My experience with no patch

[tx77057]

I know that there have been other postings regarding this issue, but I would like to post my personal experience with it as well.

I was brand new to black powder and purchased a Zouave from Cabelas a few years ago and was very eager to shoot it. Like a dummy I forgot to order any type of accessories and had no idea what to get so I started from scratch.

I have seen movies about the Civil war so I knew that I needed some kind of caps, balls and powder.
I found a local store that had pyrodex and caps, and no balls, so I told the person the caliber and all they had in stock was a .575 round ball mould. So I bought it.
To make a long story short about the caps, I never knew that there was more than one kind, so I had to drive back and exchange them for “musket caps”.
I spent a good weekend molding balls from lead weights that I had in the garage and the next morning, I was off to the range.

I put in a charge of 50 gr of pyrodex and then tried to force the ball down the muzzle with a small “home made” patch from a gun cleaning rag that I had. The darn thing was so tight that I only was able to force it ½ inch into the muzzle with A LOT of pounding. Something told me that this was way too tight because I remember from old movies where people used to “gently slide” the ball and patch down the barrel with a ramrod.
The range was pretty far from my house and I didn’t want to have to drive all the way home without firing a shot, so I took my knife and slowly “picked and scratched” out the stuck ball. I then took a new ball and just placed it in the muzzle and it gently rammed it over the powder until it was seated. I shot a few times like this and found the musket to be very accurate at 50 yards and also hitting regularly on 3 ft targets way past 100 yards.
After the ball started to get too hard to load, I swabbed out the barrel between every 10th shot or so to keep down the fouling. I ended up shooting all of the home made balls and most of my powder that day and had one of the most memorable experiences while shooting black powder.

Later on, I also bought a J.P. Murray carbine with 24” barrel (basically it is a shortened version of the Zouave) and tried firing some mini-balls, The first ten or so would “keyhole” on the paper target. so just for fun I loaded the mini ball backwards (sort of like a poor mans hollow point). And guess what? It shot more accurate then ever and never, leaving perfect round holes in the paper target.

I found out later that the bore size on both of these muskets was .577 which would explain the tightness of my loading experience.

I eventually bought a more correct version of a ball mold of .570 and started using patches with great success and stopped using mini-balls because I could just never seem to get them to shoot correctly.

Live and Learn I always say.

[Semisane]

Neat story TX.      When you don't know what you don't know you can only go by what you think you know. 

Isn't it amazing how much info you can get from a forum like this.  A complete novice can spend a few weeks reading posts, go out an buy an gun and supplies, and have a relatively successful first day shooting.

[coyotejoe]

I have a Zouave and had another about thirty years back, both shot much better with a .570" patched ball than with any minie I could find. The round ball also makes a much better hunting load than the minies because you can load the ball up to 1500-1600 fps without knocking loose the fillings in your teeth. At that speed it will shoot flat enough to use one sight setting from the muzzle out to 100 yards. The standard military load of 60 grains pushes the minie only about 900 fps with a trajectory more like a mortar than a rifle. Those who shoot minies in competition often load as light as 40 grains and the velocity is down to around 600-700 fps, pretty useless for anything but paper at exact known distances.