PP and Micro Groove

[GregLaROCHE]

I posted this on the PP black powder page and they sugested I try here too.

I just finished paper patching 25 .45-70 405gr. I used tracing paper note book (the lines made it easy to keep straight) and printer paper. It was thicker than the note book paper. When they dry I will load them and shoot them in my Marlin Micro Groove barrel.

For the first trial I am using a light load of smokless. My plan is to use black powder in the future, but don’t want to change too much at one time. So should I expect anything different than from traditional barrels?

[Dan Cash]

I have loaded PP for .30-30 in a Marlin micro groove which worked wonderfully. I am not too sure about the black powder in the micro groove. Let us kknow how it works.

[uscra112]

In the black powder era, rifles made for paper patched had shallow grooves, just like Microgroove. Bullet were patched so as to unwrap at the muzzle. The idea of having the patch be shredded by the rifling is a modern invention, made necessary by the almost-universal adoption of deep-groove "Ballard" rifling by "greased bullet" shooters and "metal patch" military rifles.

Ought to ad that those Schuetzen shooters of paper patched bullets wiped out their bores meticulously between shots. That was one big reason that the naked, greased bullet took over. A Schuetzen match was 100 shots in a day's time, so all that extra work tired a man out toward the end of the match. The greased bullet could be shot "dirty", especially after guys like Harry Pope started secretly dropping a bit of smokeless powder under the black, to make it burn cleaner.

[thirtythirty]

Paper patching has worked fine in my marlin 30-30 microgroove. Only problem has been sizing case necks so they don't strip the patch when I seat the Boolit.

[uscra112]

Sizing the necks is an issue, because the patched bullet O.D. is larger than your typical metal-condom bullet. I use a Lyman "M die", and for the Microgroove barrels I mad my own sizer plug that's a bit bigger than the one that comes from Lyman. A pretty simple lathe job, starting with 9/16-18 Grade B7 allthread rod that I buy from McMaster-Carr.