deep rifled pistol

[quewalda]

Hello everybody,

I'm the proud owner of an old duelling pistol and would like (of course...) to shoot it

I would like to have some advice about the correct way to load this old gun

it has a powder chamber so, the correct amount of powder to start with isn't the main question

I wonder about the correct bullet/patch combination that should be used, as the rifling is incredibly deep

so what should I do?

I use to force a greased round ball in my Lepage-pistol and have very good accuracy but it would be impossible to fill the grooves of the old pistol that way, without using a kind of sledge hammer

I tried to use an undersized ball with a patch thick enough to seal the barrel .... and had to employ a piece of blue-jean fabric !... It didn't work very good, with or without lube , maybe because the small place left to the ball by the thick patch couldn't be correctly centered?

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience (an for forgiving my bad English)

 

[renovato]

The best way to find out what ball and patch combination to use, is to slug the bore and take measurements. Take a cone shaped lead fishing sinker and drive it far enough into the bore to get fully engraved. Pull it back out and measure the lands and grooves. This will give you an idea how thick of a patch you will need to use to fill those grooves, and what size of ball to look for to fit the bore in a patch of that thickness.

 

[paulvallandigham]

It is very easy to forgive someone any problems they have with their English skills when you at least tell us where you are from. There is nothing shown in your personal profile to educate us.

As to what to do. You haven't given us the caliber of the gun, nor whether this is a flintlock or percussion action, is it a side action, or underhammer, or side hammer action? Without knowing the caliber, ( measure the bore from land to land, if its rifled, and from groove to groove. If its a smoothbore, measure the bore with inside calipers. Then we can at least have a meaningful discussion about the size of ball you are using, as the bore diameter is important to know when choosing ball diameter, and patch thickness.

With a rifled barrel you want to assume that fabric used for patching will compress at least 20%, so determine the depth of the grooves( difference between groove diameter, and bore diameter, then divided by 2) and that will give you a starting point on selecting patch material thickness.

For instance, if your grooves are cut .010" deep, you want a patch material that is at least .012"( 120% larger than groove depth) to allow for compression and still fill the grooves. But since the barrel has to be rifled if it has grooves, the Bore diameter determines the size of the ball to use, allowing for the thickness of the patch needed to fill the groove.

Assume that in this same pistol, the bore diameter is ..620"( 20 gauge). You would want to choose a ball that is at least .600" in diameter to use with that patch combination, and depending on the weave of the material chosen, you may find going up to .015 or .018" thickness will give you better accuracy, and a better seal.

Some pistols have such deep rifling, that you cannot seal out gases using just a Patch around the ball. You have to use an OP wad to seal the gas, and get good accuracy. Find an OP Wad that is groove diameter from Track of the Wolf or other suppliers, that is 1/8" thick. OR, you can try what Roundball uses, and recommends, which is a wool felt Wad that is one caliber larger than the bore of the gun. In our example, instead of using a 20 gauge OP wad, you would choose a 16 gauge wool wad that is lubed, and is thick enough to fill the grooves and help seal the grooves from escaping gases. Mostly the OP wads, regardless of material used, act as firewalls, to prevent the patch from being burned, or torn, and THAT ALONE helps to improve accuracy.

Good shooting. :thumbsup:

 

[quewalda]

of course, before asking my silly question, I'v tried some combinations , mostly differents patches fabrics and thicknesses.
Without finding a good solution

the caliber of this pistol is 12,45 mm at the top of the rifling and a 490 ball is just too big to do the job, this ball leaves no place for a patch thick enough to fill the deep grooves
unfortunatly it's the smallest available to me

but, anyway, you gave me a good solution with this "OP wad".....it seems to be the modern version of the old "leather wad" used by some pistol shooters 160 years ago....shame on me: I knew it and didn't think to....(I'm getting old :redface: )

I'm gonna try a combination with a thinner patch and a thick leather wad as "gas-check"

sorry about the deficiency in my profile, I just tough that introducing myself in the right section would be enough.

That's the way we use to do in Belgium; sorry again if I'v been ill-mannered.

thank you very much for the help; I'll let you know about any improvement as soon as the shooting range will open (next year)

by the way: "a happy new year to all of you"! :wink:

 

[Russ T Frizzen]

Welcome to the forum. And Happy New Year to you.

 

[Zonie]

quewalda
Welcome to our forum. We appreciate your joining and your trusting us to give you our best guesses to the answer to your problem.
You do not have to apologize for not giving us your location. Quite frankly, it is none of our business .

Looking in my Dixie Gunworks catalog, the next smaller ball from the .490 is a .457
(11,608mm) diameter ball. This would very likely be too small to work well in your 12,45 (.4902) bore even with very thick patches and an overpowder wad.

With the very deep rifling your pistol has, is it possible that special projectiles with pre cast bumps that match the rifling was originally used?

I know I've seen some Jaeger rifles with grooves that were so deep that I could see no way that regular patches as we usually think of them could have been used.
I suspect that to load one of these guns they would have had to pound a bare ball into the bore with a mallet to fill the grooves and then rammed it down to the powder load.

 

[arcticap]

Hornady made .480 round balls until a couple of years ago when they were discontinued.
I've successfully used tightly compressed newspaper as an overpowder wad in a smoothbore pistol, and have also been saving up waxed paperboard from juice and dairy containers to serve as raw material for future OP wad experimentation.

 

[quewalda]

In fact, I could have tried and tried till I found a solution

but I found this subject quite interesting as it shows one of the main differences between the modern-made replicas we all use to shoot and original weapons

I own several old european ML-guns and some of them have very deep rifling

this made me wonder about the way our ancestors used to load their rifles

Obviously, we do not do it the same way..maybe is there something to be re-discovered? and some infos to be shared?

 

[mazo kid]

My thought is to use the ball you have and an OP wad along with whatever patch you find that allows you to load the ball. Upon firing, the ball should obturate (a $2 word meaning to increase in size by action of the powder burn) to fill the grooves....hopefully. Let us know how you are doing. Emery

 

[TANSTAAFL]

You have no cause for offering an apology as to the language problem, we Americans murder the English language every day. I also doubt if one out of a thousand here on the forum speak even one of the principle languages of Belgium (French, Flemish (east and west) and German)

The problem arising from deep rifling can be addressed with a wad of adequate texture and thickness over the powder for sealing gases and a thinner patch for a ball of sufficient size which allows the ball to be well engraved by the rifling for accuracy.

As an aside, one of the things I have always appreciated about the old Belgian muzzleloading shotguns, was one of the most stringent proofing requirements of the era.

And a happy new year to you and yours also.


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