Revolvers and Paper Patching

I was curious (famous last words) if paper patched would survive the transition through a revolver cylinder to forcing cone. So apparently it does. Nine shots at 25yd, .44 magnum cases and an arbitrary load of 10.0gr Unique and patched #503 SWC (Mihec clone). No workup, zero leading, and more than half had torn or lop-sided patches that I messed up when sizing (shot them that way in the name of science). Not the smallest group, but not awful either. Probably never do it again, but it was a case of "I gots to know."

Attachment 223605

Edit: Not sure why pic is upside down.

I tried that years ago for the same reason. Does it work? And came to the same conclusion. About the best reason I thought of is for hunting if you wanted to use really soft bullets at full speed. Otherwise not much point.

Would it help clean up the forcing cone?

Since the H&G 503 is a full-diameter 44 Magnum bullet to begin with, I'm curious how you accommodated the additional diameter of the paper patch. Did you size the bullets to 0.417" or thereabouts before patching?

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Originally Posted by Tatume

Since the H&G 503 is a full-diameter 44 Magnum bullet to begin with, I'm curious how you accommodated the additional diameter of the paper patch. Did you size the bullets to 0.417" or thereabouts before patching?

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I can't speak for the OP but I sized them to .427" and patched up to .433" to fit the throats of my old super Blackhawk. Same size it needs naked bullets to be.

I used fairly soft alloy (range scrap), wet patched as-cast, smeared JPW on the patch then ran them through a .431" push thru sizer. Didn't feel like investing in a bore-diameter sizer for experimentation at this time. A few of the patches tore at the lube groove which is very wide/ no patch support on this boolit. Didn't seem to affect accuracy at such a short range, I shot the perfect patched boolits first then the "B" grade which went into the same group with no called flyers. The fliers in the pic were within the first 3 shots, possibly related to conditioning the bore. Or shooter error. As far as smoothing the forcing cone I'd considered that. This particular gun had a horrible forcing cone new out of the box- it looked like it had been cut with a tap not a reamer. It was so bad I pulled the barrel off and lapped the forcing cone along with the bore. Love the gun as it was an anniversary present but it ended up being a project getting it to perform.

Same story here, was doing a lot of PPing in rifles so had to try it in revolvers. I used the technique of patching the full diameter slug and running it through a sizer afterwards.

I don’t recall how many loads I tried but there were plenty. Test pistols were a Blackhawk .45Colt and FA83 .454Casull. The Colt did ok at best but nothing was particularly accurate in the 454, including light loads. I figured that there was just too much opportunity for inconsistent bullet deformation.

After reading about cracked forcing cones, I cooled on the idea of trying to run as soft as possible in a revolver.

I'm happy to see that there are others that tried stuff before I did. That will save me a project. I may try it with my 30/30 if I get bitten by the bug again....

I've been looking around at how to go about making a gas checked "Webley Manstopper" type of hollow point wadcutter boolit for a .41 snub nose. While looking at my options a couple of adjustable length paper patch .40 rifle molds came to mind, one of them being an old Ideal ".44 core mold". The smooth sided flat ended cores are the right diameter to accept a .41 gas check. A triple wrap paper jacket in front of the gas checks followed by push through sizing to .410" diameter would make a soft lead wadcutter of any desired length with an armored hind end. Make them 225 or 230 grains and could probably be pushed fast enough to expand just fine.

Yeehah got something new to play with![smilie=w: