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Originally Posted by john rogers
The rifle is from a collection of parts I bought from Pecatonica River Supply. The barrel is a 1:16 twist 45 caliber Green Mountain with a patent breech. I shoot 90 grains of FFG Goex, 0.060 fiber material wad, 560 grain straight sided bullet with a Creedmoor nose. The bullet is a bore rider so after wrapping it slides down the barrel nicely. The paper is single wrap with 15# butcher paper or as properly named the Chase wrap system after the old fellow that invented it. The trigger has a 1 oz break after the rear is set.
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I noticed how easily the bullets seated. My patched round ball rifles are markedly harder to load than that.
Back when I was still competing, I remember several breach loading guys were playing with bore diameter bullets and doing quite well. I always stuck with groove diameter, or actually that +.001 to .002.
Quote:
Originally Posted by john rogers
The barrel floats in the channel with 2 contact points only and the scope in these videos is one of the Chinese Malcolm copies with 6x magnification. This one I bought from a guy back East who decided not to use scopes and I cut the dovetail and mounts for the rear mount which scared the hell out me as I did not want to ruin the barrel. The supplier said it would be 18 months of so before I could get a replacement! One of these days I plan to load up the full 120 grain 1000 yard load just to see how bad that really kicks.
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In my experience, 120 grains always proved to be too much in a .45 caliber rifle. Granted, my experience is with breach loaders and fixed ammunition. That, and I always shot "dirty", using a blow tube rather than swabbing between shots. So, under those conditions, I found charges heavier than 90-95 grains got ahead of me, fouling-wise. Probably way different with a muzzle loader that you are swabbing, though.
On top of the fouling, however, when I did seat bullets out so I could load up to 110 grains in my .45-2.6" cases, recoil in my 14 pound '74 Sharps just got to be too much to get through a match. It wasn't "brutal" by any means, but rather just plain tiring. I did just as well (or actually even better) over the long haul with the 90-95 grain charges at 1,000 yards. So, don't despair if the 120 grain charge proves to be too much. The charge you are using now will work just fine at 1,000 yards.