In my quest to design a workable minie type of bullet for the typical 50cal camp gun, I was having a number of conversations with Steve Brooks at Brooks Molds. Brooks makes some seriously top drawer molds mainly for the BPCR guys, but he does have some minie designs. One bullet was a pistol bullet design dating to the 1850s. We had some discussions about that bullet and Steve cut a mold with an adjustable base plug so I can vary the size of the driving band and the weight of the bullet.
Before anybody goes off about the current crop of 50cal minie molds, they are all scaled down versions of the 58cal ones. None was going to work for what we have intended. What we are after is a minie design bullet that can be shot out of the typical summer camp gun with reasonable accuracy out to 50yd and has the same performance of the standard minie in a musket vis a vis fouling control and ability to shoot without wiping.
I tested 2 bullet weights at 3 different powder charges each. The light bullet was 220gr and the heavy at 285gr. Powder charges were 40, 45 and 50gr of Schuetzen 3f. Lube was my normal competition lube of beeswax/lard/lanolin. Because I tested in 2 guns, there was a total of 12 five shot groups and one more shot with a light charge, more on that later for a total of 65 shots.
The test gun was chosen partly because it's fairly representative of a typical camp gun, but also because it has a sewer pipe of a bore. It's a CVA Sharpshooter that has a very rough bore and I named it Schadenfreude Sue cuz, it looks awful but with the right load and feeding is quite capable of 1.5in groups at 50yd with round ball. I've surprised more than one person with that gun and I'm tempted to shoot for money with it.
Initial results at 50gr, not so good. Both weights shot about 10in groups at 50yd. At 45gr, groups from both bullet weights tightened up a bit to about 7in. At 40gr, the groups pulled in even further to about 5in. On a lark, I weighed out a couple of charges at 35g and the light bullet group shrank to 3in with a flyer opening it up to just over 4in while the heavy bullet stayed at about 5in. I also tried this same sets of parameters in a White Mnt Carbine but it really, really didn't like either bullet while it does shoot prb rather well.
More to our point of wanting a minie design, each group was shot with no wiping or any other form of fouling control. There was no evidence of leading. Bullets loaded with virtually nothing more than the weight of the ramrod to put them down the bore. The goal is to have a "gallery" type of minie ball load that can be shot from most camp guns meaning the kids get to shoot more. More shooting means more fun for the kids. So further experimentation is going to be done later as I'm involved with N-SSA Nationals and teaching a Basic Muzzleloading Course to start some folks on the path to becoming an instructor.
Before anybody goes off about the current crop of 50cal minie molds, they are all scaled down versions of the 58cal ones. None was going to work for what we have intended. What we are after is a minie design bullet that can be shot out of the typical summer camp gun with reasonable accuracy out to 50yd and has the same performance of the standard minie in a musket vis a vis fouling control and ability to shoot without wiping.
I tested 2 bullet weights at 3 different powder charges each. The light bullet was 220gr and the heavy at 285gr. Powder charges were 40, 45 and 50gr of Schuetzen 3f. Lube was my normal competition lube of beeswax/lard/lanolin. Because I tested in 2 guns, there was a total of 12 five shot groups and one more shot with a light charge, more on that later for a total of 65 shots.
The test gun was chosen partly because it's fairly representative of a typical camp gun, but also because it has a sewer pipe of a bore. It's a CVA Sharpshooter that has a very rough bore and I named it Schadenfreude Sue cuz, it looks awful but with the right load and feeding is quite capable of 1.5in groups at 50yd with round ball. I've surprised more than one person with that gun and I'm tempted to shoot for money with it.
Initial results at 50gr, not so good. Both weights shot about 10in groups at 50yd. At 45gr, groups from both bullet weights tightened up a bit to about 7in. At 40gr, the groups pulled in even further to about 5in. On a lark, I weighed out a couple of charges at 35g and the light bullet group shrank to 3in with a flyer opening it up to just over 4in while the heavy bullet stayed at about 5in. I also tried this same sets of parameters in a White Mnt Carbine but it really, really didn't like either bullet while it does shoot prb rather well.
More to our point of wanting a minie design, each group was shot with no wiping or any other form of fouling control. There was no evidence of leading. Bullets loaded with virtually nothing more than the weight of the ramrod to put them down the bore. The goal is to have a "gallery" type of minie ball load that can be shot from most camp guns meaning the kids get to shoot more. More shooting means more fun for the kids. So further experimentation is going to be done later as I'm involved with N-SSA Nationals and teaching a Basic Muzzleloading Course to start some folks on the path to becoming an instructor.
