Trailboss in the 50 BMG

[Nobade]

I was curious about what it would do, so ran some with Quickload this morning. 45% case fill or about 50 grains will duplicate 50-90 ballistics with a 500 gr. cast bullet. 75% case fill will get you 1750 fps. Pressures are plenty low, only 17K psi with 75%. I'm thinking that would make for some interesting shooting, and I might even get away with converting a few cases to 209 primers at that low a pressure. Anybody else ever try Trailboss in a 50?

[Lloyd Smale]

no but it would be awful expensive if you shoot more then a few rounds a week. Something like br2 would be much cheaper to work with. Less charge weight and much cheaper powder. http://www.gibrass.com/gunpowder.html if you looking for data its basically aa2.

[Nobade]

But...I have 10 pounds of TB and zero of the other. Besides, who wants to shoot one of those things very much?

[flyingmonkey35]

Um interesting thought.

For my 50 bmg the projectiles and the primers are extremely expensive.

Right now it's about $1 dollar per ball projeticle
40 cents per primer

If I buy pull down 50bmg powder I can get it for about 10dollars a pound.

30 cents for 200 grains of powder.

So just shy of 2 bucks a shot.

I can not find any data of someone really shooting cast out of the 50 bmg.

I see a mold out thier for it but no real testing for it.

I'd like to try it but at those speeds I fear the projectile would just disintegrate


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[reddog81]

At an estimated 1750 FPS / 75% case fill you should be plenty safe from either a squib or an over pressure. 45% case fill seems like you could be asking for trouble with that giant case... You could ask Hodgdon and see what they say.

Shooting 50 BMG is never cheap so spending $.30 on TB vs $.20 on different powder shouldn't be that big of a deal. If you're casting your own bullets it should be pretty easy to get a loaded round for less than a cost of one jacketed bullet.

For shooting at 100 to 200 yards it seems like a good option. Go much further out than that and the 500 grain bullet will be dropping like a rock, however it should be a relatively soft shooting round given that all .50BMG rifles weigh like 15 lbs or more.

[rockrat]

TB works well in the 50 bmg, at least it did for me. Started low and worked my way up. The 850gr NOE boolit will hit 1600fps and groups in the neighborhood of 1"-1.25" with what I consider a max. or near max load. Nice "plinking" load. I have found that the best groups were close to what was recommended for TB loads in that you fill to the base of the boolit, no powder compression and max loads are around 90% of that figure, that is, IIRC.
Works for my gun, but yours could be totally different

The NOE boolit will hang together to at least around 2100fps. Need to dust off the cobwebs off the 50 and try some powder coating with it.

Might be possible to convert, with a bushing, to LR primers, and have it work with TB, but probably not the real slow powers

[abunaitoo]

That's a lots of Trail Boss.