Dave
I did play around with some of those LBT jobbers and I liked the way the finished round looked. They of course would not work in the Ruger No1's because they short throated those rifles.
Too, I'm an animal with a lever gun, and so when I raped the crank I would shave off considerable lead getting them in the chamber, so that didn't pan out either.
That bullet you're using looks some wicked and I would think it would penetrate at least 12 engine blocks :wink:
In as far as loads published for the 45-70 I don't worry all that much about people getting in trouble with them, unless of course they get foolish and try to use them in a Trapdoor.
I use only 2 powders in the 45-70 and have really settled on just IMR 4198 now. IMR 3031 is good, but in the short barrels of the Guides it leaves much powder trace in the barrel after firing. One would not think this was detremental, but some reason unknown to this Ole Coug, it DOES affect accuracy. So a clean complete burn is a must IMO.
I have found that IMR 4198 will consume in the barrel of a 22 inch gun. ANything shorter and I have to use a Federal 215 Magnum primer to burn the powder up.
In either case, one cannot put to much of either powder in a case and still seat a bullet and have the load "unsafe". If we're talking about "Not doing this at Home...", there have been many a time when I marked a line on a 45-70 case by laying abullet aside it up to the front of the canalure and just filled the case to that point with powder. Then I measure the charge and that constitutes 100% load density.
One of the oddities I have noticed in rifles is that if the powder is such that it can lay here and there in the case, then this is just another variable that messes up the groups. I have run some heavily compressed loads with IMR 3031 and found that even with heavy roll crimps, the bullets like to pop up over night!
There is a Gent by the name of Mathews that wrote a book called 40 years with the 45-70. Some of the loads he used near knocked me on the floor when I read them. But, he was loading in the older Ruger No1 & No3 when they were freebored as the Weatherbys are. As you know, this gives the bullet a chance to wind up sort of speak, and this does keep the peak pressure down.
Oddly enough, he seemed only some impressed with one jacketed bullet, that being the Hornady 350 grain roundnose, and he used it a lot. Eventually, he got into the hardcast and paper patched bullets and never went back. In some of the photos of his ammo, you can see that the cases are in fact peaked out.
A short while back I manged to get my crabcrackers on an earlier version No1 in 45-70. The wood was exceptional, it WAS freebored, but alas, the ejector system on that vintage rifle was lacking because the case would hang on the breechblock on the way out. I'll tolerate that on a bench gun, NOT a hunting rifle.
In any event, I went to the older reloading manuals, Lyman in particular, and cooked up a top end load with a Speer 400 and IMR 4198. When I lit off the first round I knew I had shot something evil! That mother walloped me far and away worse than the 378 Wby or even the 460.
Me, I never met a gun I wouldn't shoot, regarless of how brutal it was. I fired off about a 20 round box, spread them all over the paper, and had a fearsome flinch for about 3 weeks. Had those bullets been solids, I would venture a guess that they would knock an elephants pee pee in the dirt in right short order! I would also guess that at those speeds with the Speer 400's, anything "soft" that got hit would probably just blow up. Not a good feature if you want to eat the critter. :wink:
These are just some of my experiences with my long love affair with the 45-70. They are neither fish nor fowl, and sometimes the experiments yeild odd results. But then, sometimes when one goes to remove a hook from a yellow perch, the eyeball of the fish kinda pops out at ya and that's odd too :lol:
Coug
