far the primer could push the powder before the powder ignited. The Fiocchi primer only pushed the rod out of the barrel about 3 inches. The Winchester primer pushed the rod out of the barrel 10 inches. The Remington primers pushed the rod out 13 inches out of the barrel. No other primer I tested pushed the rod any less than the Fiocchi primer. So, through my primer test, I learned that the Fiocchi primer had enough fire to light the powder without pushing the powder charge too far out of the barrel before the powder ignited. I also learned that I could shoot much-tighter patterns with the Fiocchi primer than I could with other primers and that by using the Fiocchi primer, I could shoot consistent patterns shot after shot. That’s the reason I now exclusively shoot the Fiocchi primer.
Question: Why do you shoot 110 grains of Blackhorn powder instead of 100 or 150 grains?
Vilorio: For me, 150 grains delivers a heavy recoil and kicks too much. I shot 120 grains of Blackhorn powder and still got a little kick. With 110 grains of Blackhorn powder, I could get between 2,000 and 2,100 feet per second, which allowed the Bushnell Dead On Accurate (DOA) 250 scope to be accurate at 100, 150, 200 and 250 yards. I formulate my powder so that the multiple crosshairs in my scope are dead-on at 100 and 200 yards.
Question: So, what’s your opinion of the CVA Accura and the Bergara barrels?
Vilorio: I can’t believe you can take a factory-made gun out of the box and consistently shoot tight groups, like the CVA Accura and the Bergara barrels will, especially when they’re loaded with 110 grains of the Blackhorn 209 powder, the Barnes Spit-Fire T-EZ bullets and the Fiocchi primer.


