.69 Musket Balls

[smoothshooter]

I will soon finally have a .69 Miroku French flint musket.

What size ball mold(s) should I be ordering?
Inassume I will actually need to get two, one for patched ball, and paper cartridge loads, and another for shooting bare balls with wads.

 

[Grenadier1758]

I would wait to order any molds until I had the musket in hand and measured the bore before making big plans for firing a ball from your 69 caliber Miroku Musket. There is wide enough range of tolerance in bore sizes that from my side of the keyboard I would hesitate to make a suggestion. Certainly you want to shoot it as soon as you get it. You will serve yourself better and have a more satisfactory experience if you get a sample package of balls. There are several suppliers that offer sample sets of balls. You will want sizes from about 0.662" to 0.680". A few thousandths difference won't really matter. After all, this is a smoothbore. You might want wads and not necessarily limit yourself to paper or patches.

 

[tenngun]

And how do you want to shoot it? Military loads in paper cartridges used a smaller ball. Most accurate shots will need bigger, maybe, as sometimes folks can get great accuracy with with smaller. Smoothies are forgiving and several sizes may all work well.
You can patch the ball, wad the ball, shoot in cartridges and may need a different size to all.

 

[Enfield1]

I will soon finally have a .69 Miroku French flint musket.

What size ball mold(s) should I be ordering?
Inassume I will actually need to get two, one for patched ball, and paper cartridge loads, and another for shooting bare balls with wads.

I have a repro Armisport .69 '42 Springfield Smoothbore. I was shooting a .680 cast round ball from a Lyman mold and thought that I was getting good results. I downsized to a .662 Lyman mold and a ball wrapped in a newsprint paper cartridge with 90 grains of 2FG Powder and can't believe the improvement. I am getting almost rifle-like accuracy out to 70 or 80 yards while standing and loading from the cartridge box. My buck and ball loads are even giving much tighter patterns out to 40 yards. I wish you the best in your load work up.

 

[FlinterNick]

Depending on the production run, The Miruko Barrels were bored at .70 in the 1970’s and then down to .689 in the 1980’s, in any matter.... I own a miruko Charleville, I use a .65 and .66 ball for paper cartridges with 90 grains 2F in each.

I don’t often patch load them with a .678 or .68 ball only because the gun shots very accurate with an undersized ball.

Buck and Ball; 6 28 cal balls with a .65 ball.

My cartridge is a .65 ball with 90 grains rolled in cooking parchment with ball end greased. I tie the round off waxed thread.

The trick is in the paper used for the cartridges. I use cooking parchment because it doesn’t stick to the fouling and swabs the bore with each new round rammed in.