How About A Minie Rifle For Flat Bases?

[Good Cheer]

Just thinking out loud and thinking I'd share some musings.
Got a few minie molds to work with that the plugs can interchange from one design to the other.
Threatening to get a .58 barrel for a Renegade stock.
Soo, thinking about it, why not get the rifling made with just a fast enough twist so that flat bases could be used as well? Not to mention paper patches, as well as lubed minies with hollow bases.
48" twist is noted for typically providing good accuracy with minies.
Make it a 42" twist and flat bases up to 1 1/4" long should work ok.

But would 42" twist start being too fast everything else? I just don't know.

[johnson1942]

good cheer it would be best to keep it at 1.1 long as 1.25 needs about a 1/40 twist to keep it stable. is it possible to make a mini about 1.1 long or 1 inch long? if you could and paperpatched it would be as good as any other cal in paper patched accuracy. that would be a really good hunting gun.

[Good Cheer]

Hi johnson,
The stability of flat bases with 42" spin is going to largely depend upon which design minie is used with how much powder, as in the nose profile and size / location of the lube grooves coupled with the FPS and RPM's. I'm figuring that any slower and no, it wouldn't work. With about .006 grooves and the boolit getting fatter and shorter, why even Mr. Greenhill would be smiling!

[johnson1942]

keep us in the loop, ive thought a lot about mini bullets.

[Good Cheer]

You know, this is a project that is getting to be dear to my heart as time goes on.
I'd really like to have a piece set up for this semi-doofus idea. Flat base, paper patches, minie molds and all.
It's just something that seems like it could be a passel of fun.

[johnson1942]

it also could get any critters you want.

[Good Cheer]

Well them gophers better look out come spring time!


Kidding aside, heavy charges in a .58... makes me think about Val Forgett's Africa trips shooting his .58 minie rifles.

[johnson1942]

i met a man about 20 years ago who went to africa with a underhammer 80 cal. round ball gun. it used 150 grains of real black powder behind the ball. he patched the ball but newspaper wading between the powder and patched ball. he shot several big game with it. he also said they shot a lot of ducks on a pond at 200 yards with it. it shot long range quite well he said. it was one of those expensive pacific rifle co. underhammers. your mini with out a hollow base would be a freight train coming.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The problem with flat-based bullets will be to get them to engage with the rifling. It isn't as easy as it is with the much more elongated ones used with fast-twist .450 or .461 match rifles, especially if rifling intended for minié bullets is deeper. If they are soft it will very likely work, and if they are really soft paper patching would probably be advantageous.

I have a Bohemian double rifle with .525in. grooves, and the monogram of someone beginning with R, and the seven-pointed coronet which means he was a baron. I found I got reasonable accuracy with the Lyman 425gr. mould for the .50-70, which for me cast at .516.

Great care has to be taken if you force a bullet into the rifling at the muzzle, and especially if it doesn't fill the grooves, to make sure it goes in straight. I think I got the best results with a false muzzle, but a much simpler one than the lever-operated ones, located with pins or a bayonet fitting, which were once used in scheutzen rifles. It was simply a small block locating in one muzzle by a brass rod it was capable of turning around, with a hole right distance away to line up with the other muzzle.

When the bullet may not start out sealing the grooves, a wax disc and thin card may be useful. I wouldn't use compressible wadding, as that might inhibit upsetting of the bullet. But if you can find some kind of plastic cup which will seal on its own, that should be excellent.

[johnson1942]

a cast bullets out of a normal lead mix will bump up in 11 inches. however their is a way to make sure that they are pre engraved is pre engrave them. i have done that. i had a fast twist barrel made once 3 inches longer that i needed. i cut off that 3 inches off and made it a bullet pre engraver. i on a lathe reamed out the lands for 1 and 1/2 inches. then threaded the out side to fit in my loading press. i would put a cast bullet in the bottom of it and push it through with a squared of brass dowel and a down ward push on the loading handle. pre engraved. then powder, wad, and a bullet in the bore, with no need to bump up. that gun was and still is a tackdriver. may build one like that again.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

That is the way scheutzen false muzzles were made. They generally locked onto the muzzle, and the bullet was pushed through either with a plunger or with a lever on each side, then the ramrod used. Very likely they inspired the first handloading tools. If I had to make one nowadays I would align it with a Cerrosafe plug cast in the bore, and drill the locating holes into the barrel face when I couldn't get a feeler gauge between them on any side.

[Good Cheer]

My fast twist forty has an engraving die made from a piece of the barrel. A long pre-engraved boolit is about as precisely aligned as you can get. The bad part of the idea is that you need to start out with a rifling geometry that minimizes the amount of metal that you are going to move during the engraving process. That means very wide grooves. Which means you have a barrel preferentially geared towards the use of pre-engraved boolits. I've finagled ways around it to make paper patches shoot. Even figgered out making patched round ball shoot. But I learned the lesson on fast twist pre-engraving and won't do it again (though it works real good for it's supposed to do).

That .40 bore might even get recut to use with paper patched .41 mag molds.

The route taken on the my .52 I do believe is the very best with approximately 50:50 land to groove width, as many grooves as practical, not very deep on the grooves, a little narrowing on the land faces and the groove bottoms, twist only fast enough to shoot the heaviest paper patched boolits you want to use. That way the rifle has the flexibility to shoot tight patched round ball or the heavy honkers depending upon what makes me grin that week.

Some day if I see a 400 grain or so .476 mold for an irresistible price then that .465 diameter round ball mold in the toy box is liable to make me need another rifle barrel for a Renegade.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

a cast bullets out of a normal lead mix will bump up in 11 inches. however their is a way to make sure that they are pre engraved is pre engrave them. i have done that. i had a fast twist barrel made once 3 inches longer that i needed. i cut off that 3 inches off and made it a bullet pre engraver. i on a lathe reamed out the lands for 1 and 1/2 inches. then threaded the out side to fit in my loading press. i would put a cast bullet in the bottom of it and push it through with a squared of brass dowel and a down ward push on the loading handle. pre engraved. then powder, wad, and a bullet in the bore, with no need to bump up. that gun was and still is a tackdriver. may build one like that again.

It depends a lot on the bullet and the load. People tried very hard and failed to get a musket-calibre weapon to seal its bore, by such dubious expedients as deforming the bullet against a shoulder or central stem in the breechplug, until Delvigne and Minié devised the hollow base. Once that was done, though, they progressed to more elongated bullets and heavy powder charges, which enabled a flat-based bullet to upset more reliably than it had in a musket-calibre weapon. That same combination of pressure buildup and bullet inertia in a larger size would have generated recoil which might have been acceptable for the big game hunter, but not a military weapon.

[Lead pot]

My winter past time when it's so cold that your eyelashes freeze your eyelids shut I test bullet alloys for the bullets I use for shooting matches. I did a lot of shooting into the snow banks to recover bullets virtually undamaged from the impact into the snow to see what is going on with alloys and loads.
I build a Hawken for a planned Alaskan Moose hunt with a heavy barrel 1-1/8" across the flats for a heavy hunting load if I needed it and a 70 twist mainly for round ball and shooting a minie.
What I found shooting the minie in a 1/70 patch twist that it shot very well using the slow twist bore. Shooting the hollow based ball into the snow the skirts fully blew out filling the .012" deep grooves with lard in the cavity for lube for the fouling and with out lube but in the rings. The hollow base performed well to a 85 grain load. When I increased that load to 100 gr things started to happen with accuracy and the skirts. The skirts started to enlarge (blown out) and the holes started to indicate tumbling. 110 gr the bases got larger.
Using a hollow base minie, 90 gr for mine is max for a load.
I also had a 3 groove minie ball that I tested both hollow based and I made a flat based plug for this mould to shoot flat based balls and they did not perform for reliable use in my rifle. Looking at those recovered bullets they had very deep gas cuts using pure lead balls that did not upset enough to fill the deep .012" groove even with a 120 gr load of powder. I retired that mould. The good thing about the minie moulds changing them from hollow base to flat base is just get a second base plug and turn it off using a lathe or saw and grinder. Not much lost.

I used the Lyman 2 groove 577-611 Minie that weighs 512 gr and it is 1.005" long with a .400" deep cavity and a skirt thickness of .125"

[Ballistics in Scotland]

My winter past time when it's so cold that your eyelashes freeze your eyelids shut I test bullet alloys for the bullets I use for shooting matches. I did a lot of shooting into the snow banks to recover bullets virtually undamaged from the impact into the snow to see what is going on with alloys and loads.
I build a Hawken for a planned Alaskan Moose hunt with a heavy barrel 1-1/8" across the flats for a heavy hunting load if I needed it and a 70 twist mainly for round ball and shooting a minie.
What I found shooting the minie in a 1/70 patch twist that it shot very well using the slow twist bore. Shooting the hollow based ball into the snow the skirts fully blew out filling the .012" deep grooves with lard in the cavity for lube for the fouling and with out lube but in the rings. The hollow base performed well to a 85 grain load. When I increased that load to 100 gr things started to happen with accuracy and the skirts. The skirts started to enlarge (blown out) and the holes started to indicate tumbling. 110 gr the bases got larger.
Using a hollow base minie, 90 gr for mine is max for a load.
I also had a 3 groove minie ball that I tested both hollow based and I made a flat based plug for this mould to shoot flat based balls and they did not perform for reliable use in my rifle. Looking at those recovered bullets they had very deep gas cuts using pure lead balls that did not upset enough to fill the deep .012" groove even with a 120 gr load of powder. I retired that mould. The good thing about the minie moulds changing them from hollow base to flat base is just get a second base plug and turn it off using a lathe or saw and grinder. Not much lost.

I used the Lyman 2 groove 577-611 Minie that weighs 512 gr and it is 1.005" long with a .400" deep cavity and a skirt thickness of .125"

That is much deeper rifling than was used with grooved and lubed or paper-patched bullets, either in American scheutzen or the British long-range match-rifle discipline. I think it is one in which you would need either the minié or a thickly cloth-patched round ball. Your minié is a good one for the velocities at which you have found it works, but I'm not surprised to find it failing with heavier charges. Hunters didn't need its big advantage, the ability to fire a lot of shots without cleaning. Despite Forgett's book few people took minié rifles to Africa (stopping power), or open-country deerstalking (trajectory) in the mountains of Scotland.

A new or modified hollow-base pin isn't a big advantage, though, and you might get away with heavier charges, if you want them, by making it more conical, so that the walls increased in thickness as they approached the front of the cavity.

[Lead pot]

The thought of turning the base plug down has crossed in my mind making a thicker skirt for a heavier powder charge but I think doing this would throw the ball out of balance. At any rate I haven't had reason to use the heavier ball for my use of the rifle.
I do carry a couple in my pocket during deer season just for a fast follow up shot if I need it.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The thought of turning the base plug down has crossed in my mind making a thicker skirt for a heavier powder charge but I think doing this would throw the ball out of balance. At any rate I haven't had reason to use the heavier ball for my use of the rifle.
I do carry a couple in my pocket during deer season just for a fast follow up shot if I need it.

It may, but making a new base plug will tell you almost for free, while just about everything else you can do will cost money. What I was suggesting was a tapered skirt thickness, not thicker all the way.

The Rifle Brigade in Spain used to carry a few undersized balls for just the same reason, or possibly for being followed up. Marshal Soult produced a report which found that during five bad weeks of 1813 ten companies of les riflemen, distributed at one per division, accounted for five hundred French officer and eight generals. But their loading for long-range accuracy was a long and noisy enough business to get them into big trouble in many kinds of operation.

[Good Cheer]

Tapered wall thickness for sure.
Just had a .533 minie plug done that way for patching. Looking forwards to trying it out.

About gas cutting, the boolit base versus the style of rifling is a big factor.
The RCBS 45-70 gas checked boolit is tough to get to seal off in my New Englander because of the heel on the base. Have to use lots of card and lots of powder. With the angle on the rifling grooves the bore is essentially a seven sided polygon. Easy to seal off with a flat base but not with a gas check base.
For a nominally .58 bore shooting flat based minies I'd want that 50:50 multi-groove rifling. Those boolits are short compared to their girth. The square inches of base area versus their inertia is going to mean they're easy to accelerate and not readily filling up the grooves without a pretty hard slap on the hind end.

[Lead pot]

Here is something that might be of interest to some of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AxKGRKY3g just skip the commercial in 3 seconds.

I did a little background research on ballistics for the minie and ran across these two guys. I have seen some of their videos on and off and they have some, shell I say unusual experiments on some but this worth looking at. This might open some eyes of shooters that think you need a high velocity bullet for penetration where in fact a .45-70 with a load of black powder will out penetrate most high velocity rounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUTlldgdg8

[Ballistics in Scotland]

They prove a lot that was pretty well known already. It is a bit like the world of food advertising. If it is high in something, it is low in something else. The .45-70 will perform in very much the same way as was already known in the muzzle-loading match rifle, the major difference being that their users weren't soldiers who, in a tight corner, had to keep on forcing a large number of bullets down the barrel. That is why the military minié shrank only part-way from musket calibre, and had deep grooves to accommodate the fouling.

The Union infantry on the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania fired up to four hundred rounds a man, a rate of fire which cut down several oak trees up to 22in. in diameter. Some men fired their rifles when the bullet lodged no more than half-way down the the barrel, and experienced no harm other than reduced velocity. Others insisted on ramming the bullet all the way down, and had rifles explode. I don't know whether that would have been possible with a black powder .45-70, but it certainly wouldn't with other kinds of muzzle-loader. You don't need to allow for that many chances at Alaskan moose.