Originally Posted by
Bent Ramrod
As mentioned, your setup looks to be for groove-diameter patched boolits. Martinibelgian and the late Montana Charlie have done more published work on that variant of paper patching than most of the rest of us. Such boolits have to be seated in the case as deeply as grease groove boolits in order to chamber the cartridge. Check out their experiments and results on this forum, and also on the Shiloh and Historic Shooting sites.
For target accuracy, depending on the nose shape, the hardness of the bore diameter paper-patched boolit needs to walk the wire between soft enough to slug up into the rifling upon firing, and hard enough to keep the nose from slumping off center while it does so. Somewhere in the bhn 8-12 range, about 16/1 lead/tin, is a good place to start. If you can swage lead that hard, make up a batch, and then, as Brent suggests, size the resultant slugs down into the 0.443” + or - range for your bore diameter experiments.
You may find it easier to just get a mould of the correct diameter. I haven’t done any .45 boolits, but bringing a 0.314” cast boolit down to 0.308” for one of my finicky .30 caliber rifles takes three dies; 0.002” reduction per die, if I don’t want a mangled lead banana for a final boolit shape. You will need some lubricant on the lead for this, which, of course, will have to be removed with solvent before patching.
I second Lead Pot’s comment that pounds-per-ream weight is useless for our purposes. Take your micrometer into the paper store and look for thicknesses in the 0.0015”-0.002” range. I use the Dutch Schoultz technique that he used to measure cloth for muzzleloader patching; no “feather touch” on the mike thimble; turn it down until it won’t go no more! That’s your paper thickness, as compressed into the rifling lands. I’ve had the best results with Tracing or Vellum paper, and what obsolete Erasible Bond typing paper I’ve been able to scrounge. Whatever it is, it should be translucent, relatively brittle and crackly compared to the usual opaque white printer paper.
A smooth, “hydraulic” push, neither too easy nor too hard, should be what you notice when shoving the patched boolit through the barrel with your cleaning rod. You should see the mark of the tops of the rifling lands on the paper when the boolit comes out of the barrel.