Minie ball get stuck in my .58 Mississippi rifle

[dheisner]

Hey Folks,

I have an .58 Mississippi rifle that I bought from a guy who used to do reenactments. On the second shot, the Minie balls always get stuck if I don't run a patch down the barrel between shots. I have no clue as to what I am doing, so I'll give you all the information I know. You guys are the experts.

I think I am shooting a .575 caliber bullet. I bought whatever size the guy told me to get from Dixie gun works. I bought them so long ago that I don't remember for sure. I usually only shoot one shot a year deer hunting and that's it, so I haven't worried too much about it until now. I shot at a coyote the other day and just for the fun of it, tried to put another one in real quick in case I got a second chance. As usual, it stuck. I had switched to Bore Butter, so I figured that I might have fixed the problem.

I used Crisco before I moved on to Bore Butter. I am shooting FFFg powder. I know now that I need FFg, but am not sure if this is the source of my troubles.

I will say that the gun is dead on. I hit a gallong milk jug 5 out of 5 times at 90 yards with it. Of course that was cleaning between shots. Any help you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Black Powder Newbie

 

One suggestion I can make is to use a wonder-wad between the powder and your slug. This should increase your accuracy as well as make the gun shoot much cleaner. You can use lubed or unlubed. I'd try lubed ones. They are available from Trackofthewolf (in the links section).
: It sounds to me as if the minnie you're shooting is too large, or too hard. Both senarios will make loading difficult if the bore is fouled. I personally prefer a slug that's .001" larger than the bore size, but if hard lead, it would be impossible to load. The lead should be pure lead not Wheel Weights, which are way too hard for minnies. I shoot Wheel Weight bullets in my ctg. guns- modern and antique, smokeless and black powder.
: Have you ever tried patched round balls? They are cheaper to shoot than minnies, generaly shoot more accurately and kill big game faster than minnie-balls do.
: A .570 round ball with a .018" patch should be about perfect. A loading block can have any number of pre-patched balls in it for rapid loading and with a good lubricant, cleaning between shots isn't necessary.

 

[Rebel]

The 3f should foul less than 2f would. Like Daryl said, you might try a lubed felt wad under the minnie to help lube the bore.

 

[dheisner]

I just read on another posting something that might cause my problem and I wanted to bounce it off of you guys. I am shooting 90 grains of powder. I read that "you don't need more than 70 grains unless you are hunting elephants". Just wanted to throw that one out there. Also, I don't think that the Minie are made from wheel weights because I bought them from Dixie Gun Works and I'm pretty sure they don't do that.

 

[Rebel]

90 grs. of 3f is a bit much with a minnie. Might want to try backing off to 70 or 75 grs and see what happens.

 

[robinghewitt]

Or 60 even :shocking:

 

[Rat]

Hmmm......I shoot 100 to 110 grains of powder behind my slugs, in both my minnie rifles. Of course that's with a REAL, or a thick-skirted minnie, but it certainly causes no loading problems.

I would agree that minnies from Dixie are not hard lead. From what I have heard they are also quite undersized.

Some of the Mississippi rifles were made in .54 caliber...you aren't somehow getting/forcing an undersize Dixie .58 minnie down a clean .54" barrel...??? How hard is it to get the first slug down a clean barrel?

Have you run a tight fitting, oiled patch and jag down the clean barrel to check for tight spots or abnormalities in the barrel? That's where I'd be looking, as a soft lead, undersize minnie really "can't" just get stuck.

Is it halfway down, or close to the breech? Or near the muzzle where it gets stuck? How are you getting it back out?

When you load into a clean barrel, does it get tight, or harder to push though the spot where it's sticking when fouled?

Fg, FFg, FFFg, would have little to do with it. A barrel will get PROGRESSIVELY harder to load as it fouls more, but the bullet getting stuck on the second shot...that's very strange and unusual.

I just have to ask...you don't target practice with the rifle before taking it hunting??????? Or ever just shoot it for fun?

::

Rat

 

[Trot]

That is a lot of fffg most use around 60 gr. of ffg or 45 to 50 if using fffg in a .58 minie rifle.

 

[dheisner]

I hate to reveal my ignorance here, but I think I may have figured out what was going on. :: ... told you I was a newbie. From the earlier posts and from talking to one of the local gun shops, I found out that I was cleaning the gun wrong. I was using my shotgun patch cleaner thingy to clean the bore instead of a jag. I was still using the shotgun wire brush, but that only got part of it. The cleaning patches were not going down the barrel tight as a tick like they would with a jag. The local gun shop didn't have a .58 caliber jag, but had a 12 guage jag. Will that work?

Enquiring minds want to know.

 

[Rebel]

The .12 ga jag won't fit down the bore of your .58 cal. unless you clamp it in a drill and turn the drill on and hold the jag against a file until it is small enough to fit. You will probably have to cut new grooves in it to catch the patch then too, since taking it down far enough to fit the bore will probably remove the grooves. You can do this with a triangular file. Easiest way though would be to get a .58 cal. jag to begin with.

 

[Zonie]

Make sure you DON'T use those 12 gage patches to wipe your barrel with.
One of the most common reasons for a stuck ramrod is because the person used oversize cleaning patches.
I would suggest buying some cleaning patches which are made for a 45 cal pistol. They measure about 2 1/2 X 2 1/2 and will work fine.

The reason the larger patches (like a 12 gauge) will get your ramrod stuck is they tend to go down the bore nice, but the "bunch up" on top of the jag when you pull the rod/jag back up the bore.
It's kinda like the chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the tighter it gets stuck.

Good luck.

 

[jdstrang]

Newbie:

There are several things at work here. First, shooting minies, you need no wad under the bullet. The whole idea is that the minie skirt expands to fill the rifling. A patch is superflouous.

Second, in ordinance tests of these rifles back before the Great Unpleasantness of 1861-65, they were fired in excess of 10,000 times without cleaning! That assumes proper lubrication, which Bore Butter should provide. So you don't need to clean it after every shot, IF you clean it right to begin with.

Third, a soft-lead minie functions best if it is one to two-thousandths UNDER bore size, not OVER. What you need to do is find out your exact bore diameter. There are drop-in gauges that make this an easy determination. These guns are all nominally .577, but vary in my experience from .573 to .585! When you know what your bore diameter is, you obtain a minie sizer, a simple push-through sizing die that extrudes your bullet to the proper size for your bore.

To properly clean your gun, you need a breechplug scraper to get the built-up crud off the face of your breechplug, and a good brush. You'd also be far better off with a cleaning rod designed for these .58-cal CW rifles. Place a small piece of leather between your nipple and hammer, pour the bore a quarter to half full of very hot, dish-soapy water, and scrub it out thoroughly with a good bristle brush. Pour out the water and repeat until the water runs clean. Then dry it thoroughly and LIGHTLY oil it. Pull the nipple and clean it, and clean out the bolster threads with a q-tip. Then store it muzzle-down so the oil runs to the muzzle, not the breech.

If you bought this from a re-enactor, there's no telling what shape the interior's in, since some (not all, but some) of them are notorious for not taking proper care of their firearms. You might well want to have someone pull the breechplug and take a look down the barrel to see if there is any impediment, such as a blown-off minie ring, around the breech. Failing that, get yourself one of those tiny, one-AAA-cell mag light flashlights, turn it on and ease it down the barrel backwards, so it shines up. Then you can see just what you are dealing with.

My piece of this sport is the North-South Skirmish Association, where these guns are used in target competition and fired with great effect hundreds, if not thousands, of times a season by our members. Check out the Web site at www.n-ssa.org and feel free to take questions to the bulletin board that links from there. If you live east of the Mississippi, chances are there's a skirmisher near you who would be happy to help you get your bore properly measured and get you set up to enjoy the potential that your Mississippi holds.

If you want to know where to obtain bore scrapers, cleaning rods, etc., drop me an e-mail off the board and I'll give you a list of sutlers who supply our 3700 members.

Once you get the basics down, these guns are easy and fun to shoot. But they can be bears -- as you have discovered -- without some starting knowledge.

Hope this epic helps. :snore:

 

[dheisner]

Papa Bear,

Thanks for the great feedback. It just so happens that I am heading home this weekend and I am going to try and hook up with an old buddy who comes from a muzzleloading family. His little brother was the Reserve National Jr. Champ some years ago. They have been doing black powder as long as I can remember and probably have exactly what I need to check the size of the bore.

I never have used a patch on anything but a roundball in this gun and I probably haven't shot a half dozen round balls out of it. I almost always shoot Minnies. I'll tell you one thing. They sure do a number on whitetails! I have only lost one deer. Actually, it was the only deer I ever lost period with black powder or modern firearms. My Dad always taught me to make the first shot count. It really annoys me when people say that they took a pot shot at a deer. OK, I'll get off the soap box.

Thanks once again for the great feedback!

Newbie

 

[Leatherbark]

If your using 90grs of 3ffg Black Powder under a hollow based minnie ball then I'm here to tell you pard that you have probably blown a few skirts off them thar minnie balls and they are stuck at the bottom of your barrel.......When using that much powder with a hollow based minnie ball,sometimes and I've done it myself ,the skirt will separate from the minnie and stay at the bottom of the barrel. You can use the heavy charges with a solid base conical. Reenactors who aslo shoot their muskets have to check this condition as more than one person during a re encactment has been wounded with a minnie ball skirt that came out when firing a blank.....THis is why you see re enactors bouncing their ramrods to make sure they "Clang" when hitting the bottom of the barrel............I experienced this 25 years ago with a Zoauve musket........I was cleaning it and my rod pushed down thru something at the breech.......My ramrod was stuck........I put the ramrod in nook in my truck and yanked hard........Out came the rod and jag and a minnie ball skirt........Did it again and brought out another skirt.............Hollow based minnie balls take small charges........50gr of 3f or 60gr of 2ff..........3ff will foul much less than 2ff.............................Bob