I have wanted a smokeless powder muzzle loader for a while now but most of the ones built off of Remington 700 actions get pretty costly (which I understand with the work that’s involved). Bumped into  a friend I hadn’t seen in a while over the weekend and he was telling me that he got a break action CVA rifle chambered in 45-70 then sent it to Hankins custom rifles in Kentucky to have the work done converting it to to a breach plug .45 cal smokeless powder muzzle loader.

I am thinking of doing this with a TC encore and an SSK barrel, I like the feel of the TC and there are a lot of barrel options if I want to get a couple. The SSK barrel is 18” which would be handy, it also comes threaded from the factory so I could potentially put my silencerco hybrid on if the juice is worth the squeeze.

I was just wondering if anyone had done anything like this in general, If so did you use Hankins or another gunsmith (please share their info if you did). Any experience in this area would be appreciated!

I would go look in the Smokeless section of this forum and ask - https://www.modernmuzzleloader.com/  

Buddy has a couple, still kinda weirds me out to see him dropping 60gr of smokeless down the bore and topping it with a 250ish gr bullet

I am the opposite. I am hoping to come across a crack barrel 45/70 so I can load blackpowder 45/70 rounds.

That’s what makes the world go around right? I am now finding out that TC has discontinued the encore and is maybe out of business all together so this project may be more difficult (at least more expensive) than I anticipated.

So it would seem.

https://www.guns.com/news/2021/05/04/s-and-w-to-sell-thompson-center

Would seem they couldn't find a buyer and repurposed the production lines to more profitable S&W products.

I have a 45-70 converted to shoot smokeless powder.  I had a gunsmith put in a savage breech plug and head space it.  It uses muzzleloader primers and I run a duplex load shooting a 40 cal copper bullet @2400+

Ive heard great things about Hanks, and you can still get barrels from eBay, SSK, MGM and others.