Buck and Ball

I am not sure this is the right forum for this question but here goes. Last evening I missed a piece on the Discovery Channel about Cowpens that I was determined to see. However, in the advertisements leading up to the broadcast I noticed that they referenced the use of "buck and ball" by Colonial forces in the fight. Does anyone have any experience using this type of ammunition or know anything about its use in combat? I would like to try it as a load for targets just as an experiment but although I understand that it was used as in battle, I can't see using this in hunting situations.

 

[roundball]

I did watch that show, and for demonstration they showed a closeup reaction for a watermelon when being hit with a single ball, then one being hit with the buck & ball load.

The single ball was very impressive just by itself blowing the watermelon apart, but the buck & ball load was simply devastating, just shredding the watermelon.

FYI, just out of curiosity one day, using paper shot cups in my .62cal smoothbore, I experimented with four .440 RB's then with three .490 balls.

The four .440's dispersed wildly which I assumed was due to their smaller size and extreme offset to each other as they were stagger stacked.

However, the three larger .490's stacked a lot straighter on top of each other and produced excellent 5-6" groups at 40 yds.

 

[Greg Walden]

Back when I used to do WBTS reenacting, those of us in the unit who shot live would get together sometimes to test volley firing against targets. We would take a roll of brown wrapping paper about 4 feet wide and wrap it between trees so that it could approximate an "enemy battle line" (if we were feeling energetic, we would outline soldiers on it). Then fire at it from 50 to 150 yards, with about 10 of us firing. Mostly rifles and bullets, but the smoothbore guys would shoot too, and use buck-and-ball sometimes. The buckshot (which IIRC were .32 RBs, three of them on top of the .69 RB) would scatter a lot, but they sure did put a lot of holes in the target.

Greg