Advice/recommendations on deer load for Hawken 50cal

Trying to dial in a good deer load for my Hawken's Woodsman 50cal.

I'm using .490 ball and Wonder Patches .015.

My indoor range is only a 25yd so I've played with different loads at different shoots but wondered what y'all have had experience with that is a good whitetail load.

In my one TC .50 Hawken 80 grains of 3F was my hunting load. In the same gun 50 grains at 25 and 50 yards and 70 at 100 for target work, it doesn’t take much to punch a hole in a piece of paper. That being said, even with 50 grains I wouldn’t go out there and stand with a catchers mitt. But those were the loads that grouped best. When shooting/sighting the rifle, after 80 grains the group size grew to big for my preference. If the accuracy went out at 70, I would have hunted with that.

Back in the day my brother owned a CVA mountain rifle (15/16ths" across the flats barrel) that was his only long gun. His best load was 90 gr ffg and a Crisco lubed patch w/a .490 rb load that he won a blue ribbon with at 100 yards benched at the local shoot. I don't know what patch/thickness he wound up settling on, but I know he used a denim patch for a while. I know that load would put venison on the table. At about 25-28 yards the bullet impact should be about the same as at 100 yards due to bullet drop, etc. Work up a load that is accurate at 25 yards and it should give you a starting place when you can get to a longer range. Good luck and smoke!

For deer, anywhere from 60 to 100gr would work good. Just use the one that produces the best accuracy in that range.

Boomerang said:

For deer, anywhere from 60 to 100gr would work good. Just use the one that produces the best accuracy in that range.

Click to expand...

Ditto

I agree but would also maybe start at 55 gr and go up to 120. That said I would also try 2f And 3f and certainly a few more lubes and patch thicknesses. Shot placement is the key to a bagging trophy deer (which is a deer in the freezer). .50 cal well placed with as low as 55 gr and yer done with the easy part.

Every rifle has it druthers so find em and shoot his eye out! (jk, I always try to hit chest no matter the range)

I dropped a number of deer with 100 grains but long ago decided that was too much despite the fine accuracy. Currently 70 grains of 3F is really great for up to 100 yards and that is what I use.

I shoot 100 grains Swiss 3F and mutton tallow patch lube. Awesome!

Deer are not hard to kill. Anything that gives good, or even fair, accuracy at 50-100 yards will do the job. For reference, early on I found anything over 65 grains with my .45 cal prb ruined too much meat for my liking. (blood shot)

My TC Hawken with 70 gr. of 3F puts them on the ground DRT if I do my part. Accuracy is around 2" @ 50 yards, which is about as good as I can do with iron sights anymore. I'm still experimenting with lubes/patches, but I don't see any reason to try to "magnumize" a .50 cal. for whitetails.

I went to several shows this year, including Dixon's. What I observed was the 70 and 90 grain powder measures were in short supply.

The old "rule of thumb" that I was taught was, "Start out with a load equal in grains to the caliber; work up from there, until a companion standing off to the side of you at about 10 yards when you shoot can hear the "crack" of the rifle." In your case that means start at 50 grains, BUT ending when the rifle starts to "crack" when shot means just over supersonic speed which is around 1100 fps. Most of us I think would agree that is a bit slow for taking a deer with a .50 (of course range is part of the equation too), but a little faster would likely be better.

The "wait for a crack" portion I think is a leftover from when powder might have been scarce, or even perhaps from The Great Depression of the 1930's and the cost of every shot counted very much. Besides with an indoor range you can't really do part-II of the old rule.

In my case, I defaulted into my load. In my state the legal minimum load for a rifle when hunting deer with a muzzle loader is 60 grains, regardless of caliber. I thought that if the game warden stopped me and decided to check my home made powder measure (I was going to make one out of a turkey wing bone), I wanted to be sure if he goofed a little on the pour of the powder that there would be no way he'd come up with under 60 grains. So I tried 70 grains of 3Fg. It shot well, and if a pound of powder = 7000 grains, then I'd expect roughly 100 shots per pound. It shot well in my .50 and in my .54, and at 110 yards I found it would put a .530 ball through and through a 90 lb. doe standing broadside to me..., so that's what I use.

For the calibers from ..50 -.58 some folks like the 60 grain load, some like 70, some like 80, some like it at 90...and some like something else in between 60-90...., if it hits where you aim and cleanly, humanely harvests the deer, you're good.

LD

80gr 2F Goex, 50 cal roundball, drylubed pillow ticking patch. Had a complete pass thru on a good sized doe this past Monday, who ran 30 yards and dropped dead.

I use. 015 patch with 60 grains of 3F Goex and a .490 PRB. Works great on mid MO whitetail.