.62 Cal. Smoothbore w/ball..what is your load?

[LeeRoy87]

This is interesting because during the '50s, when I hunted with an original 14-gauge (.69 caliber) percussion Lacey of London Northwest Trade Gun, what I did for round-ball ammo was cannibalize old 16-gauge "pumpkin ball" loads (probably a .62-.64 caliber round ball, plenty of those still around in the 1950s).

I used the same projectiles in an original .69-caliber Hutchinson (Dublin Castle) flintlock pistol, which I sometimes also carried (more for looks than anything else as in those days it was almost impossible to find a source of reliable flints).

For powder measures I used a balloon-head .45-70 case full of FFg for the Lacey (probably about 85 or 90 grains) and a modern .45 Colt case (maybe 45 grs. FFg) for the Hutchinson (with FFFg in the pan). My other loads included buck-and-ball and birdshot, typically #6, the old "equal measures" formula.

I tested all of these loads in paper cartridges (and used to carry five ball cartidges "just in case" when hunting small game), but my best results were always using separate components. For example, with paper cartridges, the Lacey would shoot three balls into about 3" at 25 yards, but just barely stay within a foot at 50 yards. Using 13 oz. denim as patches -- my own worn-out bluejeans -- it would shoot three rounds into one ragged hole at 25 yards and stay within four inches at 50 yards -- this with only a brass bead and a notched tang for sights. Again using denim-patched balls, the Hutchinson, also smooth bore, would typically hold six inches at 25 yards. It had no sights at all: merely a notched tang with which to align the arc of the muzzle of its swamped 12-inch barrel.

I have no idea how thick these patches were, but in either gun the combination was tight enough to require my homemade short-starter -- a half-inch dowel whittled to fit a Tinker-Toy wheel.

Shot wads were chewed newspaper.

I never tried the buck-and-ball load with separate components: it was three 00 buckshot atop a ball in a paper cartridge. Don't really remember how well it shot, but it seems to me the entire load would stay in about a 10-inch circle at 25 yards

(Too bad these wonderful guns -- and several more firearms that were themselves genuine keepers -- were all stolen from me by burglars in 1964.)

 

[Keith]

Re paper cartridges: I used them routinely back in the 1950s, when you could buy saltpeter for nitrating cartridge paper (which I made from tough brown wrapping paper), but those days are long gone. As I understand it, BATF regs make it illegal to make black powder -- even tiny chemistry-set amounts -- and the pharmacists and chemical supply houses are no longer allowed to sell saltpeter or potassium nitrate.

(Don't know what they do these days to ward off chiggers in the South. No insect repellent I ever heard of would deter these voracious little critters. The standard remedy -- always 100 percent successful the many many times I employed it -- was to dust your boots, sox and skivvies with sulphur.)

:bull:
Dixie sells nitrated paper if you want it. You can buy saltpeter and sulfur on E-bay. So you could make your own nitrated paper, rocket fuel or bug repellent. Making blackpowder is illegal, no doubt about it. It is also very dangerous. Goex recently blew up one of it's buildings, again.

 

[Black Hand]

Sir,
My understanding is that cigarrette papers are nitrated to make them burn slowly and evenly. I have read somewhere that folks were using these papers to make cartridges.
Black Hand

 

[musketman]

You can buy saltpeter and sulfur on E-bay.

For the small amounts needed to nitrate paper, you can buy potassium nitrate at any good drug store...

 

[Rat]

Old Grey Wolf, you gots to stop lumping Eastern and Western Washington state together. Two different places. When you say that hunting has become too restrictive, or that there are NO informal shooting ranges in Washington State...that just is not true over here, on the East side.

You really need to move over to the East Side, where the Demoncrat rule has not been so far reaching. There are plenty places in the mountains here where you can get out and[url] shoot...in[/url] fact just about ANYWHERE on State or National forrest you can stop and shoot.

No one can force you to move to the city, or force you to live on the Dark Side of Washington State...are we men, or are we mice? If living on the west side has ended your hunting and shooting...you really should c'mon over to the east side.

I think succession from Western Washington would be REALLY cool.

Rat

 

[Rebel]

Come on Rat, fess up. The real reason you live on the east side is because it doesn't rain as much there, and we all know how you feel about water. :crackup: But seriously, is it really that much different on the east side as far as hunting and shooting opportunitites(sp) go? How far east are you? How far are you from Portland, Ore.? Maybe we could meet up some day and i could teach you the PROPER way to clean yer guns. :crackup:

 

[Major2hook]

I am sure this will seem a bit unusual to the purists but I have used a 20 ga plastic wad cup ( Federals) and a .570 speer swaged round ball... 70 grains of 3fg and bore butter smeared into the area just above the over powder section.
This load gets good gas seal and the wad opens after leaving the barrel allowing the ball to leave it cleanly.
My observation is that the velocity is pretty high and accuracy is very very good. This may not be allowable at some shoots so check before hand. It will be a good hunting load.

 

[roundball]

I am sure this will seem a bit unusual to the purists but I have used a 20 ga plastic wad cup ( Federals) and a .570 speer swaged round ball... 70 grains of 3fg and bore butter smeared into the area just above the over powder section.
This load gets good gas seal and the wad opens after leaving the barrel allowing the ball to leave it cleanly.
My observation is that the velocity is pretty high and accuracy is very very good. This may not be allowable at some shoots so check before hand. It will be a good hunting load.

No over powder card or wad?
I'm amazed...the .20ga plastic cup doesn't melt?
::

 

[LeeRoy87]

The few times I've driven into Eastern Washington recently
-- to Okanogan last spring (a beautiful trip on the North Cascades Highway) and over by Ellensberg the year before -- there were just as many road closures and "no shooting" signs east of the mountains as west.

No BS, ALL of the places I hunted in this state are now inaccessible due to road closures, same with all the rivers I fished and all the back-country in which I camped, and of the dozens of informal shooting spots I knew, including several places with impromptu benchrests and 100-yard or 200-yard firing points, not a one is left open.

These are all state closures, not local, and this includes the closures of the informal ranges. Here's how the state closes ranges on private property: the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Ecology terrify the land owner with threats of legal liability for shooting accidents or lead contamination, and bingo!, an informal range where everybody has shot since granddaddy's time is suddenly closed and posted. Since the closures are the product of a statewide campaign, there's no reason to believe it would be any better east of the mountains.

Not that it would matter much: Fish and Wildlife wardens now conduct their license checks at gunpoint -- like felony traffic-stops -- and since one of these hatefully trigger-happy morons drew his sidearm on my best friend and me merely because he thought we "hesitated" when approaching his checkpoint, I haven't hunted at all. And won't ever again -- not in this state, with its legion of armed eco-zealots running around hiding behind badges. (As to the alleged "hesitation," my friend and I were merely discussing whether to check out and leave the area or continue hunting, for which we would have had to turn left about 75 yards before the checkpoint.)

These sorts of outrages are precisely why the National Rifle Association chose Washington as the state in which to launch its "save hunting from the anti-gun bureaucrats" campaign.

This is also why there's ever-bigger crowds (and skyrocketing fees) at the public ranges, and skyrocketing dues at the members-only ranges. Even as the state closes roads and continues deliberately recruiting eco-fanatics as game wardens to discourage hunting, Washington still has the highest per capita NRA membership in the U.S., so plenty of people still like to shoot. The result is just what I described: ranges so mobbed you have to wait hours just to get on the firing line, even during weekdays.

If I could, I would pull up stakes and go to Alaska. But at age 65, in truth I can't afford to move at all: my pension is small enough I will have to keep working until I die, and for me the only available work is in the Puget Sound area, with nothing at all anywhere else in the state.

 

[Rat]

Well Grey Wolf I can't totally dissagree with ya...except that I would not consider Okanogan or Elensburg to be what I think of as Eastern Wash. I just do feel badly, that you feel the way you do, hunting and shooting is still good here in the Northeast corner...but everyplace is getting more populated all the time, and that's what ruins it for sure. I guess you are just on the "cutting edge" of the over population.

Now about the road-closures...I think that's the best thing that's happened around here for hunting. It does not make an area inaccessable...it just keeps the road hunters and the Bozos on the ATV's out. I like that. A man can access anyplace on his own two feet...but many hunters like to stay within 200 yards of their truck...and that's too bad. Anyhow I love the road closures.

I certainly agree that the game dept., HQ'd on the West side, has made a mess of the game and tag regs, and are indeed ripping us off with the present system, where you HAVE to buy tags you don't want, to get the ones you do want.

:curse:

But still, there's GOT to be a solution...don't ya think?

Rat.

 

[LeeRoy87]

Rat...

When the road closure system was first introduced (in Whatcom County in 1972), I supported it too. But that was in 1972, long before the Democrats developed their anti-gun, anti-hunting, anti-fishing strategy of deliberately recruiting eco-fanatics into wildlife management.

Originally, from 1972 through about 1991 or so, the state closed the roads INSIDE a given hunting or wildlife management area, not the access roads leading to the area. You drove to the area-boundary, parked, and often started hunting immediately, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of miles opening out ahead for you to hunt on foot, which was wonderful -- the only way to hunt. Best of all, you could hunt a closed logging road without constantly worrying about some band of drunks roaring up behind you in an ATV and running you down because they were too blotto to stop. Often, once you got deep inside such an area, you could hunt all day and never see another human.

But since 1992 the state doesn't bother closing the interior roads: they close the access roads instead, which means you've got 15 to 20 miles and sometimes even 30 miles to go before you can get to the hunting grounds or the fishing waters. And it's not flatlands; it's some of the most rugged mountain terrain in the Lower 48, and beyond the logging roads, its impenetrable rain forest to boot -- literally northern jungle -- stuff that makes the fabled Jeffrey's Hell country in East Tennessee look like an easy stroll through open parkland.

It's the rain-forest that forces you to hunt close to the logging roads -- there or in the clear cuts, the best of which (my favorite) are about two or three years old. Except for the clear-cuts, where you can get some genuinely long shots (100, 200, even 300 yards), in the rain forest your maximum shot is never more than 25 yards. The underbrush really is that dense.

Kill a deer in that kind of terrain more than about a hundred yards from one of the logging roads, and you've got a real job of work. You can't drag the deer -- the underbrush is too thick -- and you can't carry the deer out on your back, lest you become a target. Too often, your only option is to skin and butcher the deer on the spot and pack out the meat in quarters.

Drop a deer in that kind of terrain 20 miles from a vehicle and you've got a two-day chore retrieving your meat. Kill an elk that far from a vehicle and packing out the meat is impossible if you're on foot. Which means that in reality the only people who can hunt are the fat-cats -- the people rich enough to employ their own horse-wranglers and own a string of blood-broken horses or mules.

All this is what's got the NRA up in arms -- the blatant unfairness of it -- the fact Washington is effectively making hunting and fishing into sports only for the very rich.

There are a few areas the state still opens on the weekends (with armies of vindictively hostile game wardens obnoxiously present), but closures now totally prohibit pre-season scouting, and the few openings that are granted crowd so many hunters into such small areas, I'm surprised the hunting-accident tally hasn't gone off the scale. The worst part is the game wardens, who make no secret of the fact they believe their obligation is to protect the game. They regard all hunters as criminals -- murderers who are tolerated only because society has not yet achieved eco-enlightenment.

Believe me, it ain't about the population growth, it's about the radical ideology.

 

[LeeRoy87]

Oh, yeah, Rat; I forgot to mention this: That damnably oppressive tag scheme is the state's response to the more-than-50-per-cent decline in hunting and fishing license sales due to the closures. Its purpose is to inflate revenues by forcing people to buy licenses they don't want or need.

I added up all the numbers when the system was first imposed, and (if I remember right), what it amounted to was about a 65 percent increase in costs over the old system. Probably not a coincidence, given the decline in license sales. (Interesting too that while the staters admit the decline, they flatly refuse to say how big a decline it is. "More than 50 percent" comes from off-the-record conversations in 1998 or 1999 with a couple of the few remaining hunter-friendly Fish and Wildlife people.)

 

[Rat]

Then they claim the new system "saves the hunter money" when buying a license and tag....!!!

Well I sure hope your situation isn't a preview of things to come over here.

:cry:

Rat