Revisiting The Renegade

In the summer of 1979 I bought a front-stuffer to take advantage of Louisiana's muzzleloading season for deer.  We got an extra week at the front of the season and a week at the end of the season, and we were not bothered by gender assignment.  If it was a deer, we could shoot it.  The rifle I settled on was a Thompson/Center Renegade in .54 caliber.  I shot a .530 round ball in pillow ticking, lubricated with human spit.  Occasionally, I'd use a product called Bore Butter, then Junior Doughty came out with a lube made from beeswax and liquid Alox that worked pretty good too.

I shot that rifle for many years, to the exclusion of my center-fire rifles.  It was perfectly suited for the deer woods I hunted.  That big .530 ball made short work of the whitetail deer in our woods. They simply fell over.  The las  deer I shot with that rifle was a young doe who was looking at me over a yaupon  bush.  I shot her in the base of the neck and lost sight of her in the smoke cloud. The later autopsy revealed that the ball had entered just above her brisket, traveled down her spine, and exited from her right hip.  

Grandson Lucas asked the other day what my largest caliber rifle might be, and we went to the hidey-hole and took out the Renegade. I haven't touched it i since 2016, and decided it was time to do the maintenance. I've ben oiling, tightening screws, doing all the things that nearly a decade of ignoring it it lead to.

Doing the research, I stumbled across this guy, who shoots Renegades.  He's getting good accuracy out of his rifles, and I have to admit that the riles I've known exhibit that same accuracy.  

The Renegade is 90% ready to go to the woods.  I'll finish it up this week.  In the meantime, it's nice to see that someone else is finding that the old T/C Renegades are worth saving.