Sixguns and Round Balls

[JimT]

Nice weather has returned to Central Texas! And I was on the Range early. I took my old Flat Top .357 and my USFA .44 Special.

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I had loaded some round ball loads for each. For the .357 I loaded a .375" round ball over 2.4 gr. of Bullseye. I figured it would be kinda light and it was. Too light. I had to tip the gun up and tap it before each shot to get the powder to the rear of the cartridge. Otherwise it went FLOOP and barely made it 20 yards.

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This is about the best I could do.

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I will kick the powder charge up to 3 gr. or so of Bullseye next time.

I lubed every other round like this:

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The barrel stayed nice and clean with a light oil film.

I loaded the .44 Special with .457 ball in .44 Russian-length cases with 3.1 gr. Bullseye. These fired just fine but again, the charge was a bit light. This is an average target with that load.

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Fun Stuff! No recoil. Obviously all hit quite low to the POA. The .44 barrel was clean also .. no leading whatsoever.

[GunnyMack]

I'm with you Jim, these could turn out to be quit fun!

The 2 powders I tried yesterday I neglected to mention I stuffed a bit of paper towel in each case, they sounded much better with 4gr of bullseye. The 5.5 of 231 were kind of bloopers- I think wadding is a must!

[Walt]

Years ago when Ross Seyfried was writing for Guns and Ammo, he wrote about paper patching so I paper patched a bunch of .375 bullets for my model 70 .375 H&H. Mindful of the stories of detonations using large capacity cases with medium burning powders such as IMR 3031, I used a quarter of a sheet of toilet paper to hold the charge back against the primer and it worked out quite well. Little shreds of toilet paper flew out of the muzzle but there were no adverse effects and the loads shot reasonably well.