Went and bought a smoke gun!

[jim 44-40]

I use ring caps that they sell for kids play gun.get them from dollar store,get the ones with white paper inside. And cut them off the ring.also had to hone down nipple a little bit so they fit better.worked with Goex and Pyrodex . Better then not shooting at all.

[Rickf1985]

Ok, I FINALLY got my gun today after all the BS I had to go through with permits. Got to look it over and it has never, ever had powder in it! It is perfectly clean, the nipple has no soot in it, The barrel is spotless all the way down. Kit is complete except there are no balls in it. Even comes with a mold that drops one ball and one bullet. I think it was worth 100.00. I will get some pics tomorrow.

[Rickf1985]

Ok, I am confused as all get out now. I have this gun that is marked as a .44 and I have been told it uses .430-.435 round balls. So I had bought some hand cast from Track of the wolf and they are ok but they kind of look like slight plump raisons. They are rough! I finally found some Hornady 44 round balls advertised at 430 so I bought two boxes. They came in and they are nice and round, or pretty close. I measured them and they come out to .441-.442. I am thinking this might be a problem since I was told the pistol needs the smaller balls and patches so I put on on the muzzle just to see how tight it is, Clunk! Right to the bottom of the barrel. Turn the gun over and with a light tap it falls back out with out a mark on it. I am thinking this is strange so I grab my calipers and measure the bore at the and of the barrel and the bore itself not in the lands is .441 and in the lands is .452! This is a .45 if I have ever seen one. Thoughts? I guess I can still use the 430 balls and 440 balls with the appropriate patches but I am wondering what I really have.

[NEKVT]

Muzzleloader caliber is typically the bore measurement so you do have a 44. Using your numbers with an example in the old Lyman 45th edition on how to fit a patch and ball to rifling:

Groove .452 minus bore .441 = .011 divided by 2 = .0055

In order for a compressed patch to fill the grooves you would need about a .010 patch (denim material is .014 for comparison). And the ball has to be less than bore diameter to allow space for the patch between the ball and lands.

Bore .441 minus one thickness of patch .010 = .431

.430 ball + .020 (two thicknesses of patch) = .45

With your bore at .452 with a .430 ball you could probably get by with denim material at .014 because the wet patch will compress on loading. If results aren't to expectations or loading too tight you can experiment with different patch thickness.

My CVA Mt Rifle is a 54. I didn't measure anything but started with .530 ball and commercially pre-cut .018 patches and got good enough results that I didn't mess any further.

I have an old box of Hornady balls marked .530 that have oxidized a bit measuring .533 on avg and a new box of Speer balls marked .530 balls that measure .531 avg for a sampling.

[yeahbub]

Whatever ball size you start out with, lay your patch material (large piece) over the muzzle, lay a ball on it and short start it into the rifling at the muzzle. Then, gather up the patching material and yank the ball back out to take a look at the cloth pattern embossed on the ball. Look for heavy-light-heavy-light embossing as you go around the ball reflecting land-groove-land-groove etc. If you see heavy-nothing-heavy-nothing, this indicates the patch isn't thick enough or you need a larger ball for the patching you have. The idea is to reduce the amount the ball has to obturate on firing to get a tight seal in the bore. This is not to say that an easy-to-load ball and patch combination won't work well, but a better seal means less leakage, no burned patches, better accuracy.

Typical rifling depth for RB barrels is .010 on a side, and following a ML rule of thumb, this calls for a ball at bore diameter minus .010" using a patch .020" thick as a place to start. This should produce marks all around the circumference of the ball. It sounds like your rifling is approximately .005 deep. In such a case the general practice is a larger ball and thinner patch, so that on firing, the ball will mechanically engage the rifling while the patch is still thick enough to seal in the grooves. Only experimentation will show you what works best, so feel free to experiment using what you have. Adjustments can always be made as you analyze results.

BTW, since your barrel is new, there may well be a tendency to foul pretty quickly and loading may be difficult due to micro-burrs and roughness from the rifling process, particularly with cut-rifled barrels. These tend to accumulate fouling fast until they're broken in, sometimes so much so that they require cleaning after every shot. If this happens, when seating the ball, use a wet patch on the loading rod and you won't have to clean between shots. In rifle barrels, we used to put an old bore brush on a rod, wrap it with fine steel wool until it's very tight in the bore, drizzle on some motor oil and give the barrel 80-100 strokes. This burnishes the bore, smoothing tooling marks without removing steel, making continuous shooting much easier. Good luck with it and let us know how it goes.

[Rickf1985]

I have always wondered about the wet patch. Won't a wet patch foul the powder it comes in contact with? Assuming you shoot right away I would think only the powder against the patch would not burn but if you do not shoot for a couple minutes I would imagine a fair amount of powder would get wet and not fire. Or am I overthinking this?

[ogre]

If you reread yeahbub's excellent post you will see that the wet patch is on the loading rod when seating the ball. In other words the wet patch does not contact the powder.

[Rickf1985]

Gotcha, with all the reading I have been doing on muzzle loading I have never seen that one.

[yeahbub]

Ogre, thanks much for the fine compliment!

Rickf1985: Ogre has it right, the wet patch on the loading rod goes on the ball-seating jag and cleans the bore a bit as you run the ball down onto the powder. But also, as you withdraw it, it leaves a fine layer of moisture on the bore which helps a good bit in keeping fouling soft and easy for the next patched ball to push in front of it. For hunting, the lube on the patch is typically a vegetable/animal oil or grease based, and allows the gun to stay loaded for extended periods. When target shooting, the gun is fired within minutes at most, usually just long enough to step to the line, cap, aim and shoot, but you needn't hurry. BP being what it is, will not be appreciably affected by a patch with water-based lube on it. There's just not a whole lot of moisture there. That immaterial smidgeon of powder in contact with the damp patch will still burn, if with less enthusiasm, and the fire against the patch will liberate moisture which also helps keep fouling soft which is all to the good.

BP is only ~49% efficient, which is to say of the byproducts of combustion, only 49% turns to gas to propel the ball/boolit, the rest is solids, most of which is obviously ejected, but what remains is that problematic fouling. Because of its relative inefficiency, the effect of a minor reduction in the load of a few granules of powder slightly dampened by the patch will never be noticed.