Very light loads?

[Cool]

Has anyone ever loaded less gunpowder in, to the point were you can see the bullet in flight?

 

[longfowler]

not on purpose, but...when I've "dryballed"! As soon as I knew what I did, I pull the nipple and put a few grains of powder in the breech, re-ram, cap & fire. About 5 grains seems to give velocity similar to a baseball, and almost no smoke. It's embarassing, but at the same time kinda cool to watch the ball hit the target! Once, I even had a ball bounce off a gong, and dug it up out of the snow & re-used it.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Some F&I groups have pumpkin rolling matches. ir the idea is to shoot into a pumpkin and have the ball stick and impart it's energy to rolling the pumpkin. Gotta load pretty light to avoid pass throughs and just plain blowing it to bits. In such cases, the ball is often moving slow enough to see it.

 

[Blizzard of '93]

no, haven't done that but as said before did put no BP under PRB so had to trickle some grains under nipple and shoot it out.
the ball bounced off the stump I shot at and whacked me in the shin leaving a round bruise.

 

[erzengel]

Not intentionally.

If you insert the bullet first, you screw the pin out and trickle in some powder through the hole.

A new one :redface: forgot twice to fill in the powder first instead he rammed the ball down first.

The first ball was patched. 3 grain of swiss fuse powder. The paper target at 25 m was barely holed. You could see the ball flying. :grin:

Second ball was without patch. Again three grain of swiss fuse powder, the ball hit the ground at 15 m and you saw it first fly and roll down to 25m. :rotf:

At arms length not healthy I believe if you are in the way. :surrender:

 

[DanChamberlain]

I haven't done that. But I have deliberately molded some wax balls and fired them off in my basement with 10 gr of 777. at 7 steps, they are accurate in my .36 Navy. I shoot into a coffee can and the can catches the wax. If I miss...which I have been known to do, the wax just disappears against the basement floor. 12 shots sort of clouds things up for a while, so it's a once in a great while thing. I'll probably get cancer.

Dan

 

[DrLaw]

Hello Southern Illini,
I found that caps work just great on wax balls in a .31, no powder needed.
And if you are getting cancer, we will all get cancer, breathing in second-hand B-P smoke! :haha:

The Doc is out now. :hatsoff:

 

[torn moc]

dosent the 10 grains of powder melt the wax???
are you using pure wax or mixing with something else???

 

[Russ T Frizzen]

Dan, don't inhale! I believe Bill Clinton is lecturing on this technique and making a fortune. But the secret is to only breathe out, never in! You may feel a little light headed occasionally, but it beats the heck out of cancer or impeachment! :rotf:

 

[R.M.]

I doubt you need to have light loads to see the ball. In the right light, I can regularly see .22 bullets in flight from a pistol. I've seen 38 wadcutters too. Probably the smoke would get in your way of seeing a BP ball.

 

[erzengel]

In the right light is affirmative.

I remember a competiton two or three years ago. You could see .45 ACP rounds fly to target. They are going about 260 m/s. The ligth condition did last 30 minutes.

But it is easier to see, if the bullet is much slower.

Therefore a bullet from a muzzle loader should be seen just the same way.

 

[Zonie]

With the right lighting, I've seen my .45 ACP bullets flying downrange but there is no cloud of smoke when I am firing that.

With a Black Powder gun I think the smoke will hide the bullet until it is far downrange.

 

[Dave Rosenthal]

Every once in a while I'll use my 25-75x Nikon spotting scope to watch my son shoot his trade rifle at our club's 100 yard range. Using his usual loading of 70 grains of 3Fg Goex to push a 370 grain .50 cal Maxi out the tube at over 1300 FPS, it looks like a streaming gray shadow as it clears the smoke trail and impacts the paper target at 100 yards, as seen through the spotting scope! I set the scope up directly over his shooting position, while he was sitting using the crossed-sticks, and shot after shot, the long gray quick shadow appeared only for a very brief moment in time, but it was there!

It's really a thrill to see holes pop into the bull of a SR-1 target using that scope.

Dave

 

[Dphar]

Has anyone ever loaded less gunpowder in, to the point were you can see the bullet in flight?

If you shoot light loads at things, like a block of wood, the ball may bounce back and whack you on the shin bone (its about like hitting it with a hammer with not too much force depending on ball size). This will result in increased powder for the next shot so the ball embeds in the wood :grin:
Original 58 cal English "overcoat" pistol.
Dan