round ball fit for smooth bores

I never thought of coffee filters, they're probably cut to just the right size too.

Would a slightly undersize ball like a .685 get difficult to load, given theres no lube on the ball to keep the fouling soft? I found my bore gets crusty real quick just using dry ball and a paper wad.

I'm honestly surprised no one casts balls with a "lube groove" , any way it goes in , the lube will do its job when fired.

FlinterNick said:

Crazy wadding experiments.

I tried a wasp nest, this actually worked pretty well.

Corn meal, smelly and messy once burnt.

cotton balls... huge mistake. Took me a month to clean out a smoothbore.

Coffee Filters... works best in my smoothbore muskets.

Pulled husk twine, works great, a real pain to unravel twine.

wax paper, and parchment works great.

crushed up rotted wood. hard to get the right consistency.

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I like this time of year when the leaves ajre just right as they fall. Still a bit supple but not so much they crumble to dust

Stantheman86 said:

I never thought of coffee filters, they're probably cut to just the right size too.

Would a slightly undersize ball like a .685 get difficult to load, given theres no lube on the ball to keep the fouling soft? I found my bore gets crusty real quick just using dry ball and a paper wad.

I'm honestly surprised no one casts balls with a "lube groove" , any way it goes in , the lube will do its job when fired.

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I've wrapped them with the thicker brown coffee filters and a .678 ball, works pretty good for clean shots, after 2 or 3 not so well.

It works best in a Brown Bess .75 or .77.

Cooking parchment greased also works very well, its a durable paper and doesn't stick after several shots.

For grease I use lip balm, Burts bees.

I was just thinking a small coffee filter stuffed down on top of a loose ball might be the way to go

I have to go out of state for real black powder. So I mostly use pyrodex, never had a problem but corrosion sucks worse the black.

What about a gauze pad.

I've just been using newspaper in roughly 4" square sheets , accuracy is the same as with paper cartridges

However it sometimes does come out of the barrel and burn on the ground , a factor to consider if the grass is dry. I've had to walk out and step on a few little smoldering papers.

I have a yorkie that I get a bag of hair off each time I brush him. Mixed it with mink oil and made wads of that. Shot well, but if you didn’t hit the critter you was aiming at the smell knocked it unconscious. Unfortunately me too

I was shooting for a kid's outdoor day and loading quite often. I finally wet down some TOW cleaning patches with number 13 just for demonstration purposes. Got great accuracy with my .62 Fowler and a . 610 ball. Works good with Wonder Lube as well. Never know what works best for you til you stumble across it.

I paper cartridge a 0.648" ball with 2-1/2 wraps and a wax dip in a 0.662" for a snug fit.

Stantheman86 said:

Using super tight patches and balls in a smoothie usually gives no gain, there's only so much you'll get accuracy wise.

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Agreed! My ‘standby patched’ load for smoothies uses an albeit ‘thin’ 0.010” patch of tightly woven Homespun material. Thin - yes, but have never had a burn through and one Winter day, w/ 1” of fresh snow on the range, I recovered and re-shot the same patch 7 times ... just to prove to myself that the patching was adequate for the task.

Now the other day, I was working up a load for a new smoothie I just completed, the bore measures a tad larger than my other 62s, so I tried some pillow ticking patching. They were significantly harder to load, barrel had to be scrubbed every other shot or loaded w/ a metal range rod and they only shot 6” groups at 50-yrds.

Tried my ‘ol standy’ Homespun patching for the next groups ... loaded easy, fired 5 in a row with easy loading and presto - 3” group at 50Y.

The one thing you have to stick to, if it works, keep doing it

I have guns, both front stuffers and modern stuff , that it's taken me years in some cases to get around to finding that magical combination that gets them to shoot.



I mean this isn't really a good "group" but I shot this target last week from a standing, unrested position at 100 yards with my Pedersoli 1816 Springfield with 100 gr of 2f, a .648 bare ball with pieces of phone book paper rammed on top. It does a little better with paper cartridges.

I'm about to get a GoPro camera and shoot at 100, maybe even 200 to show people who refuse to let this myth die that a smoothbore musket can't hit anything at 100 yards and if you do it's "purely by chance" . This is BS spread by movies and Wikipedia.


I shot these at 50 and I know I can do better, but if i could move the group on the right target over a few inches and down I'd be OK with that.

I can't get away from masking paper for my cartridges because it works, I don't want to mess with it. Rag Paper is too thick.

I usually load just a tight-patched round ball. I have found that loose or unpatched loads result in a LOT of fouling. I use only wooden rods to load with a simple detergent-and-water lube; really wet. I can shoot this all day without having to field clean, and it is about as accurate as I can make it. I am convinced that the secret of smoothbore accuracy lies in getting the ball going as fast as possible, so that it gets to its destination before it slows and loses the sheath of highly compressed air which allows any minute unevenness on the ball to grab a bit of air, and go awry. (just think about how long a pitched ball goes straight before it grabs the air and curves or whatever). I like moose turds for wadding if I need it.

The greater the velocity the more accuracy was the findings of one French officer name of Journee ( A General I seem to recall).I shoot a 40cal matchlock smooth bore in MLAIC type' Tanagashima' events . Since this allows a large charge that drives the ball through the target before it has time to grasp that round balls arn't supposed to be accurate and with out the down side of uncomfortable recoiling . I used a card followed by wetted felts was swept home followed by a naked bore size ball the match being 13 shots in 30 minets standing . Rudyard

The French were pretty serious about their Musketry and marksmanship was stressed.

There's a guy on YouTube who uses something like a 140 gr 2f charge in a Brown Bess because he found that a stout load improves accuracy.

100 gr of 2f gives me all the accuracy I feel I need out of a .69 Smoothbore but I may try 100 gr of 3f, which equates to about 120 of 2f but may work better. A lot of the Skirmishers use 3f in their Smoothbores for matches. 100 gr of 2f with the round ball isn't even bad recoil-wise.

The you tube shooter might well get better accuracy.But at a cost of stressing the musket and a battering by recoil such as to render his best efforts nurgatory, Well at least as far as target shooting is concerned. If he where up against French or revolting Colonists it would be a different matter .The 16 bores do generally do better since proportionatly the ball is lighter and the gun at least as stout. Rudyard

flntlokr said:

I like moose turds for wadding if I need it.

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Big problem with that piece of knowledge, not many of us have a moose in the back yard....
Personally, if I had one, I would keep it in the freezer.

The 100 grain military charge is plenty for me, people do make the error of using 200 year old load data stating the British used some huge service charge for the Brown Bess , but powder was different back then and that load found handwritten in old log books equates to about 110 gr of Goex 2f, maybe 100 of Swiss.

100 grains of Goex OE 2f produces probably the peak accuracy that a .69 bore without rifling will produce for me. I'd probably gain more by filing sprues off round balls than upping the charge.

I also like 100 because it's a good, solid round number and I like to use the "proper " load in my military stuff. People say 3f is more equivalent to the high quality French "musket powder" of the 1700s so a 100 gr charge of 3f will have a bit more pop.

I’ve not ever heard that 3F was equal to French musket powder.
DuPont was disappointed with American powder, the US frigates were armed with 24lbs guns when most frigates had 12 or 18s, because powder was not as good as European and so had to carry bigger guns to make up for it.
I have read Swiss is a little hotter then GO, pyrodex is hotter per volume then GO.
Old Curtis Harvey powder took a big charge to equal GO, but when you got the same velocity you had much lower breech pressures.
Old Bess loads could be real high, I have read shooting ballistic pendulums with service muskets Brits recorded velocities up to 1700 fps. My Lyman ballistics book gets no where near that with GO and patched ball.
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