Ball, conical...both?

BC Bigbore

BC Bigbore

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I recently decided to expand my gun enthusiasm to include traditional black powder arms. I picked up a used Lyman Great Plains Rifle and found it has a 1:60" twist barrel. I understand this works for patched round balls but what about conical bullets? If I use balls, which should I use, .530" or .535"? Any recommendations about conical bullets? I'd like to cast my own balls/bullets as supplies are sporadic at best here and mostly serving the inline crowd with sabot stuff. Some wheel weights, a ladle, fire and a mould would work for me :)
 
Congrats! The Great Plains is a nice rifle. And if you are serous about shooting big slugs you should be able to find an aftermarket barrel with a faster twist.

I've never tried conicals in something with rifling that slow. Give it a shot and see what it does. The hotter the load the better your chances of it stabilizing but don't hold your breath.

If I remeber right the rifling should be fairly deep and you will probably find that the .530's work best with about a .015" patch. Again experimenting (or talking to someone with a better memory than mine) will be needed.

Casting is a great way to go for your bullets but so yourself a favour and make the effort to find the purest lead that you can. Wheel weights are much harder than ideal for blackpowder use (but make excellent pistol bullets).
The first casting outfit that used cost exactly the price of a mold. Lee sells them for under $30. The rest of the gear was an old hot plate, a customized table spoon, and an old steel kitchen pot from somewhere. Made thousands of bullets before upgrading. Spilling lead on an an exposed heating element isn't very good for them.
 
The slow twist is best with a round ball, but in theory, the shortest, lightest bullet (most 'ball-like') should perform better than a long heavy bullet. I believe the bullets wiill work best with a light load (two answers - two opinions, already!).
Most wheel weights are hard alloy lead and not reccomended for use in MLs, as the hard balls will not deform to fit the rifeling well. If you plan on using them, a .530 ball with appropiate thickness of patch may work best.
 
X2...you can use relatively short and light conicals quite successfully with a slow twist.Buffalo Ball-ets or Lee REALs are good choices,with moulds available for the latter.
 
Aha..good replys already :) So wheel weights are out, check. Already have a hotplate and iron pot. I'll make a dipper, so I'll just have to order the mould(s) and find a different source for lead.
 
Go with the round balls. A .530 round ball pushed by 80-90g of real black powder is an great deerslayer. I use the .530 and a 18th pillow ticking patch in my Lyman Trade rifle, and have taken 4 whitetails with it so far. Only one went 75 yards, the other 3 fell to the shot. I cast my own balls using old roof flashings that a plumber gave me.
 
ball or conical

If you go to a "Primitive" Rendezvous, you don't have a choice. It'll be patched RB or nuthin'.

My experience with my P-H Enfields is that both the 1 x 48" twist of the P58 and the slow 1 x 72"(?) of the P53 will stabilize patched round ball as well as Minies. I use .564 RB and a diaper cloth patch.

Conventional wisdom says to use soft, pure lead for ML patched round balls. A while back, US gun writer Ross Seyfried blew that myth out of the water with an article he wrote on shooting his .54 Mortimer (I think). He used the same alloy as he does for his BPCRs.

The ball never comes in contact with the bore, the patch being the bearing surface. Deforming a dead soft lead RB achieves nothing.

The exception is with cap & ball revolvers. Good luck in seating a ball cast from anything other than pure, soft lead!
 
I've shot plenty of balls made from both soft and hard alloys. Deforming of soft lead balls does accomplish several things.
1. Ease of loading - when a tightly patched ball is rammed home, the lands engrave the weave pattern of the patch into a soft lead ball. Just try loading a tightly patched hard alloy ball...lol.
2. When the charge is ignited, the softer ball will upset and fill the bore, squeezing the patch even tighter into the grooves. This results in a cleaner bore, shot after shot.

Now, with that said - I have had some success shooting hard balls with a proper fitting patch.
 
Sharps '63 said:
Conventional wisdom says to use soft, pure lead for ML patched round balls. A while back, US gun writer Ross Seyfried blew that myth out of the water with an article he wrote on shooting his .54 Mortimer (I think). He used the same alloy as he does for his BPCRs.

The ball never comes in contact with the bore, the patch being the bearing surface. Deforming a dead soft lead RB achieves nothing.

The exception is with cap & ball revolvers. Good luck in seating a ball cast from anything other than pure, soft lead!
Click to expand...

I had no soft lead and made up a batch of balls out of WW lead and had no end of trouble with them cutting the patches on loading and generally being very miserable to load. This was with .490 balls in a .50. Might have been able to solve the issues with different patching or even smaller balls but finding softer lead was the easiest option. If you really wanted to you could probably fire ball bearings but why bother. Terminal ballistics with pure lead are generally excellent too.

Used the same stuff for some cap and ball revolvers too. It worked but I was starting to worry I was going to bust the the seater or a vein in my head after about the 3rd cylinder full.
 
what's the harm in trying a conical in a slow twist. i had a browning 50 cal mountain rifle that shot conicals with deadly accuracy.
i never used them, i prefer round balls, but it's worth a try.
 
BC Bigbore said:
I was rooting around in one of my sheds and came across a 6lb box of soft lead pencil sinkers. Would this work for casting muzzleloader balls/bullets?
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Lead is what you want if your casting your own.

A good rule of thumb is

-if it can be marked with your thumb nail your good to go-


Post a picture of your new rifle.
 
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hornhead said:
what's the harm in trying a conical in a slow twist. i had a browning 50 cal mountain rifle that shot conicals with deadly accuracy.
i never used them, i prefer round balls, but it's worth a try.
Click to expand...

No harm in "trying",I mean,what's the worst that could happen....it just may/may not work very well?My CVA .50cal Mountain Rifle with a relatively shallow rifling 1:66 ROT shoots a greased 250gr Lee REAL just fine?Aside from not having a fast enough twist rate to stabilise longer conicals,many RB barrels also have deeper rifling designed to be used with a patch.A patchless conical in a deep rifled barrel,along with too slow a ROT most likely will have velocity robbing gas leakage unless you also use an overpowder wad?Besides the velocity loss,there can also be other up/down,side to side forces in play as the bullet exits the muzzle associated with gas leakage.
 
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