FFF powder in a .62 caliber smoothie?

[Britsmoothy]

what would it take to over charge and damage a barrel?

You can't over charge it.
There is no evidence of of over charging a muzzleloader and it failing.

To the contrary, a blocked barrel with even a light charge can fail! If not blocked it won't fail.

 

[Gordoncourtney]

With target rifles , these days for me pcp accuracy is the holy grail , I am shooting paper, pigeons and squirrels . But when pistol , 1960s , shooting 22 colt woodsman I could not do better than a 72, yet I could hit the heart on a man size target fast and every time wit the 22 and 357 pistol out to 50yards. I guess accuracy in Alaska is the prime consideration food . Probably few muzzle loaders. last night , mountain men, sky tv, I watched a couple take a mountain bear in snow at a good.300 yards , thinking , the hungry bear had a chance to eat you time you got close enough for a one shot muzzle loader . , you missed . brown bread , dead !!!! Ha ha

Back in the 1960s. My friend with his home made Kentucky .45 flint lock, Belgium barrel , took the running deer trophy at Bisley uk . It really pissed the sporting rifle members off with protests. Mole said “ I take more care with my loading “

My view is you can put and animal down in the kindest way, that’s all that matters , you are not trying to be an Olympic star. On the other hand I have wanted to put a scope on a flintlock just to see how accurately it could shoot at 100 or so yards

Just rumbling on . This old gunny fart is 81, but act like 42, The police will never let me own or shoot anything more than an airgun , that’s their problem , I can take anything down with my compound or ionx bow

Love from a cold stormy. England , London to be precise , not a hint of snow for years

 

[smo]

Your video link maybe of a very large rifle.
Can you provide a link to YouTube please.

It’s a 4 bore….

 

[Loyalist Dave]

So I guess my last question on this is, practically speaking what would it take to over charge and damage a barrel? I remember reading on another post a while back that Jim Kibler initially had some concerns with the thinner barrel walls of his Fowler kit being subject to excessive pressure from tightly patched round balls if guys load up a fowler the same way they would a rifle. Loading up a smoothbore that was meant to be a shotgun the same way we might load a rifle is a bit of a different issue than powder granulation, but that aside, I do wonder how much FFF would truly be unsafe for normal loads...

It's been my experience, that smoothbores suffered from improper loading when they have damaged barrels from firing, or suffered from improper care when the barrels were damaged.

I was taught by a now long-passed avid black powder shotgunner, how to think about black powder in shotguns. I always thought him a tad crazy to use black powder shells or more often a black powder shotgun as his favorite gun ; as I've gotten older I realized he was "crazy like a fox" as the saying goes. He taught, IF you look at older modern shotshell boxes you see a leftover remnant of the black powder days. You find "Dram Equivalent" listed.

That is to tell the shotshell shooter what the modern load is supposed to be compared to a Black Powder load. The advantage of the muzzle loading shotgun is the shooter can tailor his load for the game. The breechloader using a shotshell could sorta do that, but needed to know how much powder was in each shell. Waterfowl for example needed a good deal more powder than a rabbit. So the boxes listed the powder charge per shell.

THEN when smokeless powder came along, to help the folks accustomed to using black powder loads, the "Dram Equivalent" was listed, which informed the shooter what the new shells should do compared to the old shells with which they were accustomed. The top box is shooting 1 ounce of lead shot, and should be very similar to a 1 ounce load launched with 90 grains of BP (3¼ drams).

Now the second box seems a bit cryptic, but it's marked 2½-1-8 So, that's 2½ [dram equivalent] -1 [1 ounce of shot] -8 [#8 sized shot]. So this second box should work very similar to 1 ounce of #8 shot launched by 70 grains of black powder (2½ drams) .

SO what this showed me, in a rather simplistic way, was that even in the modern stuff, the shells were performing like black powder loads AND those loads from 20 gauge up to 12 gauge were most often from 70-90 grains of black powder.

No worries then about loads from 70-90 grains of BP, and I doubt the friction plus mass of a round ball, properly seated upon the powder, is worse than that of a shot column plus a couple fiber wads. A 20 gauge (.600 ball) is 325 grains of lead, while a 7/8ths load of lead shot (a very popular 20 gauge load) is 383 grains of lead and a full ounce is 438 grains of lead, not to mention that the bearing surface the part actually touching the inner surface of the barrel is very small when shooting a round ball compared to a column of shot.

When I've seen black powder barrels fail from black powder live loads, it's been because of some outlandish load that functioned as an obstruction, or interior corrosion due to improper cleaning and/or storage had over time so thinned the barrel walls at the breech, that the normally safe load was too much for the damaged barrel to contain.

I've seen a few black powder barrels fail from the use of a modern powder, but that's for a different thread, and is pure operator error.

LD

 

[maillemaker]

The upshot for real black powder is, the finer the granulation, the higher the pressure spike. Also, the more powder you add, the higher the pressure spike, and consequently, higher velocity.

Here is an interesting thread:
https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/threads/pressure-changes-by-barrel-length.115648/

With this image:

This is why I shoot 3F in everything. 2F and 3F costs the same per pound, but you can use less 3F and achieve the same pressure as a greater amount of 2F.

According to this chart, a 50 grain 3F charge will get you the same velocity as about 68 grains of 2F. That's a 30% difference in charge weight. That saves you about $6 per pound of powder shot. I go through about 25 pounds of powder a year, so I'm saving $125.