  The two guns for our tests were a Thompson Center Omega (top) and a CVA Optima. Both were bought at Walmart, and shown here, they have been fitted with a TC scope package and a Bushnell scope, respectively, also both on the shelf at Walmart.
 We fired just over 50 rounds through both guns using Hodgdon Triple Se7en 50 grain pellets, TC Shockwave bullets, and Powerbelt bullets.
 All of our tests were shot with 150 grains, three pellets, even though the Powerbelt Aerolites were only rated for standard 100 grain loads.
 Both the TC and Powerbelt 250 grain bullets came in at just under 1800 feet per second, which is the top of the spectrum for the Powerbelts. Chronographs don’t work real well with muzzleloaders because of the muzzle blast, but we were able to measure these.
 The TC Omega has something of a falling block action. The trigger guard swings down and the breechface cover swings away and around. When you seat a cap, you only put it in this far and it is seated by the breechface. This allows for easy replacement if you get a dud primer without taking the gun off of your shoulder.
 The CVA Optima is a break action, similar to a single barrel break shotgun, and they actually make this gun in a centerfire .45-0 as well.
 The TC Omega doesn’t come with rings, but Walmart sells a scope kit for it with rings and propietary bases that are drilled to fit several screw spacings for differnet muzzleloader brands.
 It is a little confusing when you open the package because the directions are not good, but eventually we figured out what screws go where.
 The CVA Optima comes with a DuraSight ring and base combination that is really nice, and we bought the Bushnell scope to match.
 The TC also comes with Williams fiber optics sights installed. It could be that since we bought these in Florida where scopes are legal for muzzleloaders, the CVA comes with the scope mounts instead of open sights.
 The strongest aspect to the CVA is its finger removeable breechplug. Even after punishing the rifle with dozens of rounds of full house 150 grain magnum loads, it opened easily. Notice the silver lithium grease on my fingers.
 Our most consistent groups were from the TC Omega using the TC Shockwave bullets and 150 grains of Triple Se7en. At 50 yards three shots were almost always in into an inch or under.
 The plastic sabots are a little hard to get down through the forcing cone after the first shot, but you can carry a little tin of Crisco, or even the TC 17 bore cleaner.
 We use the end of the cleaning rod as a starter, and a range rod to push it home. A range rod keeps your ramrod from getting all scratched up and is a good investment.
 The CVA Optima put the same Shockwave bullets into about an inch and a half consistently using the same load.
 The Powerbelt bullets did the same thing in both guns. Two shots went into a ragged hole and the third generally an inch to an inch and a half away. This could be because the pressure was at the top of the rating for this Aerolite bullet, so it was cutting some gas on the side.
 Powerbelts are 1/1000th under bore diameter, not .45 cal like the sabots. They use this plastic cup in the back to capture the gas and obturate the bullet and bump it up to the size of the rifling. They are easier to load than sabots, but the rest of the claims from Powerbelt seem to be mostly bunk.
Our most consistent groups were from the TC Omega using the TC Shockwave bullets and 150 grains of Triple Se7en. At 50 yards three shots were almost always in into an inch or under.
 The CVA did the same behavior, ragged hole with a flier.
 We didn’t conduct accuracy testing with the 100 grain load, but on the chronograph it came out to about 1300 feet per second, or roughly a little over .44 magnum ballistics, compared to .444 Marlin ballistcs at 150 grains.
 Note that in all of this testing we only ran a bore swab down the barrels once, and this was the result. There are no clumps of fouling with the Triple Se7en. You can shoot it all day.
 This article isn’t meant to be a winner takes all comparison, but you should understand that there is a class difference in these rifles that transcends the features. The Omega is a TC and an extremely mature product made in America by Americans. Check out the fouling on the breechface on the CVA vs. the TC. After dozens of rounds there was no backblast at all in the Omega.
 I strongly suggest that you remove the breech plug and apply some lithium grease to the threads on the TC (or any other inline muzzleloader) before you shoot magnum loads. This grease comes with the TC cleaning kit you can buy at Walmart.
 In Okeechobee the muzzleloading section is getting a little thin and the muzzleloaders are sold out, but your local Walmart probably doesn’t have the hardcore locals that are here in G-d’s country in this hunter’s paradise. You don’t need most of the gimmick products they sell. You aren’t going to get a second shot anyway with all the racket that your muzzleloader makes.
 Both of these rifles are great guns and you can buy them with confidence. The biggest selling point on the CVA is definately the unique breechplug, but you can’t beat a TC for overall long term reliability and accuracy. It all depends on what you want, and they both actually TOTALLY ROCK! Have fun hunting.
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Thompson Center Omega
https://www.tcarms.com/omega
CVA Optima
https://www.cva.com/omega
Muzzleloaders are very different from every other type of hunting rifle. Most hunters consider them ancillary, because the extra two weeks of muzzleloader season are meant to put you at a disadvantage. You get one shot at the deer, and you are forced to use what is considered by many to be a substandard weapon. Some states even have laws that you cannot use optics, putting older hunters and an even further disadvantage, and many states have quirky little laws to exclude certain advanced features that have crept into the modern muzzleloader market. Couple all of that with the fact that you can have a muzzleloader shipped to your door from online in most states, and you get a muzzleloader market that is something of a mess. Many small gunshops don’t even stock new muzzleloaders, so a lot of hunters end up settling for what’s on the shelf at Walmart. Fortunately we found that this isn’t such a bad thing. We bought two muzzleloaders and all of the stuff to shoot them in one trip to our local Walmart in Okeechobee, Florida, and the results were surprising. For about $350, with the scopes, both of these guns rivaled centerfire rifle accuracy, and proved that even the most inexpensive modern muzzleloaders aren’t substandard at all. If you are thinking of buying a muzzleloader at Walmart this week for your states special early season, have no fear. Walmart muzzleloaders totally rock!
The two guns we tested were a $288 Thompson Center Omega and a $296 CVA Optima, both in .50 caliber. Your local Walmart, if it carries guns, and not all do, may not have these specific rifles, but you should be able to find the same brands with similar features. Your local gun dealer can also get you these guns, but because muzzleloaders can be bought online without a transfer dealer in most states, a lot of gun shops shy away from stocking brand new guns. We did buy ours actually at Walmart, as well as a Thompson Center scope package for the TC, and a Bushnell camo scope for the CVA. Both scopes were under $50. The TC scope package came with proprietary bases and rings, and the CVA Optima itself came with a monolithic base and ring combination, so for about the same money, both guns came out to just under $350 scoped.
While both of these rifles performed very well, they are also very different guns. Overall, the TC is a more accurate and mature rifle, and you are buying an entry level rifle from the most trusted name in muzzleloading hunting rifles, made in Springfield Massachusetts. The CVA Optima is made in Spain and is much more of a full featured rifle, but the accuracy isn’t quite as good as the TC, and at the end of the day, it’s a CVA and not a Thompson Center. The Omega comes with a regular, blued barrel and plain black polymer stock. The CVA is brushed stainless, with an ambidextrous thumbhole stock and raised cheekpiece in camo. Both of these guns are designed to take #209 shotgun shell primers exclusively, but the action on each is different. The Thompson Center has something reminiscent of a “falling block” action, similar to a Sharps. The trigger guard unclips and the breechface cover drops down. The advantage to this is that if you get a dud primer, you can replace it without removing the gun from your shoulder. The TC also has a unique trigger that stays forward until you cock the hammer. This prevents you from forgetting to cock the hammer in the wake of hunter’s tunnel vision when a trophy buck appears. The CVA has a break action, similar to an old H&R single barrel shotgun, so you would have to take the rifle off your shoulder to seat another primer should the first one fail to go off. It is a small point, but in the moment the difference can be very important. Both guns have a twist rate that is made for modern sabot slugs and other premium muzzleloading bullets.
This article isn’t meant to be a head to head, winner takes all type of comparison, so though I am from New Hampshire, where TC got its start, please keep in mind that both of these guns performed very well and would be great choices for your deer season this fall. The CVA has a unique QR breech plug system that sets it apart from pretty much every muzzleloader out there. You don’t need a wrench to remove the breechplug. A large knurled knob the width of the breech easily removes and re-seats with hand pressure. You may not think this is a big deal, but on a muzzleloader, you tend to remove the breechplug a lot, and not just for cleaning. Many times on long afternoons shooting my muzzleloaders I have forgotten to put the powder down the barrel before the bullet , requiring either a bullet puller or a removal of the breechplug to drive the round out. Neither of these guns have to be taken apart to remove the breech plug, which is nice, but the thumbscrew CVA plug is so easy to remove, you might as well remove it to boresight the gun as well, which I did. Even with full house 150 grain magnum loads the CVA breechplug twisted free with only hand pressure, and that is quite a feat. In every other muzzleloader in which we have tested that load, it has been difficult to remove the breechplug, (including the TC Omega but we didn’t grease the plug first). In the last Traditions gun we tested, we sent the gun back to them with the breechplug stuck in it. This was a shock that the CVA breechplug removed so easily.
Most people consider 100 yards a long shot with a muzzleloader, but both of these guns performed at levels that exceed many cartridge guns. We tested two types of bullets, both at 250 grains. The first was a sabotted bullet from TC called the “Shockwave”, and the other is the “Powerbelt Aerolite,” which is a unique full caliber gas check bullet made by a company that appears to be connected to CVA called Powerbelt. They claim to be the the best selling muzzleloader bullet in America, with over 7 million bullets sold a year. I suspect this is because of the heavy Walmart distribution. Powerbelt claims that their bullets are much superior to sabots, so though I had never heard of Powerbelt, I was eager to try them in these two guns. The only problem is that the Powerbelt bullets come in grades, and I didn’t notice that these bullets carried by Walmart were only for standard loads, not 150 grain magnum loads, and I only noticed this after all of the testing …with 150 grain loads. We tend to use full house magnum loads for accuracy testing simply because most guns generally shoot their worst at magnum velocities. If a muzzleloader shoots good at 150 grains, it will shoot really good at 100 grains. We should have bought a different Powerbelt for these tests, but we were close in velocity anyway, and they performed pretty well regardless.
The old rule of thumb with black powder is that the caliber of the weapon should govern the volume of the charge (BP grains are measured as volume not weight). If you shoot a .50 caliber rifle, at normal rifle barrel lengths, you should probably use about 50 grains of powder. More than that won’t burn inside the barrel, because black powder burns so slow. This is one of the reasons why, these days, we don’t use actual “black powder” at all. After testing real black powder from Goex and Swiss powder, as well as several black powder substitutes, we use exclusively Triple Se7en pellets from Hodgdon in all of our #209 testing. The pellet variety is every bit as reliable in the modern inline muzzleloader guns as the powdered variety, and loading couldn’t be easier. You just drop the powder pellets into the barrel. Triple Se7en burns clean and you can shoot a dozen rounds or more without ever cleaning the barrel. It also isn’t corrosive, yet Triple Se7en cleans up with tap water and dish soap, just like real black powder. It ignites a lot hotter than real BP and doesn’t work great in traditional wormhole guns, but inline, there is no better or more accurate powder than Triple Se7en and we use the 50 grain pellets exclusively. Walmart also conveniently carries them.
At magnum 150 grain loads of Triple Se7en, the Thompson Center Omega repeatedly shot into in inch at 50 yards with the TC Shockwave bullets. The CVA Optima performed almost as well, averaging just about an inch and a half with the same TC Shockwave sabots. The Powerbelt bullets averaged one and half to two inches for three shots, but again, these particular Aerolite bullets weren’t made for the magnum loads we subjected them to. As you can see from the targets, the most common behavior with the Powerbelts was two shots into a ragged hole and the third shot about an inch and a half away. This could have meant that one in three rounds was getting slight gas cut from the extra pressure. Now we need to find some magnum Powerbelts and give them a try.
One thing that was striking about the Powerbelts is that they seat much easier than the sabots. Both of these rifles have a forcing cone about 8 inches down the barrel. The CVA was a little tighter than the TC, but sabots both were noticeably hard to seat in both guns once you got them into the bore. This is because the plastic on the sabots actually rides the rifling down, at bore size. The Powerbelts are 1/1000th under bore diameter, and the plastic skirt gascheck keeps them from falling out. On firing, the Powerbelts obdurate in the breech from the pressure, then ride the rifling out. Ease of loading is one of the marketing claims on the Powerbelts, and this one is true. Some of the other claims aren’t true, especially that the plastic sabots leave residue. If they did we wouldn’t have seen this kind of accuracy. We also so no difference in muzzle velocity from the Powerbelts. But they definately are easier to seat.
Say what you want about Walmart, but a lot of first time hunters buy their guns there, and that is a good thing. It isn’t fair that gun dealers can’t generally buy guns at wholesale for what Walmart sells them for at retail, but at GunsAmerica we feel that it all comes back around in the wash. They introduce a lot of new enthusiasts to our shooting and hunting sports for cheap money, and eventually the guns bought there are traded or sold for guns that they don’t sell at Walmart. For accessories, everything we used for this article came from the muzzleloading display in the outdoor department. Remember that if Walmart wanted to, they could make their own guns in China or Turkey and sell them at half the price. These two rifles are from two of the oldest names in muzzleloading, Thompson Center and CVA. The TC is even Made in the USA, (though not in New Hampshire anymore). You can attack Walmart for a lot of things, but in guns, they sell almost exclusively American made guns from Remington, Mossberg, Savage, and even Colt. These Walmart muzzleloaders are going to bring a lot of new shooters into one of the most challenging and exciting “one shot one kill” aspects of our sport. If you decide to impulse buy a muzzleloader at Walmart this week, don’t worry, they totally rock.