Originally Posted by
Omnivore
I'm sure you mean "lube getting into the powder". I've been all around this issue for a while. It's not complicated. The lube can be placed in direct contact with the powder IF it has no oils in it that will soak into the powder over time or when the weather gets warm, though you'd want to avoid leaving your cartridges in a car in a hot parking lot in the sun, for sure. Gateofeo #1 lube (look it up) works pretty well, as does the old standby, SPG. If you want more insurance, then yes; use a card wad between the powder and the lube. BPCR (Black Powder Cartridge Rifle) shooters have been doing this for years and years in their metal cartridges.
A Big Lube style bullet will work too, but either way you look at it, the right amount of lube is going to take up a certain amount of space in the limited capacity chamber of a revolver. A bullet with a giant lube groove will help keep lube away from the powder, but it will be substantially longer than a more standard bullet of the same weight. Longer bullets generally require a faster rifling twist than shorter bullets. Using a longer bullet also means you do NOT have the option of loading without lube to increas your powder capacity for hunting. In hunting, where you may only fire one or two shots for blood, you don't need lube. The lube is only for keeping the gun running by keeping the powder fouling soft so it gets blown out with each subsequent shot. If you're only firing a frew shots, you can forgo the lube and use more powder in its place, UNLESS you have a long, big lube bullet, in which case the space is used up already.
The bottom line is that you can use all the lube you need by placing it between the powder and the bullet, so long as you use the correct lube. If you use a lube that's too soft, or has oil in it, it can wick its way through the paper to the powder over time, even if you have a big lube groove full of it and no lube is placed on the powder.
Use the right lube, use enough of it to prevent all fouling build-up (meaning your hundredth shot leaves the barrel looking exactly as it did after the first shot) and use whatever bullet shoots best in your gun.
With all the talk about this or that lube in the percussion revolver discussions, and whose personal recipe is the "best", the BPCR and Coyboy competition shooters have been quietly using SPG lube very successfully all along. Best we take some heed to that. GF1 lube has been working well for me, in hundreds and hundreds of paper cartridges, either placed directly on the powder or between cards, though I'm still not done with a long-term test to determine how much, if any, velocity reduction might result from leaving cartridges assembled with the GF1 in contact with the powder through two hot summers. If you're going to shoot them up within a few weeks or months, and you're not leaving them out in the hot sun on a hot day, you'll not have any cause for concern using GF1 or SPG in direct contact.
Also; lube in a bullet groove is not going to mix with the powder fouling as well as lube between the bullet and the powder. If 99.9% of it gets blown out the muzzle, then it's not doing its job.
Remember; we don't care a whit about actual "lubrication of the bullet" here. We don't need any of that at all in a black powder revolver, so even using the word "lube" can be a bit misleading if you don't understand the objective here. The only reason we need it at all is to keep the fouling in the barrel, and that which gets into the cylinder arbor, nice and gooey-soft so there's no buildup to degrade the performance of the barrel or tie up the action. That means we can keep shooting all day and not have to fuss around with swabing or removal of the cylinder for cleaning until we got home in the evening.
Oh! Another thing about using a card. Standard cards for 44/45 are .450" or, most likely, larger. That means a standard sized card will create an impedimant to inserting the cartridge into a chamber, being that practically all repro 44 percussion revolvers have chamber diameters of .450" and less. Some are as small as .447". I've used .452" - .454" cards in paper cartridges, but they're more difficult to load. Lately I've been using a punch for making cards for the 43 Spanish cartridge (available at Buffalo Arms in Idaho). Given that the paper case is tapered, and given that the card is below the lube pill, which is in turn below the bullet, the 43 Spanish-sized cards fit the paper case pretty well. You can tweak your rolling mandrel to ensure that your smaller card fits snug in the case with your desired amount of powder (I use 30 grains in most 44 carts).