50cal Hard cast balls?

[coloradoclyde]

They did just fine....and laid waste to every animal that came before them.....and with great efficiency..

 

[bob308]

I say first get the lyman muzzle loading manual read it and look at the pictures of how a patch works with a round ball. then think how a hard ball will work. a patched round soft lead ball will kill dead a hard one will make them no deader.

I think a lot of this comes from people trying to equate b-p arms with smokeless powder rifles. it just can not be done on paper.

 

[coloradoclyde]

I think a lot of this comes from people trying to equate b-p arms with smokeless powder rifles. it just can not be done on paper.

:thumbsup:

 

[tenngun]

That's a trueism. At 100 yards people are putting paid on lots of deer with will less then five hundred ft/lbs of energy. I don't know if a deer with a half inch hole through its chest, through lung/blood vessels/heart can tell the difference between a hard ball and a pure lead :idunno:

 

[Sjfriend]

One of the beauties of round ball is how easy it is to make work whatever you got to work with.

That's really it. You can only buy pure lead balls as far as I know, but for little more than the cost of 100 balls you can buy a LEE mold and turn out your own, whether pure or alloy. Whichever you choose, the biggest benefit of casting your own is really, really cheap shooting. Never figgered out the cost of electricity for my lead furnace, but I'm betting I can turn out several thousand balls from free lead for less than 100 commercial balls.

As for cheap electricity, we sure don't pay the same rates as "outside". And where do you find free lead in AK. Sure haven't found any in Homer (all goes to fishing weights)

And again thanks to all the responses. Just poking around for help starting this new "old" game.

 

[Gene L]

I have never removed a patched lead ball from the barrel, but I have recovered patches which show a pattern on the ball. I understand that a properly-patched lead ball will show the imprint of rifling on the ball through the patch. Am I wrong? Maybe I've misnterpretd the process. Which leads me to believe a too-hard ball will not show the rifling on the ball, which means the ball will not rotate properly. Am I wrong again? Quite possible.

 

[excess650]

I cast my own. All of the "pure lead" that I have was cable sheathing and it is NOT pure. Even after scraping off what floats to the top while melting, and I'm not speaking of dross, the resultant metal is noticeably harder than the .54 TC Maxiballs that I used to "zero" my tester. Bullets cast with the cable sheathing are closer to 25-1 in hardness, but DO take the patch well and DO expand on deer sized game.

The pictured ball was recovered from my big Virginia buck. Range was about 25 yards and the ball was recovered under the hide of the off side shoulder. .605" from the mold, it was 7/8" x 15/16" as recovered, and the patch is plainly visible. Velocity from a .62 is considerably lower than it will be from a .50.




Back when I was fighting the IPSC wars I had the opportunity to try my .40 S&W against an outdated vest draped over a kitchen chair. The vest stopped the 1000fps MV hardcast and it was slightly mushroomed, and that at 18bhn+. THAT would be decidedly too hard to try to patch through a MLer, but softer than 10bhn will work.

 

[coloradoclyde]

I use water dropped wheel weights with a touch of tin solder added...19 brinell hardness for cast bullets for modern rifles.....that mix is way to hard for a muzzleloader....I agree if you keep the hardness under 10 it will work fine in a ML..
Wheel weights start around 12bhn and go up from their depending on how you harden them.

Here is a good resource for folks...
http://www.lasc.us/castbulletnotes.htm

 

[tenngun]

I don't think I ever loaded a hard ball in any of my guns. I run my ball out of lead I can scratch with fingernails. I know if you look at a recovered ball you can see imprint of cloth on the ball. I wonder if your ball was too hard if you would get some stripping of the ball. I have heard foals shooting wheel weightless in smoothies

 

[nkbj]

I've used hardball in the .69 minie rifle; rides on the three lands better than soft and prevents favoring one of the wide grooves.