Unboxing a Flintlock Hawken Kit from Investarms and Muzzle-Loaders.com

I'm Ethan and I love muzzleloading and today we're going to give you a little insight into one of our winter projects planned for all of us learning this fall. You can see here I've got a nice big box fresh from Muzzle-Loaders.com, you can kind of see the bottom in there.

Full disclosure. Darren Binder at Muzzle-Loaders.com gave me a sweet deal on this kit.

I really want to be transparent about all this. Any review and commentary about the kit is is going to be honest and up front.

We'll be building this kit to show you how it's done and to give you some of the insights from my shop. Really not really insights from me, but for my father, who I kind of rope in to these projects because he knows a lot more about what he's doing than I do.

This is one of your introductory muzzle loader kits akin to the traditions line.

This is from Investarms, Investarms is kind of new again on the scene of Muzzleloading. This is an Italian company that previously built the muzzle loaders and the muzzleloader kits for Cabelas and for Bass pro shop.

So they're not a new company. But what were the kits that we're seeing now are a little different from the kits that you may have seen over the last 10, 15 years at the big box retailers.

Opening it up here, it's something I really like about Muzzle-Loaders.com is they pack everything really well. So there you are. There's a look at the box here. I got to say, I'm a real big fan of their new branding. So many times when it comes to musladin products, everybody's really focused on old timey.

And I love old timey. Don't get me wrong. But sometimes it's good to update the old timey into some fresh old timey . Being an introductory kit, maybe not necessarily looking for total historic accuracy here. We're looking at getting people involved in muzzle loaders and easy, affordable way to keep them shooting and and really get them interested.

Get them hooked, I guess, is the word I'm looking for getting on the bench now. You can see the box a little better opening it up here. We're not going to go really far into this kit at all in this video.

I just wanted to show all of you what I had, what I was planning for this fall. So if you're looking to build something this fall and you need some help or you know what you know, you want to see some videos to go along with it, maybe you want to get one of these InvestArms Hawkens/

lready, I can kind of see some of the pieces that were going to have to start working on. There's a lot of wood here in the stock. The stock is pretty rough. I can really feel that grain there.

There's some extra wood, especially here around the trigger inlet and the barrel tank. I like the casting here in the lock plate. That's going to be kind of nice. And the flintlock itself and the trigger assembly already look like they're inlet.

So not going to be a whole lot of work there. Unlike the traditions, kids that you see, a lot of it looks like all the hardware on this is iron. So we're not going to have any of that shiny brass.

You can kind of start planning on how we're going to finish some of this steel and some of this iron altogether. I'm pretty pleased with how it's packaged. I like the cardboard over some of the bubble wrap that you see in other muzzle loading kits and nothing looks damaged.

I have a little bit of box breakage here on this one and where the nose cap is. But thankfully, that knows caps already on there so that that force can't get hurt at all in shipping. So I think kind of first impressions.

There's a lot of work to be done on this kit. Maybe a little bit more than you see on some of the introductory level tradition's kits. This does cost a little bit more. But I think looking at it, we're getting a little bit more for our money when it comes to this kit.

So that's going to be one of our projects here. I love musladin for this winter. I'm really excited to now that I've got an open and I've kind of looked at it and this was my really my first look at the kit itself.

But now that I've got it open, I'm really excited to get this going. So I'm I'm not trying to rush it, but am excited to get our August travel kind of out of the way here so that I can start building this.

I'm kind of getting that itch again to start building another muscle there. And I think this will be a good one to kind of add to the collection. So after I stopped filming on this Invest Arms, Hawken that we were going to be putting together later this fall.

The curiosity got the better of me. And I started going through the manual here. And to my surprise, there are even less instructions than you find in any traditions muzzle loader kit, unless they're in here somewhere else. This pamphlet that you get with the kit really covers like loading, cleaning, safety, all very important stuff.

But the only thing pertaining to this kit, it looks like, is this sheet of paper with some technical drawings, which I love technical drawings. But I kind of expected even just like tradition's just has a really simple like inlet, the trigger guard, and if you have to remove would cut it with a knife kind of stuff.

But this has even less I mean, it's not a problem. Like I said, having put together a few of these, they're all pretty much the same. They're all very simple. But even now, I'm even more excited to make it because I'm kind of worried about people out there that could be putting one of these together that have never done it before without any guidance. So maybe we'll accelerate the production of this a little bit here to make sure that we're we're helping people put this together. So if you have one of these and there isn't a manual or there is, let me know, because maybe I didn't get one.

If you have any questions or any particular parts of muzzleloader building that you'd like me to cover. Feel free to leave them in the comments or shoot me an email at ILoveMuzzleloading(At)gmail.com because I've done a few of these now of different degrees of, you know, really of quality and of historic accuracy.

I kind of look at them different than some of you out there might when it comes to being new to muzzleloading. So if there's a section that you really want me to focus on, whether that stock finishing, carving, oiling, you know, anything in particular there, let me know and I'll be sure to cover it in the tutorial series. Once again, I'm Ethan., I love Muzzleloading, Thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to learn more about this kit and follow along with the process later this fall, please visit. ILoveMuzzleloading.com