Maybe not the right place, but it IS cast.

[44man]

I butchered the deer I shot with my .54 RB---or rather it was already butchered for me! [smilie=l:Oh my, what a mess, bones shattered and mangled meat in both shoulders. When I got the skin off I just finished cutting half the shoulder and leg off with the hide. A lot of blood shot meat too.
It got me to thinking of the soldiers shot in the revolution and civil wars with pure lead. It had to be horrid. :holysheep
I am going back to behind the shoulder shots with this gun! I like shoulder meat, not like the carcasses found along the roads here with just the back straps removed.
I don't visit the ML forums much because the in lines dominate too much.

[white eagle]

I don't visit the ML forums much because the in lines dominate too much.

whats that ?
in line like the straight and narrow ?
yeah I can understand why so many amputees in the war era.
terrible

I am going back to behind the shoulder shots with this gun! I like shoulder meat, not like the carcasses found along the roads here with just the back straps removed.

I haven't seen that but them there people need to be spanked

[btroj]

Was your round ball gas checked? Was it a rnfp or a wfn round ball? How many grease grooves?
What lube sizer did you use to apply the patch?

So much more info is needed!

[smilie=b:

[stubert]

Hey 44Man, Try muzzleloadingforum.com They are traditional only, the "I" word is not allowed, Stu

I took a deer with a 62 flinter 2 yrs. ago ,In thru a rib, out thru the center of the shoulder. I was only using 80 gr 2f with a .610 ball (340 gr.) I only lost a bout 1 lb of meat. How fast was your ball going? maybey it was to fast.

[leadman]

I use air cooled WW in my H&R 58 cal. Huntsman. Shot several deer and 1 elk with it. Did a good job with very little meat loss. Did have to drop the size from .575" to .570" to get it to push down the barrel.
And my inline is almost 35 years old. Still uses a percussion cap and has a slow twist barrel.

Bought it back in Michigan to hunt with and being left handed it was a good option for me. Not many left handed guns especially muzzleloaders back in the mid 70s'.

Well, glad you got a deer, sorry you lost so much meat.

[44man]

Hey 44Man, Try muzzleloadingforum.com They are traditional only, the "I" word is not allowed, Stu

I took a deer with a 62 flinter 2 yrs. ago ,In thru a rib, out thru the center of the shoulder. I was only using 80 gr 2f with a .610 ball (340 gr.) I only lost a bout 1 lb of meat. How fast was your ball going? maybey it was to fast.
I don't know! I use 100 gr volume of Pyrodex, .020" patch and a .535" ball. Sounds funny because I have all kinds of BP but this gun is so accurate I left it alone.
Now I have nothing against the in line guns or those that use them. It is only I don't like them because they get real hard to load when fouled and I have limited experience with them. I just don't fit in discussions.
I suppose I have killed over 220 deer with a .45 flintlock and RB's, a .50 and the .54. I find them as accurate and effective as I need. I have never found a need for a scope or 200 yard shooting. I feel the inline has encroached on close range primitive hunting yet I bet I can shoot a .54 RB at 200 yards off hand as good or better. 120 gr of powder and a sight adjustment let me hit 4 out of 5 steel chickens at 200 meters off hand with open sights.
The in line guys just want less drop but in place, they have more problems.
Many, many bring them here to shoot but there is something missing. I hate to see a guy run a ramrod into a tree to get a sabot down. To have to swab a gun after every shot is not the thing to do in the field. I can shoot over 200 rounds and never wipe the bore out.

[nanuk]

44man:
how do you get so many shots off without swabbing?

[hydraulic]

220 deer? Wow! That figures to be four every year for fifty years. I wish I could shoot as well and you-I just got back from our monthly lever rifle silhuette match, and at 200 yds I can't hit the rams over 5 out of 10 let alone hitting chickens at that range.

[x101airborne]

Sounds like I should let you borrow the name of my 50 beowulf. "THE HOLY HANDGRENADE"!!!

[mroliver77]

Dang 44man. 220 deer with a flinter added to all the deer you have shot with a handgun. How do you legally shoot so many deer? I can get 4 with permits and 6 with damage permits coming to ten this year. I won't live long enough to come close to your tally! What am I missing?
Jay

[44man]

Been hunting deer a long time and I never used a shotgun in Ohio more then twice. I hunted Ohio, PA, Mich and WV back then. I also did some control on a few orchards. At the arsenal I shot many deer, had to give all but one away.
Now here we can get as many as 11 deer. I quit with 5 this season, 6 last year and 7 the year before. I feed the neighbors too.
Now about shooting a lot without cleaning. Might be the Pyrodex I use in the .54?? I use Young Country lube and if a ball gets harder to seat, I just add more lube to the next patch, clears it right up without affecting the accuracy.
I don't remember about the flinters but I shot a lot of grocery shoots long ago and I don't remember cleaning even with BP.
I have never found a lube as good as Young Country.
I have built and shot ML's for 56 years. Here is one of them, made from a plank of maple. I made all of the brass parts and inlays.

[pdawg_shooter]

Around here, what p**** me off is all the dead dear rotting away with an arrow sticking out of it. Have seen 6 this year. Fellow who works here admits to shooting 2 with arrows and no recovering either one. Stick flingers should be allowed 1 arrow. If they miss they can recover the arrow and try again. If they stick a deer and dont recover it they are done for the year.

[44man]

Around here, what p**** me off is all the dead dear rotting away with an arrow sticking out of it. Have seen 6 this year. Fellow who works here admits to shooting 2 with arrows and no recovering either one. Stick flingers should be allowed 1 arrow. If they miss they can recover the arrow and try again. If they stick a deer and dont recover it they are done for the year.
100% true. I am an archer and hate the new super light arrows at over 300 fps. I use arrows with WEIGHT for penetration.
Light, fast arrows STOP!
I don't go to archery forums either because they want flat shooting arrows that fail to kill.
I have taken 3 deer with healed in arrows from the high speed junk and am afraid to put my hands in a dead deer.
It is amazing how close revolver boolits are to arrows. I don't like to read about 180 gr hollow points in the .44 that killed the one deer a guy shot because he fails to have experience just like the guys with toothpick arrows.
I am disgusted with the new archery stuff and will never change from heavy arrows and penetration no matter the velocity as well as a heavy boolit from my revolvers.
Archers want one pin to 40 yards just like the in line shooter wants 200 yards with a ML. Now a revolver with light bullets to 200 yards like the .460! It is getting out of hand.
The .454, .460 and .500 S&W are things I don't want. Nether is a 300 gr arrow at light speed. Tone it back.
Bigger, heavier is better without making it faster.
A few arrows found in healthy deer I shot with the revolver.

[Chicken Thief]

Ancient knowledge!
Slow and heavy does the trick. Guess the buffalo hunters perfected that 125+ yrs ago;)

[beagle]

A soft ML bullet is pretty devestating. 4-5 years ago, a friend in VT wanted some expanding .450" bullets to load in sabots for hunting. I cast a hundred or so 457122HPs from almost pure lead from stick-on WWs and nose first sized them to .450" and sent 'em up. He managed to shoot a doe and hit it right in the neck/shoulder junction. Said it almost took her head off and he did recover what was left of the bullet and said it resembled a wad of bubble gum.

I think that we tend to get carried away in our destructive bullet designs and I'm a good one to talk with my enhanced HP designs but I like to mess with them.

I don't know the range he shot that doe at but probably it was fairly short and a hit at a little longer range would have resulted in less damage and would have resulted in the desired result but his initial results were a bit of overkill I beleive. But, you can never tailor your range to what is desired when hunting./beagle

[mpmarty]

+1 on wishing I could "turn down" the heat in my 7mm Rem Mag when confronted with a nice deer in less than fifty yards. The 160gr Nosler partition over 79gr of H870 is a bit much at short range. Then there was the buck I stalked to within fifteen feet in a rainstorm. Kept a big tree between us until I reached the tree, then snuck around the side and nearly stuck the muzzle in his ear. Had an '06 at the time with 165gr spitzer boat tails in a Remington pump. Nice venison.

Merry Christmas one and all.

[mroliver77]

Willbird and I were shooting his .58 with Minnie's & Goex one time trying to shoot a tree down. He had some freebie Minnie boolits that were lubed with a weird looking opaque lube. After a few it would not accept another loading. We started spitting a big woogy down the tube after loading and things got much better! Ran out of spit so I went in and got some olive oil. We substituted the oil for the spit and shot many many rounds with no cleaning and fine accuracy. With the spit we were seeing little red beads in the barrel after the shot.

I love lead/tin boolits in my 45-70 or 38-55! No need for HP! Actually the 30-1 was too soft from 38-55 going into a 250lb hogs boiler room. Boolit expanded to .75+ cal and stopped against off side rib cage. Massive damage and dead right there but if I would have hit a larger bone it probably would have been bad. I would have rather seen less expansion and more penetration. For deer the 30-1 is fine. For pig I will go with 20-1 next time. Neat thing about lead or lead/tin is you get great expansion but loose little weight as blob stays intact.
Oh ya Ranch Dogs 38-55 boolit. Fired from a 1893 Marlin.
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo189/mroliver77/DSC00171.jpg

[44man]

The funny thing is that I never recovered a single RB from any deer even with the .45.
The .54 RB weighs 234 gr, really very light but nothing has stopped them even at 100 yards but I never made a Texas heart shot either.
I just never will understand why a ML is so deadly.
One thing has proven true just like a revolver. Make the caliber larger and destruction steps up big time.
Long ago I learned the .58 musket with Minie' balls suffered from poor accuracy to the point of missing large sheets of paper at 50 yards. I started lapping molds for friends to find a tight fit let us clang a 200 meter gong.
I lapped and tried one but got it stuck in the bore. I took the nipple out and dribbled in a little powder, pushed the Minie' down and held the muzzle at a 2X4 on my bench. I had a pop and the slug went very slow, I actually felt it go past my hand on the barrel. It popped from the end and buried itself full length in the 2X4.
A new appreciation was shown all of us! I doubt I had a gr of powder in there.

[mroliver77]

When younger I argued lighter faster bullets were the ticket. After seeing animals dropped like a ton of bricks from slower heavier soft boolits I was sold. Like they say "eat right up to the hole".

Neat story about the stuck Minnie