New to cap & ball

Mr.Rigpig

Mr.Rigpig

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I just completed a purchase online for a Uberti 1850 36 cal revolver. I have never had anything to do with black powder before, any words of wisdom? also, what should I be getting for supplies as I wait for said revolver to arrive?
Looking forward to a new challenge, the old stuff has really caught my interest lately, especially the 1874 Sharps.

Thanks,
Tony
 
It's great fun. You'll love the smoke and the dirtiness, really brings you back.

Been 6 months since I've been able to take either of mine out. One still at the gunsmith and the other is still being replaced under warranty. Canada sigh.
 
A flask with the flap control built into the top really helps. And you'll want a couple of 20gn screw in spouts. One you'll likely cut down towards 15 gns as you check for accuracy from the shots. The second is a spare to use in case you go too far on the first. You'll also need a nipple wrench.

Ball size will depend on the chamber size. But it'll be either .375 or .380. It can be hard to find .380 I've found.

For cleaning one of the best "tools" I've found for cleaning out the blind end chambers is a bundle of bristle style pipe cleaners bent so they double over on one end for the length of the chambers and with a little dog leg cranking handle on the free end. For my .44's I use 6 pipe cleaners. For a .36 I'm thinking 4 should work. When done right it should be a snug sort of fit. With the usual hot water with a dash of liquid laundry detergent to cut the lube residue the pipe cleaner bundle makes short work on cleaning the chambers. And the looseness lets it rinse out easily and lets you re-use it a couple of times before the center wires begin to become rusty. For barrel cleaning I like using a nylon bristle "bottle brush" instead of bronze. We're just cleaning, not trying to remove any caked on leading..... or at least I hope not. So I prefer the gentler action of the nylon brush.

You're almost certainly going to find that the stock front sight is too short. And typically the rear sight on the hammer is a vague sort of joke of a "v" that is nearly impossible for old guys to see well. I fixed my own 1851 with a new taller front brass pin along with cutting the rear notch with a small jeweller's file to form a "U". Now I can see the sight picture very nicely and the taller front post let's me aim at my target instead of a foot below it when shooting at 15'ish yards. So if you're looking for decent target accuracy be prepared to do something similar.

I'd post a picture of the one I made up but for some reason Photobucket isn't working at the moment.
 
C&B is great fun.
I have found 3 things that work for me.
1. I pre-measure the powder into empty .308 cases that I keep in an MTM box. It is then easy to load each chamber from the individual pre-measured charges.
2. The powder is topped by a 'cookie' of 50:50 lard-beeswax, then the ball, which must be a smidgen oversize to seal against chainfires. Opinions differ, but this has always worked for me.
3. Loading is easier with a loading stand. There were plans available in this forum a year or so back. Try the search engine.
 
Here in yUK most of us shooting BP handguns - or anything else for that matter of a similar vintage design - tend to wear protective glasses. The reason is that often there are tiny fragments of the caps flying in all directions, and I have the scars, one of them on my lower left eyelid, to ptove it. Standing next to a Springfield shooter last year, I collected a piece of his musket cap in the back of my left hand and sixteen months later it has still not healed properly. That detritus is nasty stuff.

Of course, you won't look so cool, but then nor does wearing a rubber eyeball for the rest of your life.

tac
 
Pre measure your charge into some kind of small containers. Pill boxes, old pencil lead containers etc. Safer and more convenient. Do not pour directly from flask into a chamber than has recently been fired. After loading all cylinders,smear lube onto the front to the cylinder covering the bullets. This is to prevent "chain firing" of more than one cylinder.

Take cleaning rags with you to the range. Black powder residue and the lubes that go with it get everywhere and it is nice to keep your hands clean.

There are also black powder substitutes like pyrodex that are less corrosive.
 
In regards to cleaning, clean your pistol right after you come home from the range; black powder guns are one of those things you can't toss into the safe and clean a week later, black powder is a hydroscopic material and rust will set in faster than you'd expect.
Also, soap and hot water works wonders for neutralizing the black powder

for lubrication, Bore Butter... or the cheaper alternative Crisco is your best friend, putting a little on top of the ball after you've seated it as said above will keep the fouling down and some say it helps reduce chance of chain fires, can't hurt

Really, just have fun, I've been into it a few months and i'm hooked, my 1851 sees more range time than my 1911 these days lol

enjoy
 
tacfoley said:
Here in yUK most of us shooting BP handguns - or anything else for that matter of a similar vintage design - tend to wear protective glasses. The reason is that often there are tiny fragments of the caps flying in all directions, and I have the scars, one of them on my lower left eyelid, to ptove it. Standing next to a Springfield shooter last year, I collected a piece of his musket cap in the back of my left hand and sixteen months later it has still not healed properly. That detritus is nasty stuff.

Of course, you won't look so cool, but then nor does wearing a rubber eyeball for the rest of your life.

tac
Click to expand...
Yup. Looking authentic has to take second place to safety.
It's mandatory to wear eye protection at the ranges where I shoot. Some guys also wear gloves when shooting.
 
Recently fired an .44 Uberti 1858 New Army, fun but messy. I found that pure Crisco over the loaded chambers wasn't the greatest to use as it seemed to melt too easily. Might try mixing with beeswax next time.
 
Yup, eye protection is a must for these BP breathing beasts. A flask with the appropriate size spout has been already mentioned. Maybe a BP measuring tool made for pistols not rifles.
Most are just desinged for muzzleloading rifles/shotguns and often start at 50 gr, which is way too much for most cap and ball revolvers. One can improvise though. IIRC, an empty fired 38 special casing dispenses a FFFG of real black powder, safe for Remington 1858 .44 replica or the Ruger Old Army with a full flush across the mouth powder load. One could make up a buck-she handle with twists of 0.032-.040 thou' lockwire for temporary use?

If you are like me, you detest capping the live cylinders with just your fingers. There are those 100 capacity horn shaped cappers are really handy. If you cannot get one locally, even the shorter spring loaded, in line, all brass cappers that hold 15-20, and are designed for caplock rifle shooters are much less fiddly IMO.

PS: Get yourself at least one spare cylinder that will time/lockup safe for your handgun. Constantly loading on your handgun even with a loading stand, puts some strain on the revolver's loading mechanism. By taking the cylinder right off the frame of your firearm and loading it on a dry flat surface with a rifle short starter to seat RB takes so much stress off your valued and expensive gun parts.

My two bits only for this last hint as this is often a considerable added expense......but even without a spare it's still a good idea I think so myself.
 
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Do NOT use any kind of petroleum-based grease as a chamber sealer over the top of the ball. It will carbonise into the most difficult-to-remove crud you've ever met in your life. Many of us over here in UK and Yoorup use a pharmaceutical skin cream called E45 - not only is it a good basic chamber sealer, but, being an emulsion, washes off real easy and takes all the fouling crud with it. However, any good light grease should be used to lube the cylinder arbour. I lucked into a ten-pound can of Shakespeare spinning reel grease many moons ago, and use it on my BP revolvers [and my Swiss rifles and carbines, too].

tac
 
Good choice for a first BP gun, the 1851 Navy is a great Colt to start with, next stop...Walker or '49. Antique or repro, it is all good fun til the Remi's show up.
 
canthitathing said:
Recently fired an .44 Uberti 1858 New Army, fun but messy. I found that pure Crisco over the loaded chambers wasn't the greatest to use as it seemed to melt too easily. Might try mixing with beeswax next time.
Click to expand...

I earlier alluded to the "difference of opinion" regarding the choice and placement of lube. There are the two methods:

#1. Tamp bullet directly over powder and smear grease atop the bullet over the loaded chambers.
or
#2. Place a lube-cookie or lubricated wad between powder and bullet and then tamp bullet.

The reason given (especially in older books and magazines) for using method #1 is that the grease seals the front of the chamber and prevents chain-fires, i.e. the flame from the shot supposedly penetrates past the bullet of an unfired chamber and sets off the powder, However, the more up-to-date references seem to discredit this. The blast from the first couple of shots blows out much of the grease from the other chambers, anyway, so there's goes any protection. And you end up with grease all over the gun in places where it's not doing any good. Also, there is evidence that chain fires can occur if/when a cap comes off a loaded chamber, and the flame from one shot enters that chamber from the nipple end. So the grease over the loaded cylinder is messy and doesn't necessarily do what it's advertised to do.

Method #2 is advocated by people who've done a lot of shooting using method #1 and finally decided there had to be a better way.
One needs to understand the primary purpose of the lubrication, which is not to prevent chain-fires. It is not that, nor is it to prevent leading. It is to keep the fouling soft. Hence the warning against using petroleum-based grease - it doesn't soften the fouling, quite the opposite :p
Thus it makes more sense to put the lubricant where it will have maximum effect, i.e. next to the powder.
In my own experience, it's easier to load and clean up.

Chain fires are prevently more effectively by
- choosing tight-fitting caps that won't drop off before firing.
- using bullets or balls that are just slightly oversize, so that they are either swaged or shaved when pushed into the chamber, which will seal off the front of the chambers (and also prevent balls from slipping forward and creating the dreaded air-space.)

I won't debate anyone who insists on using Method #1. Try different methods and make your own decision. And have fun doing it!
 
OK, I see where getting into some deeper nitty gritty. So here's how I've been doing it.

I use my C&B guns mostly for cowboy action Frontiersman shooting. So getting them loaded with powder and ball quickly so I can get back to the possy and help out is somewhat important. So I load the ball directly onto the powder. With my .44's this means I need to load at least 28gns of powder or the ram on the guns won't seat the ball deeply enough to compress the powder.

SAFETY NOTE- In case you haven't seen this point yet you NEVER want any air gap in any black powder or BP substitute powder loadings. And it's better if the powder is under some amount of compression. So it's important to be able to seat the ball onto the powder charge.

Anyway, with that amount of powder I end up with a LOT of room to fill up with over the ball grease. It would have been extremely messy. So I went with an idea I saw someone using on You Tube where they would lubricate and seal in the ball with a small drop of Canola oil. Applied with a small squeeze nozzle bottle this makes for a neat and tidy method.

As it happens the Canola oil REALLY works well with BP fouling. After a morning of shooting 3 CAS stages I looked in the bore and there were oily webbing lines of black goop wobbling around in the bore. So it certainly results in keeping the fouling soft. As a benefit I also found that putting a drop onto the joint for the base pin or cylinder arbor, depending on Remington or Colt style, keeps the cylinder spinning freely all day. This being done every time when I'm putting oil onto the seated balls.

If you try this don't use it as a long term storage oil. Over a longer time frame the Canola oil gums up and finally turns into a varnish like film. But for a day oil or even a week if you're going to shoot it again the following weekend it works great. I even tested it against some other oils for rust resistance. It's actually darn good stuff other than the gumming up.

As noted above you don't want to use most of the petroleum based oils with BP. Apparently it becomes a tar like gum that is hard to clean away. The oil of choice for BP shooters is Ballistol Universal. Although it's also a petroleum distillate it's from some point on the refining family tree that produces an oil which IS compatible with the BP fouling. So that's what I now use after washing and cleaning the guns. I only use the Canola oil now during actual shooting sessions.

On the topic of caps I echo what is said above. But my Uberti Remingtons are somewhere in between. CCI #10 caps are too tight and require a hard push to form onto the nipples so that the priming compound is resting on the lip. But CCI #11's are too loose and want to fall off too easily. The "fix" is to pinch the #11's to a slightly oval shape so they hold in place.

Even with the caps I use being a little loose so they need to be pinched I find I get a lot of first hammer fall FTF's unless I seat the caps with a push stick and firm pressure. If I don't do this the first strike is slowed down by the hammer seating the cap and there's not enough impact energy to fire the compound. So I have to go to half ####, spin the cylinder around for another try then shoot it again. The second strike always sets the cap off unless there's something seriously wrong. Needless to say doing this while on the clock isn't a good thing. So I use a stick of wood tapered to a blunt flat point a little larger than a cap and cut to an angle on the nose that presses evenly on the end of the cap. I seat the caps with a firm pressure. If you try this after some failures to fire start with about an 8 to 10 lb push. That should be enough.

And if you're worried about the cap firing from this you should be. But in practice it seems safe enough. To test it I tried seating a cap onto a spare nipple in my bench vise. I applied enough pressure that the nipple cut through the priming compound and the copper. No ignition since it's done slowly. It's not so much the pressure but the SPEED of the pressure that does the job. So seating the caps is with a firm push that isn't an actual strike is pretty safe. I still take care to keep all my body parts behind the cylinder face though. This means holding the gun with my right hand on the grip and using the seating stick in my left hand so I'm holding the gun firmly enough. Nothing has happened yet over about 700 to 800 shots fired over the years I've done it this way. The only result is that I can shoot all five with little risk of a misfire that needs me to chase the cylinder around for a second strike.

Cleaning the guns feels like it takes forever. But about three years back I found a secret weapon that speeds things up. This is a was of pipe cleaners folded over double with the fold pinched tightly. The resulting bundle should be a firm fit in the chambers. The free end of the bundle gets a dogleg bent into it and the ends twisted to hold the cleaning tool together. To clean the chambers I hold the cylinder in the washing bucket and stuff the wad of cleaners into the chamber then spin it with the crank handle. The fibers sticking out the sides and end make short work of cleaning the whole chamber. And best of all the pipe cleaners rinse out well between chambers. This trick is the single factor that took my cleaning from about 45 minutes per gun down to around 10 minutes. Try it, you'll soon be ordering up a bulk pack of pipe cleaners like I did. The bundle washes out and dries nicely and I find it's good for about a half dozen cleaning sessions before the wires begin to show rust from the BP residue. So it's pretty economical as well. A second dry bundle is used as a "jag" for pushing patches into the chambers to dry and then oil the chambers. One patch run through all six, then a second dry patch to be sure, then a patch oiled with Ballistol and finally a last dry patch to leave only a light film of oil. No further treatment is needed and the next time out I just put the powder into the chambers without any further patching.

For scrubbing out the barrels I prefer a nylon bristle brush. We're not looking at unseating lumps of lead so a bronze brush is more aggressive than needed. If you do get leading in the bore than something is wrong that needs fixing. I've never seen any leading in any of my five .44's. At least not yet. So the nylon bristles are all I need to get the bore clean. Following the dunking, brushing and hot water rinse dry the exterior with an old rag and use a round jag and push a couple of dry patches down the bore. This is followed by an oiled patch using Ballistol and one more dry patch to leave only a fine film. The residual heat from the hot tap water rinse will aid in drying any water in any deeper crevasses.

As said above I found that only a little fouling gets into the action through the openings so I only strip and detail clean the guns after about 3 days out or at the end of the season for a longer storage period. In practice the oil in the action keeps any rust at bay and the fouling doesn't make things sticky for this amount of fouling. So no harm done. I know that this will be a sacrilege for some folks but it's proven to work out for me over the last 6 years of shooting my BP guns about 6 days a year in events along with the occasional plinking and target sessions.

For the in-betweens I just clean the recoil shield, sides of the hammer and generally what I can wipe off easily with a damp rag then oil it all with an old toothbrush that has had a couple of drops of Ballistol put onto the bristles. This makes for a handy tool for oiling right into all the nooks and crannies. Oh, another folded over pipe cleaner gets me down into the hammer channel where most of the internal fouling is found anyway.

A note on screwdrivers and torque. First off you WILL be detail stripping the BP guns for cleaning and lubing more often than smokeless guns. So good fitting screw drivers for the three sizes of slots are very important. Don't skimp out on this. If you have not invested in a set of hollow ground gunsmithing bits and handle now is the time. You'll be glad you did. As for torque we don't want things to fall apart but it's been my experience that most folks tend to over tighten gun screws. It's surprising how light a pinch is needed to hold small screws firmly tight. On the other hand there's OODLES of buggered up screw slots due to folks over tightening things than having the tips skip out when trying to undo them later on. So try seating the screws with only a firm pinch. After a cylinder or two of shots check them. If they've come loose tighten them with a slightly firmer pinch. But at no time should you need to get all "white knuckled" with them. Small screws only need about 10 to 15 INCH-pounds of torque to hold firmly. Not FOOT-pounds. Most of us can generate this sort of torque with only two fingers on a typical screw driver handle. So keep this in mind and sneak up on the amount of torque you need to hold the gun together. It makes for much easier working on the gun later and a much longer life span for the screws and threaded holes in the gun.

Speaking of the wash bucket. Mine is an old drywall mud bucket. When filled with hot tap water and a dash of liquid laundry detergent my Remington barrels can be immersed just up to the forcing cone neatly so the action doesn't get wet. I found that I only need to clean the internal action about ever third time out so a bucket that lets me dunk only the barrel is nice. Of course on a Colt open top this isn't a big deal. I still use the bucket anyway with my Colt guns. It's just handier than a full sink.

Don't soak anything for long. I found that this is a great way to end up with flash rusting on the parts. Just do things one at a time and dunk, scrub, rinse, dry and oil each before moving on to the next. And again the old toothbrush with a couple of drops of Ballistol is great for oiling all the little nooks and crannies around the back of the cylinder and the bolt notches. Just a little will do ya. It only needs to make the metal look shiny but not wet.

Pipe cleaners to the rescue again. The tip of a pipe cleaner gets down neatly into the nipple holes for both cleaning and for getting a light film of Ballistol into them. Again I don't pull the nipples every time. I only pull out the nipples to clean and lube the threads when I'm doing a full detail strip. A little synthetic boat trailer grease on the nipple threads keeps them good for that long a time and the general washings between full detail cleanings. Again if you can manage to only use a light amount of oil or use a second dry toothbrush to remove any excess you'll find that you can cap and shoot the next time out without any risk of the caps becoming oil fouled. It's truly amazing how far a single drop of oil can go if you are patient with spreading it around.

Again some of the "clean ever time out" school will find this to be sacrilege. But in practice it's worked for me and I'm very OCD about rust or pitting. But I'm also pragmatic and lazy enough to not want to fully detail clean the guns ever time I shoot them. So I ran the guns early on and only inspected the internal action without cleaning by lifting the trigger guard on my Uberti Remingtons so I could peek inside but didn't actually clean anything. I found that the fouling build up was light enough per day that it was only in need of cleaning after three to four shooting days. So that's what I started doing and it's worked out well with no harm to the guns. Ballistol is the oil of choice for the internal action parts. And I use a little heavier application than for the external parts where I only want them to look shiny but not wet. The internals get enough that they look wet without actually dripping.

OK, that's it for me. You know all that I do now.
 
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I load my cylinders full but leave room for ball,I use a sealant at end of cylinders of toilet bowl wax sealant. The one between seat & floor. In winter I cut it with Vaseline to thin it out. Clean same day, but if you want to clean temporally when leaving range or it gums up, windex works great. Hot soap & water for black powder, hot water & shot of vinegar for pyrodex. And dry internals with heat gun oil well check next day.
 
Nobody seems to have mentioned the obvious safety point - NEVER place any part of your fingers forward of the front of the chamber...it might seem pretty obvious until the noob you were helping suddenly screeches his/her head off as the side-flame catches them out.

At least there won't be much - if any - blood, as the 1000+C temeprature does a pretty good job of cauterizing the injuries.

tac
 
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