So... yesterday being Friday and me only having to haul one load of logs out of the woods I had some time to kill when I got home. I had my boss bring his two TC Hawken 45 Caliber rifles over to the camper and I went through them to see which one would be the best to experiment with. Both are pretty much identical and very well put together although they've been collecting dust for a while. I made sure they weren't loaded and then patched out the bores and basically dusted them.
I loaded up a PRB using patches that his father had left over, blue striped pre-lubed pillow ticking I'm guess is .017-.018. The loading with these really wasn't too much of an issue although getting the ball started tooks some umph. The first two rounds were at 25 yards using 70gr 2f and she shot pretty good. I then upped the powder to 90gr 2f and proceeded to walk her into the bulls eye at 40 yards, I'm pretty impressed although my shoulder is thinking I'm going back into shotgunning.
Unfortunately it was getting kind of dark but I mixed up a 1/2 pound jar of Tannerite and we were going for the money shot that would scare the cows but neither one of us could hit the thing at 40/50 yards in the failing light although I did manage to actually shoot the lid off the thing without tipping it over on the second shot. I couldn't do that again if you paid me.
I figure we'll put the gun back into service again this afternoon when chores are done and see if we can actually make a 1/2 pound of Tannerite explode with a round ball. I did notice last evening while shooting at that thing that even if you did hit it you'd only know because of the explosion, with all the smoke that 90gr of powder puts out the target is simply invisible after the gun goes off. My wife was impressed by the smoke laying down in the grass even five minutes after the gun was fired.
Thanks for the help guys. Now more than ever I want to put one of these things together.
