JPerryE said:
Johnny Tremain said:
PS: I do spin mine is a media and a rock tumbler,
so they smooth and uniform. quote]
Warren Muzzleloading sells balls that have been tumbled too. Take a few of your cast balls and slice them in half. You'll find a small air pocket in most of them fairly close to the sprue.
The Bevel Brothers had a couple different articles about this in past issues of the Muzzle Blast. They also had recommendations on how to make the air pocket as small as possible when casting.
Anyway, the conclusion the Bevel Brothers reached is that it's best to load with sprue up. If you've tumbled the balls, they look pretty but you won't know where sprue (and air pocket) is.
Good gracious...the Bevel Brothers article I read said spru position made no difference at all.
One can only imagine the potential for embarrassment. Had I misstated an important concept when referring to a past article by the Bevel Brothers in the Muzzle Blasts?
To have one’s post contradicted by such a prolific forum member as is Roundball, who has nearly 6,000 notches on his post credits, can cause a great deal of self doubt. If Roundball had spent only 5 to 15 minutes per post, that means from between 500 to 1,500 or more hours on this particular forum, and that’s just posting hours!
So, I figured I’d better go back to the fountain of my knowledge. It consumes a lot of time going back through those past issues of Muzzle Blasts. There’s so many things that catch one’s eye while looking for one article. Finally, there it was in the “Stump the Experts” December 2003 Muzzle Blasts. The question was:
whether it made any difference at all, accuracy wise, if the sprue on a cast round ball was seated up or down, or centered on the bore axis or not. The testing was done with a very accurate .45 caliber Getz barreled chunk gun that had a 6 power scope attached. Shooting was done at 68 yards off a bench. The first 5 shots, loaded sprue up, all made overlapping holes. The next 5 shots, loaded sprue down, had nearly identical results as the group shot sprue up.
“Bevel Down: But the next group was a real surprise. We seated these five balls with the sprue up, but intentionally canted off center by about 45 degrees. ...Strangely enough, though, this introduced error only opened the group up to about half again the size of the sprue-centered groups.”
“Bevel Down: So what can we learn from all this? Well, I for one will continue to load with the sprue up and I will be very careful to center that sprue on top when I’m shooting important match targets.”
I assume that to open a group up to about “half again the size” means by about 50%.
By the way, while I was looking this article up, I ran across another article (...I said it takes a long time to look up a past article) “Round Ball Decision Part III” by Robert Mims and Fred Stutzenberger, July 04 Muzzle Blasts. In this article, Fred picked the five lightest , max variation .20 grains, and five heaviest balls, max variation 20 grains. The average difference in weight between the light and heavy group was 3.13 grains.
The five heavy balls when fired produced a group 1.53" center-to-center at 50 yds. The five lightest balls grouped only slightly larger at 1.88" center-to-center. Perhaps the more interesting observation was that the
heavy group centered 3/4 inch higher over point of aim than the light group.
Mims and Stutzenberger concluded that mixing the weights wouldn’t be conducive to good accuracy.
There, I hope my honor, what little there was, is intact. And, thanks Roundball. I enjoyed going through those past issues of Muzzle Blasts.
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