Case filler with cream of wheat or extra wads?

[Kenny Wasserburger]

If you’re at 2.5 to 3 MOA, you don’t need filler you need more powder.

KW

[Chill Wills]

"The OP Wrote: "My Pedersoli Sharps .45-70 seems to like 62g of OE 3f under a BACO Money bullet. That leaves a decent amount of case left to fill"
I agree Kenny.

First question is, How do you know your rifle seems to like this load - have you been shooting this load?
The second question is, what accuracy does your current 62 grain produce?
I am not trying to be hard on you but I think you are going about this the hard way. You do have some good information about your rifle chamber and bullet, you know how far out of the case to seat the bullet to touch or be very close to the rifling.

My advice is, start with that over-all-length and fill the case up under the bullet with powder, no filler, and then test that and increase the powder charge one or two grains at a time until accuracy gets good and refine the amount of powder from there until you have the most accurate load.
You can play with all the other variables after that. This way you will have a baseline load.

[2TM101]

Don't make this any harder than it needs to be; Cream of Wheat is often used but it has no magic quality so any easily obtainable fine ground and light weight, clean, dry and cheep space filler will do as well. Rice, grits, corn meal, used coffee grounds (dry), cob/nut case tumbling media, etc., will do the same thing.

I just loaded a number of rounds using dry used coffee grounds as filler - and it seemed to me it was very dirty, almost like using black powder. I do have a lot of case tumbling media since I went to wet cleaning so maybe I'll try that.

[racepres]

Edit...Appologies..My experience was with Smokeless 44 Mag...I slink away now!!

[dtknowles]

I use "Kapok", also called dacron/polyester, to fill the airspace in a cartridge. About a "pinch" (1/2 grain) keeps the powder near the primer and velocity has always proven to be consistent. I've always had a bias about using cream of wheat because I didn't like the possibility of getting it mixed with the powder; plus I was never fond of eating it, so I never kept it around

Kapok is not dacryon/polyester. Kapok is a plant-based fiber, polyester is synthetic. I expect they are interchangeable in this application, but I can't be sure. Kapok has many differences with polyester.

Tim

[dtknowles]

My Pedersoli Sharps .45-70 seems to like 62g of OE 3f under a BACO Money bullet. That leaves a decent amount of case left to fill if I want to set the bullet with a minimal amount of freebore (I think that's the term). I know OE prefers some compression; the exact amount is TBD, but I'm guessing somewhere in the .125-.250" range. What do y’all prefer to do if you need to compress powder and take up case space? I can put in a couple of thick wads (I've got .05" and .125") or CoW (or some other filler), and I know I'll just have to experiment with both. But if there's a consensus or more common approach, I'd like to start there.

Freebore is created when the rifle is chambered (not a feature of a cartridge) and on a 45-70 is usually quite short. What I think you are talking about is what is most often called, "jump to lands" and yes, it is set by how deeply you seat the bullet. You are right in thinking you should keep this to a minimum for best accuracy.
Tim