How many shots to expect before foul out?
My 45 Colt cartridges are loaded as follows:
Starline cases - annealed (the annealing stopped blow back)
CCI 350 Magnum primers ( for the vitamins to reduce/tighten ES)
Powder charge is 35 grains of GOEX 2fg (not a gamer load)
Bullet is a cast SAECO #955 RNFP .452” 264 grain 20:1 alloy (not a light gamer bullet)
Lubed with homemade Emmerts Improved.
The firearm is a new Miroku made Winchester 1873 rifle with a 24” barrel.
Question: How many shots, using the above mentioned load should I expect before powder fouling destroys the rifles accuracy ballooning the group.
Back story: I’ve had several range sessions previously with this M73 but only fired smokeless powder under copper plated or my cast bullets.
About a week ago I fired this M73 rifle with my black powder cartridges.
This is the first time I tried my black powder SA revolver cartridges in this rifle.
The target made it obvious I fired too many BP shots as the group size was ~10”x10.5” for 60 shots at 57 yards bench rested. The last 40 shots were done from a standing position firing at 10”square steel plate. Most of those shots rang the steel.
So I fired the contents of two 50 round MTM cartridge boxes 100 shots total.
This was far too many shots to reveal the rifle true accuracy potential.
I was going to just shoot one box of ammo that was the plan but I was having so much fun I couldn’t resist opening the second ammo box.
When I got home I started washing out the cartridge cases.
The next day I cleaned the rifle. I forgot to wet the fouling and just pulled a wet patch through breach to muzzle with my Dewey cable pull through tool.
The patch slid though the first ½ of the barrel then encountered considerable resistance as it traversed the crud ring. Subsequent patches pulled through easier and easier I did see some tiny silver flakes obviously lead abraded off by passage through the rough fouling build up in the front half of the barrel.
I was using a 7:1 mixture of distilled water:and Ballistol (moose milk) for the first time as the powder solvent. After the bore felt clean, I looked down the bore with my bore light in the chamber and freaked out. It looked like the whole bore was coated in partially lifting flakes and streamers of lead. I spent a long time brushing and patching out, put never seeing any lead on my patches. Another look through the bore and saw zero improvement. Then I noticed just inside the muzzle white droplets of moose milk the I realized that I thought was fuzzy lead in the bore is just the oil and water beading up like rain drops on a waxed car. I pulled dry patches through and took another look, the bore was clean and shiny.
The Starline cases had been annealed, an experiment to see if the blow back I was getting when firing smokeless powder could be reduced. The experiment was a big success fired cases had a slight oily feel on the outside no black fouling none one any of the 100 cartridges fired. I removed the side plates and action guts wiped each part off with a white paper towel, no black fouling was present in the action or in the magazine tube. All my 45 Colt cases now have been annealed.
The next experiment will be to see how long the cases will stay clean between annealings.
Because I fired too many shots in one range session I don’t know when I got lube failure with the SAECO bullet I had hoped it would carry enough lube for a 24” barrel.
Obviously I will have to experiment with my rifle in a more controlled test with fewer shots onto more targets to find out at what shot count my groups grow to unacceptable size.
