How Deep Do You Seat A Round Ball?

[Suo Gan]

How deep do you seat a rb into the neck? What would be a good clean load. Something fast I'd imagine. I have some Bullseye. I have some others. Would I need a filler? Some load suggestions for gallery and small game would be nice.

Any opinion on diameter? For 30 cal use O buck (.32)? What size for 44 (carbine and pistol)?

Trying to be as frugal as possible with my lead. How close to pure could I roam?

Anybody ever make some stew with what they shot from a roundball from a breechloader?

Thanks

[JIMinPHX]

If you load with black powder, then you seat the ball all the way down on the powder. With smokeless powder (like Bullseye) you don't do that. I've loaded .433" pure lead round balls in .44 mag cartridges with 3 grains of Bullseye before. It's a real pop gun load with virtually no recoil. It burns kind of dirty, but it's accurate at short range. The ball flies so slow that you can see it on it's way to the target. With that small of a powder charge in a gun with a loose forcing cone gap, the ball might not make it out the barrel & might cause a barrel obstruction, so watch for that. Barrel obstructions are seriously dangerous.

Some of the older reloading manuals, like Speer #11, list the old gallery loads. I don't see very many of them listed in the newer books.

Round balls knock game over just fine. The slower velocities that they are usually shot at produce a lot less bloodshot meat than the more modern high speed cartridges tend to. I know several people who hunt happily with round balls in front stuffers.

[Echo]

I believe Mike V. advocated seating the RB revolver balls down in the case so they were completely inside - then swabbing a gob of lube in the mouth. I loaded up some 38 Specials that way, but haven't gotten around to shooting them yet.

[mooman76]

I haven't loaded much RB for cartridge yet but have done some and read of others. For a 44 I'd use a 440 ball and size it down to what you need to normally shoot. Other say they do and it makes it easier for the case mouth to take a crimp on a RB. Maybe a little LLA on the RB. For light loads you should be able to go pretty close to pure but that's just a guess.

[NickSS]

I shoot quite a bit with round ball in 45-70 and 38-55 with 457 and 380 RB. I do not size the cases and push the ball down on the powder. I generally shoot between 5 and 8 gr of Red Dot. I also load .454 RB in 45 Colt and 45 Schofield brass. This is mostly loaded with a case full of FFFG black powder with a lubed felt wad under the ball. I seat the ball about half way and crimp with a light role crimp to hold it in place. I do the same when using about 5 gr of Red Dot except I tumble lube the balls in LLA. Accuracy is fine for all loads I have tried and I have killed several raccoons With them. I have recently loaded some light 30-30 loads using 4 gr of red dot and a .310 RB lubed in LLA. They proved to be very accurate at 25 yards as I had no problem shreading a pop can with them. I crimped the balls in place about half way in the neck. All my balls are cast from soft lead.