I reviewed the lat two years of headlines in the muzzleloader section. If they just beat this to death 25 months ago I am sorry I missed it.
I have only done it once and it was a lot of fun. I figure if you are gonna do it you might as well load up 50 or 100 of them and have at it all at once, the gun won't be any harder to clean. By Gawd that was cool, enormous clouds of thick smoke, plumes of sulfurous solids coming out the just fired chamber throat - probably a good thing I had the range to myself that day.
Well, sort of. Won't be harder to clean if you do 50 of them compared to 6, but boy howdy I had some crud in the barrel.
I am going to try placing a lubed patch between my powder charge and my bullet this second time around- and maybe see if I can use a case mouth belling die to compress the powder a bit before I seat bullets.
The stuff I did correctly last time was to trim all my brass the same length, standard primers worked fine for me. I measured the distance from the crimp groove on my bullet to the bullet base did a little math and trickled a charge into a primed case that would end up giving 5% compression on the powder charge with the bullet seated. I did that by using that tail piece on my micrometer dangling down from the case mouth... Then I poured that charge out of the case back into my powder measure so I could make more of the same.
IIRC I came up right near 37.5gr for 45Colt with 255gr SWCs.
Has anybody fooled with drop tubes or tampers to run their charge up a little?
Better or worse lube/patch combinations? It reads like the thing to do is get a bunch of really soft lube in there to keep the fouling soft.
Thanks, for me this right up with seeing a professional sporting event or major concert or Halley's comet and so on, a cylinder full of black powder .45 Colt.
I have only done it once and it was a lot of fun. I figure if you are gonna do it you might as well load up 50 or 100 of them and have at it all at once, the gun won't be any harder to clean. By Gawd that was cool, enormous clouds of thick smoke, plumes of sulfurous solids coming out the just fired chamber throat - probably a good thing I had the range to myself that day.
Well, sort of. Won't be harder to clean if you do 50 of them compared to 6, but boy howdy I had some crud in the barrel.
I am going to try placing a lubed patch between my powder charge and my bullet this second time around- and maybe see if I can use a case mouth belling die to compress the powder a bit before I seat bullets.
The stuff I did correctly last time was to trim all my brass the same length, standard primers worked fine for me. I measured the distance from the crimp groove on my bullet to the bullet base did a little math and trickled a charge into a primed case that would end up giving 5% compression on the powder charge with the bullet seated. I did that by using that tail piece on my micrometer dangling down from the case mouth... Then I poured that charge out of the case back into my powder measure so I could make more of the same.
IIRC I came up right near 37.5gr for 45Colt with 255gr SWCs.
Has anybody fooled with drop tubes or tampers to run their charge up a little?
Better or worse lube/patch combinations? It reads like the thing to do is get a bunch of really soft lube in there to keep the fouling soft.
Thanks, for me this right up with seeing a professional sporting event or major concert or Halley's comet and so on, a cylinder full of black powder .45 Colt.
