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Old Stumpy
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Please do! Many thanks for the information so far.
Old Time Reloading Advice for .44-40 Black Powder Cartridges
- Thread starter Old Stumpy
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Please do! Many thanks for the information so far.
Cowhide Cliff
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My wife shoots smokeless and we run .427 in her 44-40 guns because her pistol is older Navy Arms Schofield with .427 bore. Those same rounds shoot accurate in her Uberti rifles which is .429 bore. I'm sure they would do fine in a Miroku.
Driftwood Johnson
Member
OK, where was I?
We have talked about groove diameters, let's talk about Black Powder bullets and bullet lube now.
The purpose of bullet lube on smokeless bullets is to cut down on friction as the bullet travels through the bore. This helps keep the temperature of the bullet below the melting point of the lead and helps prevent leading or smearing of lead in the bore. Black Powder bullet lube has an added requirement other than just lubricating the bore. Black Powder bullet lube has to be soft and gooey to keep the fouling in the bore soft. Without a good Black Powder bullet lube, the fouling in the bore will tend to build up as a hard, crusty layer, quickly filling the rifling grooves and ruining accuracy. Hard BP fouling in the bore is also difficult to scrub out when cleaning time comes around. We will talk about cleaning up after shooting Black Powder later.
Which brings me to another point. Black Powder bullets must carry enough lube on them to keep the bore coated with lube for its entire length. If the bullet does not carry enough soft lube to keep the bore of a rifle coated with lube for its entire length, the bore will become starved for lube for the last six inches of so of the length of the bore and hard fouling will begin to build up for the last six inches of the bore. Accuracy will suffer. As the bullet travels down the bore it sheds lube into the bore. Then the next bullet comes along and pushes the fouling and lube left behind by the last bullet ahead of it and out the muzzle, leaving its own lube behind. The cycle gets repeated for every shot.
I took a look at that Lee .429-200-RF bullet and I have to tell you I doubt it will carry enough lube to keep the bore of a rifle lubed its entire length. It would probably work fine for the shorter barrel of a revolver, but I suspect you will begin to have hard fouling building up near the muzzle with that bullet. I went through all this years ago. There were several bullets on the market advertised as Black Powder bullets. They all had two narrow, shallow lube grooves just like that one. When loaded into my Black Powder 44-40 cartridges they all fell short and hard fouling built up near the muzzle.
This can be moderated by the Black Powder you choose. If you use regular Goex, which leaves more fouling behind than some other brands of Black Powder, you will experience more fouling in the bore than with some other brands of Black Powder. In the 19th Century there were different grades of Black Powder. Some was advertised as Rifle powder, some was advertised as Musket powder. Rifle powder tended to burn cleaner than musket powder. The old metal cans of Goex claimed it was Black Rifle Powder. Not really, Goex is more like a musket powder, it leaves more fouling behind than some of the better brands of powder.
The reason I use Schuetzen is because it uses a better type of charcoal than Goex and creates a little bit less fouling than Goex for about the same price (that $5 price on that can of Goex is a really, really old price, don't expect to buy BP for that price). As I mentioned earlier, Schuetzen uses the same buckthorne alder charcoal that Swiss uses. If you choose to use Swiss brand Black Powder, which is more expensive, you will probably do better using a bullet that does not carry as much lube as you will with Goex.
There are probably almost as many recipes for Black Powder bullet lube as there are Black Powder shooters.
When I was pan lubing my BP bullets I was using a home made mixture of 50/50 Crisco and beeswax, a very common recipe. I bought beeswax in a local craft store I would break off a chunk of beeswax and melt it in a double boiler with a glob of Crisco. Nothing scientific about the measuring, I just tried to make the glob of Crisco about the same size as the chunk of beeswax. It is important melt them in a double boiler because it is a flammable mixture, and you don't want it to get too hot. Nothing fancy about my double boiler either. I took a big pot and put it on the stove and put a smaller pot inside the big pot. I filled the big pot with as much water as it would hold and lit the flame under it. The water in the big pot kept the temperature in the little pot below the boiling point of water, so there would be no accidental ignition of the flammable mixture. Yes I bought a cheap pot for the little pot and dedicated it to making bullet lube. Mrs Johnson would not have appreciated me using one of her good pots.
You mentioned NRA lube from Dragon Lube. I have no experience with that stuff. Notice I used the technical terms soft and gooey to describe Black Powder lube. If the NRA Dragon stuff leaves a sticky residue on your hands when you handle it, it will be fine. If it does not leave a sticky residue behind, the results will be less than satisfactory.
When I was casting my own BP bullets and sizing them in my lubrisizer I used SPG lube, as shown in the earlier photo. SPG is a mixture that Steve Garbe came up with in 1983 after testing many different formulas for Black Powder bullet lube for Black Powder Cartridge Rifle (BPCR) competion. He and Mike Venturino formed a company and named it SPG to produce the lube commercially.
As I say, there are many different formulas for BP bullet lube, but SPG is probably the best known in Black Powder circles.
When I started experimenting with Black Powder cartridges about 20 years ago I was pan lubing regular commercial hard cast bullets for 45 Colt and 44-40. I would lay my bullets on a couple of sheets of paper towels on a cookie sheet and place them is an oven set at the lowest possible setting for about 1/2 hour. The hard, waxy bullet lube would melt and the paper towels would wick it away from the bullets. Then I would pan lube my bullets with my 50/50 mixture of Crisco and beeswax. As I said earlier, this was enough lube for a revolver barrel, but not enough for a rifle barrel. At a CAS match I would swab out my barrel with my favorite water based Black Powder solvent after a few stages to swab the hard fouling out of the last six inches of the bore and restore accuracy. This worked fine, but I knew there was a better way. This lead to all the experiments with lube cookies that you may have heard of. A disk of lube material seated between the bullet and the powder to add soft lube to the cartridge. A thin card wad was placed between the powder and the lube cookie so the lube would not adulterate the powder, particularly in hot weather. I discovered that the soft lube cookie was ruining accuracy because it was getting glued to the base of the bullet, causing the bullet to fly like a lopsided dart. So then I added another card between the lube cookie and the base of the bullet. This worked but it was way too much work.
Then I discovered the Big Lube bullets. Dick Rhody, known as Dick Dastardly in CAS circles, started selling Big Lube bullet molds quite a while ago. The Big Lube series of bullets have one very deep and very wide lube groove. When fired, the lead at the waist of the bullet compresses slightly and the lube gets squeezed out onto the bore, leaving the longest rifle barrel coated with soft, gooey lube for its entire length. I started casting my own bullets with Dick's molds. I sized and lubed them with SPG. Life was good. No more stuffing cookies and wads into my cartridges, I simply dumped in the powder and seated and crimped my bullets.
https://www.biglube.com/Default.aspx
Here is a photo of the Big Lube bullets I use in my Black Powder cartridges. Left to right they are the 190 grain Big Lube 38-40 bullet, the 200 grain 44 Mav-Dutchman bullet, the J/P 45-200 200 grain bullet that I designed, and the 250 grain 45 PRS bullet, one of the first Big Lube designs. No, I do not get any kickbacks from the J/P 45-200, I designed it when the only option for 45 Colt was the 250 grain PRS, and I wanted a lighter bullet for 45 Schfield cartridges in my 1858 cartridge conversion Remington revolvers. The other two bullets are not Big Lube bullets, the big one is a 405 grain 45-70 bullet with lots of small lube grooves, and the last on on the right is one of my pan lubed hard cast bullets. Notice how tiny the lube groove is.
Here is a photo of the Black Powder cartridges I load. Left to right they are 44 Russian, 45 Schofield, 38-40, 44-40, 45 Colt, and 45-70. All except the 45-70 use Big Lube bullets.
At the left in this photo are a Mav-Dutchman 44 caliber bullet with and without lube, showing how huge the lube groove is and a loaded 44-40 round. At the right are a PRS 45 Caliber 250 grain bullet and a loaded 45 Colt round.
At the left in this photo are some of my 44-40 rounds, at the right are some of my 44 Russian rounds. They all use the Mav-Dutchman Big Lube bullet. I size all my Mav-Dutchman bullets to .428. The 44 Russian rounds are fired in antique Smith and Wesson Top Break revolvers.
This is one half of my Mav-Dutchman mold. The Big Lube molds are all six cavity. Dick Dastardly used to get the molds made up by Lee, but he has gone to a different supplier more recently.
I believe I stated earlier that I no longer cast my own bullets, the lead count in my blood is too high. Now I buy all my Big Lube bullets from Whyte Leatherworks. He custom sizes all my Mav-Dutchmans to .428 when I order them. He uses his own recipe for his BP bullet lube, whatever it is it works just as well as SPG.
http://www.whyteleatherworks.com/BigLube.html
How soft should a BP bullet be? I have no idea what the Brinell hardness should be. My rule of thumb is if I can jab my thumbnail into the bullet, it is soft enough.
When I was casting my own Mav-Dutchmans I was casting them from pure lead. Pure lead shrinks more when it cools than lead with a little bit of tin added. My Mav-Dutchman mold is cut a little bit big, when they cooled my pure lead bullets were .430 - .432 in diameter. I was sizing them down to .427 at the time. I was casting my PRS 250 grain 45s with a mixture of about 30/1 Lead/Tin. They dropped out of my mold at .454 - .455, so I did not need them to shrink any further. I was sizing them to .452 for my 45 Colt revolvers.
There is a limit to how much you can size a cast bullet. If you size it down too much, you start wiping away some of the surface features. Like crimp grooves. My rule of thumb was to not size my bullets down much more than a few thousandths.
One more thing. This is a 'lube star' on the muzzle of a rifle barrel. This means your bullet is carrying enough lube to keep the bore coated with soft lube for its full length. The lube star is created when a bit of the lube remaining on the bullet as it exits the bore is squirted out onto the face of the muzzle. Notice the lube star follows the pattern of the rifling, with more squirted out where the grooves are than where the lands are. If you have a lube star on your muzzle after firing a few rounds, you have enough lube on your bullets. If you don't have a lube star, your bullets are probably not carrying enough soft, BP compatible bullet lube.
That's pretty much it for bullets and lube. No, I do not get any Big Lube kickbacks, I just think they are terrific.
Next we will talk about primers, powder charges, crimping, and all that stuff, but it's time for lunch right now.
We have talked about groove diameters, let's talk about Black Powder bullets and bullet lube now.
The purpose of bullet lube on smokeless bullets is to cut down on friction as the bullet travels through the bore. This helps keep the temperature of the bullet below the melting point of the lead and helps prevent leading or smearing of lead in the bore. Black Powder bullet lube has an added requirement other than just lubricating the bore. Black Powder bullet lube has to be soft and gooey to keep the fouling in the bore soft. Without a good Black Powder bullet lube, the fouling in the bore will tend to build up as a hard, crusty layer, quickly filling the rifling grooves and ruining accuracy. Hard BP fouling in the bore is also difficult to scrub out when cleaning time comes around. We will talk about cleaning up after shooting Black Powder later.
Which brings me to another point. Black Powder bullets must carry enough lube on them to keep the bore coated with lube for its entire length. If the bullet does not carry enough soft lube to keep the bore of a rifle coated with lube for its entire length, the bore will become starved for lube for the last six inches of so of the length of the bore and hard fouling will begin to build up for the last six inches of the bore. Accuracy will suffer. As the bullet travels down the bore it sheds lube into the bore. Then the next bullet comes along and pushes the fouling and lube left behind by the last bullet ahead of it and out the muzzle, leaving its own lube behind. The cycle gets repeated for every shot.
I took a look at that Lee .429-200-RF bullet and I have to tell you I doubt it will carry enough lube to keep the bore of a rifle lubed its entire length. It would probably work fine for the shorter barrel of a revolver, but I suspect you will begin to have hard fouling building up near the muzzle with that bullet. I went through all this years ago. There were several bullets on the market advertised as Black Powder bullets. They all had two narrow, shallow lube grooves just like that one. When loaded into my Black Powder 44-40 cartridges they all fell short and hard fouling built up near the muzzle.
This can be moderated by the Black Powder you choose. If you use regular Goex, which leaves more fouling behind than some other brands of Black Powder, you will experience more fouling in the bore than with some other brands of Black Powder. In the 19th Century there were different grades of Black Powder. Some was advertised as Rifle powder, some was advertised as Musket powder. Rifle powder tended to burn cleaner than musket powder. The old metal cans of Goex claimed it was Black Rifle Powder. Not really, Goex is more like a musket powder, it leaves more fouling behind than some of the better brands of powder.
The reason I use Schuetzen is because it uses a better type of charcoal than Goex and creates a little bit less fouling than Goex for about the same price (that $5 price on that can of Goex is a really, really old price, don't expect to buy BP for that price). As I mentioned earlier, Schuetzen uses the same buckthorne alder charcoal that Swiss uses. If you choose to use Swiss brand Black Powder, which is more expensive, you will probably do better using a bullet that does not carry as much lube as you will with Goex.
There are probably almost as many recipes for Black Powder bullet lube as there are Black Powder shooters.
When I was pan lubing my BP bullets I was using a home made mixture of 50/50 Crisco and beeswax, a very common recipe. I bought beeswax in a local craft store I would break off a chunk of beeswax and melt it in a double boiler with a glob of Crisco. Nothing scientific about the measuring, I just tried to make the glob of Crisco about the same size as the chunk of beeswax. It is important melt them in a double boiler because it is a flammable mixture, and you don't want it to get too hot. Nothing fancy about my double boiler either. I took a big pot and put it on the stove and put a smaller pot inside the big pot. I filled the big pot with as much water as it would hold and lit the flame under it. The water in the big pot kept the temperature in the little pot below the boiling point of water, so there would be no accidental ignition of the flammable mixture. Yes I bought a cheap pot for the little pot and dedicated it to making bullet lube. Mrs Johnson would not have appreciated me using one of her good pots.
You mentioned NRA lube from Dragon Lube. I have no experience with that stuff. Notice I used the technical terms soft and gooey to describe Black Powder lube. If the NRA Dragon stuff leaves a sticky residue on your hands when you handle it, it will be fine. If it does not leave a sticky residue behind, the results will be less than satisfactory.
When I was casting my own BP bullets and sizing them in my lubrisizer I used SPG lube, as shown in the earlier photo. SPG is a mixture that Steve Garbe came up with in 1983 after testing many different formulas for Black Powder bullet lube for Black Powder Cartridge Rifle (BPCR) competion. He and Mike Venturino formed a company and named it SPG to produce the lube commercially.
As I say, there are many different formulas for BP bullet lube, but SPG is probably the best known in Black Powder circles.
When I started experimenting with Black Powder cartridges about 20 years ago I was pan lubing regular commercial hard cast bullets for 45 Colt and 44-40. I would lay my bullets on a couple of sheets of paper towels on a cookie sheet and place them is an oven set at the lowest possible setting for about 1/2 hour. The hard, waxy bullet lube would melt and the paper towels would wick it away from the bullets. Then I would pan lube my bullets with my 50/50 mixture of Crisco and beeswax. As I said earlier, this was enough lube for a revolver barrel, but not enough for a rifle barrel. At a CAS match I would swab out my barrel with my favorite water based Black Powder solvent after a few stages to swab the hard fouling out of the last six inches of the bore and restore accuracy. This worked fine, but I knew there was a better way. This lead to all the experiments with lube cookies that you may have heard of. A disk of lube material seated between the bullet and the powder to add soft lube to the cartridge. A thin card wad was placed between the powder and the lube cookie so the lube would not adulterate the powder, particularly in hot weather. I discovered that the soft lube cookie was ruining accuracy because it was getting glued to the base of the bullet, causing the bullet to fly like a lopsided dart. So then I added another card between the lube cookie and the base of the bullet. This worked but it was way too much work.
Then I discovered the Big Lube bullets. Dick Rhody, known as Dick Dastardly in CAS circles, started selling Big Lube bullet molds quite a while ago. The Big Lube series of bullets have one very deep and very wide lube groove. When fired, the lead at the waist of the bullet compresses slightly and the lube gets squeezed out onto the bore, leaving the longest rifle barrel coated with soft, gooey lube for its entire length. I started casting my own bullets with Dick's molds. I sized and lubed them with SPG. Life was good. No more stuffing cookies and wads into my cartridges, I simply dumped in the powder and seated and crimped my bullets.
https://www.biglube.com/Default.aspx
Here is a photo of the Big Lube bullets I use in my Black Powder cartridges. Left to right they are the 190 grain Big Lube 38-40 bullet, the 200 grain 44 Mav-Dutchman bullet, the J/P 45-200 200 grain bullet that I designed, and the 250 grain 45 PRS bullet, one of the first Big Lube designs. No, I do not get any kickbacks from the J/P 45-200, I designed it when the only option for 45 Colt was the 250 grain PRS, and I wanted a lighter bullet for 45 Schfield cartridges in my 1858 cartridge conversion Remington revolvers. The other two bullets are not Big Lube bullets, the big one is a 405 grain 45-70 bullet with lots of small lube grooves, and the last on on the right is one of my pan lubed hard cast bullets. Notice how tiny the lube groove is.
Here is a photo of the Black Powder cartridges I load. Left to right they are 44 Russian, 45 Schofield, 38-40, 44-40, 45 Colt, and 45-70. All except the 45-70 use Big Lube bullets.
At the left in this photo are a Mav-Dutchman 44 caliber bullet with and without lube, showing how huge the lube groove is and a loaded 44-40 round. At the right are a PRS 45 Caliber 250 grain bullet and a loaded 45 Colt round.
At the left in this photo are some of my 44-40 rounds, at the right are some of my 44 Russian rounds. They all use the Mav-Dutchman Big Lube bullet. I size all my Mav-Dutchman bullets to .428. The 44 Russian rounds are fired in antique Smith and Wesson Top Break revolvers.
This is one half of my Mav-Dutchman mold. The Big Lube molds are all six cavity. Dick Dastardly used to get the molds made up by Lee, but he has gone to a different supplier more recently.
I believe I stated earlier that I no longer cast my own bullets, the lead count in my blood is too high. Now I buy all my Big Lube bullets from Whyte Leatherworks. He custom sizes all my Mav-Dutchmans to .428 when I order them. He uses his own recipe for his BP bullet lube, whatever it is it works just as well as SPG.
http://www.whyteleatherworks.com/BigLube.html
How soft should a BP bullet be? I have no idea what the Brinell hardness should be. My rule of thumb is if I can jab my thumbnail into the bullet, it is soft enough.
When I was casting my own Mav-Dutchmans I was casting them from pure lead. Pure lead shrinks more when it cools than lead with a little bit of tin added. My Mav-Dutchman mold is cut a little bit big, when they cooled my pure lead bullets were .430 - .432 in diameter. I was sizing them down to .427 at the time. I was casting my PRS 250 grain 45s with a mixture of about 30/1 Lead/Tin. They dropped out of my mold at .454 - .455, so I did not need them to shrink any further. I was sizing them to .452 for my 45 Colt revolvers.
There is a limit to how much you can size a cast bullet. If you size it down too much, you start wiping away some of the surface features. Like crimp grooves. My rule of thumb was to not size my bullets down much more than a few thousandths.
One more thing. This is a 'lube star' on the muzzle of a rifle barrel. This means your bullet is carrying enough lube to keep the bore coated with soft lube for its full length. The lube star is created when a bit of the lube remaining on the bullet as it exits the bore is squirted out onto the face of the muzzle. Notice the lube star follows the pattern of the rifling, with more squirted out where the grooves are than where the lands are. If you have a lube star on your muzzle after firing a few rounds, you have enough lube on your bullets. If you don't have a lube star, your bullets are probably not carrying enough soft, BP compatible bullet lube.
That's pretty much it for bullets and lube. No, I do not get any Big Lube kickbacks, I just think they are terrific.
Next we will talk about primers, powder charges, crimping, and all that stuff, but it's time for lunch right now.
Last edited:
JJFitch
Member
I've been shooting .427 225 grain SWC's, Precision Poly Coated in my 44 mag without issues, even hitting steel at 100 yards!
'sI have a few thousand of these for sale! Work well in both 44-40 and 44 Mag/Spl!
Anyone interested, these are 225 grain, .427, "Precision Poly Coated" SWC!
$55 per box of 500 shipped. I can provide additional information and photos.
Contact via PM .
Smiles,
JF
Last edited:
Here is a thread from another forum regarding the 44 WCF. The author, w44wcf, did a lot of research and documented most of it on that site and also on the cast bullet sight. He has since passed on, but, his work is still pertinent.
https://www.cascity.com/forumhall/index.php?topic=54292.0
Kevin
https://www.cascity.com/forumhall/index.php?topic=54292.0
Kevin
I initially started buying Kaido’s 240 grn version of the Lee 255 RF in my ROA. Later I was getting a Pietta NMA and was tired of paying $40/100 bullets plus shipping, especially when you can buy scrap lead for $1/lb. Figuring the Pietta had the slow 1:30 twist I felt I needed a short, short bullet, and being that I wanted to hunt with this I wanted a wide meplat and as much mass as I could get. Naturally out hunting if you need your pistol you won’t likely be shooting many and so I made my lube grooves fairly shallow. And what I found is it works great even through the 7.5” barrel all day long at the range. I couldn’t tell you if I get a “lube star” or not but I don’t think I’d benefit from any more lube than what it uses.
Here’s the 195 grn version:
http://accuratemolds.com/bullet_detail.php?bullet=45-195C-D.png
If I were to get a carbine I’d just use a lube cookie/lubed wad as well.
Here’s the 195 grn version:
http://accuratemolds.com/bullet_detail.php?bullet=45-195C-D.png
If I were to get a carbine I’d just use a lube cookie/lubed wad as well.
TheOutlawKid
Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2018
- Messages
- 1,480
Your custom bullet has a .10 inch wide lube groove which is fairly large considering most are about .04-.06 wide. So i think this helps with keeping fouling soft and barrel clean. You use Gatofeo #1 lube right? Correct me if im wrong.
TheOutlawKid
Member
- Joined
- May 31, 2018
- Messages
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Mr.rodwha..i too feel the same about lube grooves...i feel one wide groove does better than the two thin ones such as on lees bullet molds bullets
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