With All Due Respect, Gentlemen, I hope that if there is any lesson to be learned from this post is that you need to actually measure the bore of every gun you buy, regardless of who supplies the barrel, how much money you pay for it, etc. BP accuracy, just like with modern guns, ( buttstuffers), is a game of thousandths of inches. Can you imagine how maddening it is for Ray to constantly get calls from men asking him to make a custom mould for them, and they don't know the bore size of their gun? or the groove depth, and diameter? Give the man some respect( and yourself too) by measuring the bore( land to land) and groove diameters before ordering a mould.
My most recent acquisition was a smootbore 20 ga. The gun maker ordered barrel stock from the same supplier he obtained stock to make a similar gun for himself just a few months before my order came to him. He never bothered to measure the bore. When the 20 gauge wads slipped down the barrel too easily, and the velocity readings for PRB were unexpectedly low on the chronograph, we pulled out a caliper( Dial caliper this time) and measure the bores. The were substantionally oversized, so that we ended up ordering 19 gauge over powder wads and over shot cards to use in the gun. It works fine, now. We did have to sort our cast round balls and fine sticking with the larger sized balls out of the mould give better accuracy. If I really get into using this gun for hunting deer, I
will consider ordering a custom mould, too.
Personally, after having several guns over my life time that had odd sized bores in them, that cuased getting good accuracy to be difficult at best, I have taken to slugging the barrels of every new gun I acquire, or measuring the bores of new ML rifles and smoothbores. EVERY TIME. It has save my stomach ulcers, and my high blood pressure from killing me.