Some years back, I found a .45 CVA "Frontier" rifle at a local pawnshop for $60. It was a kit-gun that the previous owner had never finished.
I added a few missing parts, some 'medicine' tacks and refinished the stock.
I had taken deer in the past with my other .45s, but with Maxi's and saboted rounds only.
I worked-up a decent PRB load for the 'Frontier' rifle: 59 gns of FFF 777 under a .445 roundball with a .015 Oxyoke patch... clocked abt 1800 fps and a 40 yd zero put me just-low at 100. Accuracy seemed up-to-the-mark.
I figured it was abt a 50 yd set-up. Those .45 roundballs run kinda' light.
Friday morning, I'd quit the blind and started walking back home. I came up on this cull-buck at abt 40 yds. (I'd caught some game-cam pictures of him before and made up my mind that he didn't need to be breeding our does)
The shot looked good, he swapped-ends and ran away, flag down. Plenty of blood where he'd stood, more on the ground along the way, he'd ran abt 70 yds before he piled-up.
First RB deer for me and a clean kill. If you'd been there, you would been an astonished witness to my rendition of the "Happy Pilgrim" dance!
Not much to look at, weighed 90 lbs on the game scale, but with crab-claw horns like these, I figured he needed to be taken out:
He was quartered toward me at the shot, and it looked as though the ball didn't exit.
The RB had broken the shoulder going in, got at least one lung, knocked a chunk out of the heart, slipped between the ribs and sat under the hide on the exit side. Penetration totalled abt 12".
When I saw that bone had been hit, I figured that the ball would have just blown to pieces. Was pleasantly surprised to see that the ball had remained reasonably intact, flattened out to abt .75, and had lost less than a grain in weight (weighed 133 gns leaving the muzzle, weighed just over 132 after recovery).
Not bad performance from an 'obsolete' projectile!
Now it's time to go out after a trophy, so far, so good!
(Signing off with a Happy Pilgrim Dance)
Skillet
