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I'm right there with you. I doubt I'm the only one living and hunting right on the ocean, even lugging guns in boats. WD-40 has a terrible rep here with lots of former users and confirmed users quickly identified as newcomers angling for an education.

The magic words, hence the requirement for really tight patch/ball combos in all my experience and experiments. If you can start the combo without a mallet it probably isn't tight enough in a shallow fast twist for charges approaching "deer" loads.

Won't try to help you make a choice between the two, but I can add this to your thinking. My wife prefers 54 caliber RB for all her hunting, but she also doesn't like charges over 60 grains of 3f. She limits her shots to 50 yards or less and broadside only, but in 20 years of deer dinking we've...

I'm in a place where consistent access to powder is a problem, so I come at it from a bit different angle. My goal in testing any powder is to figure out how to make it do the best it can. One powder might work better than another, but when the day most certainly comes that supplies are short, I...

My 54 GPH barrel absolutely love 30-40 grains of 3f and ticking with a .530 ball, but accuracy starts going south at 60 grains. Increasing ball diameter to .535 and continuing with ticking increased loading effort considerably while letting me go up to 80 grains of 3f with good accuracy. It...

Much is made about the fouling with courser powders. In my experience with smoothbores, it's a non-issue with the right lubes to keep it soft. Seating remains easy and fouling doesn't build up shot by shot because each time you seat a load, the fouling is pushed down on top of the powder to be...

If your usual charge is 70 grains of 3f, I'm guessing a charge of 85 grains or so of 1f will give comparable performance. You remind me that I need to try 1f in some of my rifles. Got plenty on hand because as already noted, I greatly prefer it for shot loads in smoothbores.

My thoughts, zackly. Of course free powder is kind of like a free horse, which I know well. Sometimes a guy has to spend a lot of money to use the free stuff right. Describes my life pretty well!!!!

That's what the books say, and it always works for me. It goes the other way too, when going from 2f to 1f- I just up my 3f charge 10% when going to 2f, or bump my 2f charge 10% when swapping to 1f.

I looked pretty hard at linen a few years back, but only on walk-ins at stores and nothing online. I'm sure my impressions reflect only what the stores happen to be carrying and little about what I might learn if I did a whole bunch of ordering just so I could pinch and squeeze the goods. But...

Here's something to move folks who want to move beyond the yammering and finger pointing. A bud is a career food scientist, using his degrees in food chemistry and food engineering to try inventing the next turkey baloney or some such. He's also a dedicated muzzlestuffer and fan of TOW mink...

Not me. I never even notice the smell, unlike some of the stuff I've concocted myself using deer tallow. There's a difference between black bear oil and brown/grizzly oil, with the latter having a sharp, almost bitter smell to it. Both the bear oils are dandy lubes, but I don't prelube patches...

I have to question your sources a little based on my own shooting of a 32 Crockett (1:48 as I recall) and my 30 cal custom (.290 ball), also with 1:48 twist. I wasn't looking for quiet loads so much as combos that didn't blow tarnation out of small game if head shots wandered down into the neck...

I've run up and down the scale from 20 grains to 80 grains of 3f in my own 45, and it seems to have trouble picking between any of them. It just flat shoots well with all loads. Deer don't seem to know the difference between 60, 70 and 80, so I've settled on 60 for a little economy. Not...

The cleanest kills I've seen on elk at our place have been with 54 cal RB's topping 80 grains of 2f. Shots were held to 50 yards and well placed, but that's kinda the point in any case. Dunno how the load would perform at longer range or with lesser shots, and frankly I don't want to know.

I've tried enough of my own rifles and those of friends with low charges to convince me that the finger points at another culprit- Slow twist rates. Down around 1:48 most rifles deliver stellar accuracy with light charges, as good or better than the best large-charge loads. Get up to around...

Based on my own barrel probing and cleaning, I have no doubt you're right about naked conicals Idaho Ron. Anyone with experience shooting swaged lead bullets from modern handguns at more than about 750 fps can verify the leading and how tough it is to get it ALL out. And those aren't even pure...

I sure wouldn't fiddle and fuss with that hunk of firewood, and I probably wouldn't even bother with a used original. I'm not the handiest guy in the world, but once upon a time I got a replacement from Pecatonica for less money than many discussed here. And came out with a heck of a lot nicer...

Hate to waste a good heart and hate to waste good ribs. There's no one do-it-all shot for me because not all shots are the same. Some face-on, some broadside, some angling away, and some angling toward you. From the front I only shoot close or with a real solid rest, then use the center of the...

Yup. Blades across the board for me with ghost rings, other than a few TC's that still wear beads. I DO NOT center the bead on the target though. I just use the top of the bead like I use the top of a blade. The bead will completely cover a deer at 100 yards, and fuggedabout aiming at smaller...