New rifle for long range paper patch shooting

[kokomokid]

Thanks Brent and congrats on the shooting at Lodi.

[Chill Wills]

OK. so I got a handle on your reamer and chamber. Q. What is your Starline case neck thickness? The .458" to .450" 3 degree taper makes sense but paired with the 0.475" neck diameter has me going. If (as an example) brass is 0.010" the chamber neck (in the brass mouth area) is 0.455".
If the brass neck is 0.011" the inside will be 0.053"
If - 0.012" the inside will be 0.051"
Needing room to release and assuming a 0.450" patched bullet we are at 0.012" brass case walls?

Now, can you contrast that chamber with what you call a typical or Funnel PP chamber as I likely have some variation of one of those I am working with now.

I have to say sorry twice;
one) this is a lot of your time and a later reply is fine.
two) if you do not want to get into this at all that is OK. This level of detail is asking a lot by me.

[shooter93]

Ok Brent and whoever else.....could those dimension be "scaled down" for a 44 caliber? While I know the 45-70 is probably the easiest way I have a Steve Earle Wesson action that I think I'll do in the 44-100 Wesson caliber simply because it was one of his calibers. I may do it as sort of a do all rifle and I no longer have any desire to compete so it's just for me. Have you ever used smokeless powders with such a chamber? Just curious how it worked. It's been many years since I've shot blackpowder cartridge.

[Lead pot]

I have chambers like Brent's for the .45-2.4 and scaled down for a couple .44's and they shoot great. But I do see things that made me change my alloy and wad stack.
What I see when the chamber is tight where the case mouth cant expand enough where the inside of the case mouth is a smaller diameter then the groove is deep, I see a hard bullet will not fully expand the bullet base inside the case mouth and I see some, not all, recovered bullets that have cuts like a mouse has been nibbling at the base and some cuts extended all the way up to the ogive.
And this gets worse if the bullet is seated more than 3/16" in the case. The land cuts are there but the bullet did not fill the groove.

Kurt

[Lead pot]

Here is one of my .44's for the .438"/.446" bore groove. it is almost too tight. for seating a PP bullet in a fired case unsized .002" over bore diameter.

[BrentD]

Thanks Brent and congrats on the shooting at Lodi.

Thanks but that is really great spotting by Bob Wood and superb target pulling by Mike Metzel. Bob saw a condition, I thought I saw it but several times he called me off when it looked good to me. Down in the pits Mike recognized right away from the tempo of shooting that we had a condition that we were trying to run so he had the targets up every time I brought the rifle back up. We finished with something like 10 minutes or more on the clock that time. Mike and Bob are incredibly good guys to shoot with.

My best shooting was done on the previous day when we sat on a condition too long and weren't watching the clock. Suddenly, I had a dirty barrel, 3 more rocks on the rack waiting their turn to fly and only 1:26 on the clock. Somehow I got all three on paper, though the last one was in the air when time was called. For me, that is stellar. Lead Pot can tell you that speed is NOT my strength. I don't recall what the score was. It was not very good score but that there were no misses, no rocks left unthrown, that was a bid deal for me in that match and I was pleased that I pulled it off given where I was at the 1:26 mark.

[BrentD]

This level of detail is asking a lot by me.

No problem at all. But I've taken a lot of grief over every step of getting to where I am.

As for the thickness of the brass, I don't know. I will measure some shortly but I don't have any here in the shop. Your concern about release space is a good one, and Al was concerned enough with it that we added a couple thousandths to the neck diameter before ordering the reamer. Your question makes me wonder if the dimensions on the drawing are the first iteration or the revised one. I'm going to have to do some checking and pull the reamer out and check some more.

Bob Wood built a rifle with my chamber and he experimented with some slightly oversized bullets (.453s as I recall). They were to tough to chamber but worse, they pulled a mile of brass down the bore before the cases snapped in half. He only fired a few before he realized it wasn't working. There is not a lot of tolerance for variation in bullet diameter with a chamber like this. My bullets are .450+ or maybe .451-. I don't claim any superhuman abilities to measure in "tenths".

In so far as the brass goes, I simply bought Starline and shot it without any trimming, annealing, or neck turning. I shot it that way for 3 yrs and then finally had some grow enough that I could see they were climbing the end of the chamber, after three full seasons and countless practice and load testing sessions, I finally trimmed them slightly and annealed them. Everyone claims that Starline absolutely must be annealed. I do not find that to be true. I have not yet annealed them a second time.

The problem with the funnel chamber is that the bullet will bump up to fill that entire funnel and the it must be swaged back down to climb up the funnel into the bore and grooves. All that squishing and squeezing doesn't bode well for accuracy. It makes a fine hunting chamber in my Ballard Pacific where I have fouling to contend with. So, it gives a modicum of accuracy but nothing like a proper target chamber (which would simply suck at hunting if a fouled bore was any possibility at all). The key to accuracy (even with the groove bullets) is to minimize bullet distortion and the funnel chamber does not do that at all.

[BrentD]

Ok Brent and whoever else.....could those dimension be "scaled down" for a 44 caliber? While I know the 45-70 is probably the easiest way I have a Steve Earle Wesson action that I think I'll do in the 44-100 Wesson caliber simply because it was one of his calibers. I may do it as sort of a do all rifle and I no longer have any desire to compete so it's just for me. Have you ever used smokeless powders with such a chamber? Just curious how it worked. It's been many years since I've shot blackpowder cartridge.

Absolutely no reason not to try a .44. But a .44-100 would be one mean witch to tame. These rifles need very, very little bullet in the case. The less the better. I like less than 0.10". To do with paper patches means that your bullet has to be supported by the powder charge and the wad. So, you need a hell of a lot more powder to do that than you need just to get the bullet to the target in good order. I'm no scholar of the .44s but I would go for the shortest one I could find.

I have not attempted smokeless. I think it would be a disaster for these reasons - 1. You have nothing to support the bullet as described above. 2. Smokeless is not going to bump up the bullet like black and that will result in gas cutting through the patch in the lands and then leading your barrel like hot-solder and torch. If I was absolutely determined to try it with smokeless, I would try something really fast like Unique and I would use a super soft bullet (soft is not good for accuracy due to nose slump).

[BrentD]

Lincoln, is any of this helpful to you? What are your thoughts about what you want to do?

Do you have any ideas of who you might have build it (yourself?)? I'm curious as to what your thoughts are and where you are starting from.

[BrentD]

Michael,
I measured several pieces of brass and they are 0.010 to 0.0105, maybe 0.011 depending on how snug I push on the calipers. Not sure how well I measure but that's what I get. Then I measured my reamer out on the end of the chamber. With both a micrometer and a calipers, I get 0.475". Measuring the reamer is really hard to do since the cutting edges are releve on the back side making the diameter tough to find. But what I repeatedly didn't get was any number bigger than .475 when I gently rotated the reamer in the jaws. So, I think the drawing measurements are right.

[Lead pot]

Brent I have to say that I don't see any evidence of a bullet getting deformed with the funnel throat. I have looked at enough that filled a 5 gallon bucket full and now a second 1/4 full.





But what I have seen is what I mentioned in the above post with the alloy to hard and the tight chamber you and I use.
At first this made me scratch my head when I found some like this. This was the worst one out of the bunch.
I looked at almost 600 this winter since we had a lot of snow to get away with the uncut bullet bases till I found the right combination.

Kurt

[BrentD]

Kurt, you may not see it in those bullets but you aren't looking for grossly obvious deformaties because bullets fired from a funnel chamber are not grossly inaccurate. Without some way to measure spin balance and concentricity (is that a word?) with super high accuracy, we can't really know. If those bullets are perfectly balanced and straight.

But we do know that bullets bump up in the case, so we know that they will fill that funnel. And then we know they will be swaged back down going forward. Doing that exactly the same every time is unlikely, but they will be close to the same and, thus, there will be some semblance of accuracy, but probably not the level of precision that we really want. So, you end up with a 2-3 MOA rifle instead of a 1-2 MOA rifle. Actually, I don't find a funnel chamber to shoot better 3 MOA and usually closer to 4 MOA if I'm strictly honest with myself and shooting 10+ shots per group at a descent distance.

While the big advantage of shooting bore diameter bullets is axial alignment, it is not the only advantage - if done optimally. It is also the best way to start the bullet smoothly an uniformly down the barrel. When we think of all the effort that folks go to annealing the brass and striving to maintain precise neck tension on their groove-diameter bullets, it is clear that launching the bullet with uniformity is critical. Often zero neck tension with no crimp is best, and certainly that would be the most consistent way to start a bullet.

With bore diameter bullets, we can also have very consistent release of the bullet from the brass. Even more so than what the best groove diameter bullets can produce. However, to the extent that we bump them up in the throat and then squeeze them back down, we defeat this advantage. All this metal moving and reshaping is going to take much more force and thereby much more variability than overcoming any neck tension or crimp could ever produce. Thus, I have been of the notion that the throat should be as minimal as possible.

Ultimately, the goal of launching a target bullet from a target rifle should mimic a muzzleloader as much as possible. This has been my goal ever since I read Robert's "Muzzleloading Caplock Rifles" and then compared what I read to the photos of cartridges in James Grant's first book "Single-Shot Rifles." That was the first time it dawned on me that bore diameter bullets were the ticket, and that mimicking muzzleloaders was the key. No one was shooting bore diameter at that time (early 1990s) - at least not anyone on the internet. Everyone was absolutely convinced that bullets had to be groove+ to be accurate, so I only made progress very very slowly and it took me a long time to figure out there was more to this than just the bullet. Especially since I only had to travel out of state to get access to ranges beyond 200 yds, and then only for matches. Until 2008, I only shot schuetzen and that just didn't give me the data I needed. When I started shooting Creedmoor, I learned things much faster, but I only got to shoot those distances during matches, and that is a hell of a slow way to develop a whole technology more or less from scratch.

Anyway, that is a nutshell is the philosophy behind paper patching with bore diameter bullets - mimic the muzzleloader. The results of the Irish and English as Wimbleton tell us that they are the ultimate in precision riflery with blackpowder and lead.

[Lead pot]

Well I will stick with the funnel chambers and the bottle necked and straight .44's I have seen these results many times. Yes this is only 200 yards but it is less then a MOA with 7 shots???? maybe 10 with one sight change. I don't remember to say for sure anymore. But the long tapered throat's will shoot and shoot quite well. This target was shot using the .44-90bn with a chamber reamer made from an original long tapered throat 1877 long range rifle.

When you get right down to it, we all have our preferences and there is not just one good way to make things work.

[Gunlaker]

Brent thanks for sharing your thoughts on this stuff.

The idea of minimal deformation makes plenty of sense. I think the ultimate in deformation reduction comes from breech seating ahead of the throat which works quite well at schuetzen distance.

The funnel chambers in my, and Michael's rifle, is quite minimal at least. The length of the funnel is just under 0.017" long ( 25 degrees from outside of case at 0.474" to .458" groove ).

There is one problem with this relatively steep angle I've found. If a cartridge is chambered and the bullet enters at a slight angle it can tear the front of the patch, or roll it up like a sock on the bullet. This seems a little more likely on my .45-90 than the .45-70 for whatever reason.

Chris.

[Don McDowell]

Chris do you have a drawing of that reamer? As you know I also have one of those reamers, and am waiting for Oregon Barrels to get a barrel made with a 16 twist and the contour to match this Browing bpcr. Then will take the whole pile of stuff to Eron Ahmer and let him work his magic with it.

[Lead pot]

I see a lot of damage to bullets with the 45 degree chamber end transition then the long tapers. I have records where the bullets actually ended up longer then before it was fired using soft bullets.
This is getting a little off topic so I will drop this. Maybe I will start a new thread on this at some point between the now standard and the vintage throats. When you really look at undamaged recovered bullets and take close measurements and dispel speculations what you might think it tells you a different story.

Kurt

[Lead pot]

I think what might make an interesting breach seating chamber is one that has a straight 90 degree chamber end with a sharp 5 degree or steeper lead so there is no gap between the case and bullet base and breach seat a groove diameter bullet.
Or have a groove diameter free bore long enough that matches your bullet.

[BrentD]

Kurt, you know the latter was often cursed as the "Wolfgang" chamber.

[Lead pot]

ya I know, but how many tried the groove diameter bullet breach seated in that chamber?

[BrentD]

At least one. I rebarreled within 6 months of buying the rifle.