Yesterday got spent shooting nothing but C&B repros. One of the sergeants at work belongs to West End Gun Club, and asked me to come along. He and his dad-in-law had new Rem 58 x 44 repros to get dirty, and I brought along my much-used ASM 1851 x 36, as well as a yet-unfired Uberti 1849 x 31 x 4".
Good grief, these cranky old wheelers are a ton of fun! It all began by fording Lytle Creek to access the site......axle deep water moving pretty good, but the rocky bottom gave good traction. No sweat. It was pretty warm, mid-90's and no shade. We had to put the Crisco in the ice chest to keep it from running, and not waste time getting the shots off either.
The Rem repros really shot well. Bruce the Sarge can shoot well, and he cut some cloverleaves at 25 yards using 30 grains of Pyrodreck and swaged RB's. One flier in every group, so he might have a bad hole--but the five-shot clusters hovered around 1.5" pretty reliably.
I used The Holy Black in my 31 and 36, Goex 3F. In the 36, I consumed a full box plus of Hornady .375" RB's, and had no stoppages--just two wipe-downs and re-greases of the cylinder arbor. This wheeler shot pretty well, too--2"-2.5" at 25 yards without fliers, 20 grains of the original stuff prompting the heavy metal along nicely.
The 31 didn't shoot quite as well as the 36.......moving the targets in to 50 feet, the little wheeler would do about 2.5"-3" using some #00 buckshot that I bought with the gun. These cut a small ring when balls were seated, so fit isn't an issue. These were a little tough to seat using the short loading lever, but I managed. The cylinder got draggy after 5 cylinder-fulls, so it was dismounted and wiped down, and the arbor re-greased. It behaved itself again, but got balky after 20-25 more shots. The load was 10 grains/3F, with Crisco sealing the chamber mouths.
A great time with the old tools, for sure.