GP Hunter Loading Problem

[jbricejr]

I recently bought a Lyman Great Plains Hunter (conical shooter) in 50 cal. I've been shooting the Great Plains bullet in it, and have found that after the first shot it is very hard to get a second bullet down the barrel. Is this normal? Do you have to clean between every shot? I have been cleaning with just hot soapy water. I'm wondering if I may not be getting it completely clean, even though the water seems to get it clean quick. I've also shot TC Maxi-Balls out of it, same problem. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks for any advice.

 

[GaCop]

I recently bought a Lyman Great Plains Hunter (conical shooter) in 50 cal. I've been shooting the Great Plains bullet in it, and have found that after the first shot it is very hard to get a second bullet down the barrel. Is this normal? Do you have to clean between every shot? I have been cleaning with just hot soapy water. I'm wondering if I may not be getting it completely clean, even though the water seems to get it clean quick. I've also shot TC Maxi-Balls out of it, same problem. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks for any advice.

Try swabbing the bore between shots with 91% Isopropal alcohol. The alcohol will cut through the crud making loading the next shot easier. Just use one wet patch down the bore once and pull it back out. I use a second dry patch to make sure the bore is dry and then load. :thumbsup:

Tom

 

[jbricejr]

Thanks GAcop, I'll try that. Is the problem simply one of powder fouling, or is it possible that my bullets are leaving some lead residue, and if so should I be using a solvent in addition to the hot water when I do a thorough cleaning? It seems to me that I've read somewhere that muzzleloader velocities are typically low enough to minimize bullet residue accumulation, but then I think I read somewhere else where a guy was cleaning his GP Hunter rifle and used a solvent and got all sorts of lead crud out of it.

 

[Blake]

I do what GaCop says but you might try hollow base Lyman 425 grain Minie my GP Hunter shoots awesome I can shoot 8 to 10 times before I swab my barrel.

 

[Spikebuck]

I think that having to swab much more often is one of the disadvantages of conicals vs the patched roundball. I have probably shot 50/50 between conicals and PRB, and generally three shots without swabbing was about all I could get using conicals.

When you clean, if you think you're getting leading, you can use JB bore paste. After shooting conicals I can clean the barrel as normal with hot soapy water and when the patch comes out clean go in with a patch-load of JB and it's just black again. I don't use it everytime I clean, but a couple times a year I give the conical shooters a good cleaning with JB.

 

[William O.]

I think swabbing between shots is going to help a great deal and you shouldn't have anymore problems. Swabbing is just that, down and up with an alcohol dampened cleaning patch around your cleaning jag, you don't want to try and clean the bore, just remove some or most of the powder fouling but not all and the alcohol patch does that pretty well. A little fouling is going to provide resistance to seal things and also help keep the bullet seated on the powder charge. I've found that the addition of a lubed fiber wad such as the Wonderwads to increase the accuracy of conicals out of my GPH barrel. You might also try the Lee REAL bullet which was extremely accurate out of my GPH barrel. It did need 95 grains of 3f Goex to do it's best, which is not an all day plinking load to say the least but it would cloverleaf the target at 75 yards. I didn't get good accuracy from the Great Plains conical though, and IME they are better suited to slightly slower twist barrels like the 1:48 Trade Rifle.

 

[Misfit-45]

Well, You have my sympathies. I just went through the same trouble with my GP Hunter. The bullet I was casting was .503. The bore of the rifle is .502. The Lyman book says the rifling is supposed to "engrave" the conical as it being loaded. In my humble and not so experienced opinion, that's a bunch of hogwash. Your barrel needs to be spotless in order not to break your wooden ram rod. (I use a fiberglass rod now)
After much discussion on this forum and one other, my solution was to buy a Lee re-sizing kit in .501. I was worried that the smaller bullet would not expand sufficiently to properly engage the rifling. Not a problem. The rifling on the Hunter is shallow so it doesn't take much for the lead to engage. After sizing, in a clean barrel, the bullet goes down like a good minie ball. After progressive shots it gets tighter. Using 80 grains of Goex and Bore Butter to lube the conical, the bullet gets a little too tight after about 5 shots. Once a simple swab of a wet cleaning patch followed by a couple of dry patches, you're ready to go again. My groups have improved significantly! You can decide what works the best for you. Maybe swab every other round. Suffice it to say that now, shooting is fun again. It's flat out embarrassing having to hammer the ram rood down in order to seat a bullet. I feel your pain. Hope this helps.
Marv

 

[George T.]

PRB shooter here and I wipe lightly between shots. I have never seen the wisdon of trying to get a lot of shots between wipeings. GGeo. T.

 

[GaCop]

PRB shooter here and I wipe lightly between shots. I have never seen the wisdon of trying to get a lot of shots between wipings. GGeo. T.

+1 :thumbsup:

Tom

 

[Rat Trapper]

Must have something to do with where a person lives and the weather. I can shoot PRB or conical without wiping when using bore butter. Doesn't matter if I am using Triple Seven or Goex, don't have to wipe when using the bore butter. This is with GM and TC barrels.

 

[Captjoel]

I own a percussion rifle made in Italy by I believe the same company that makes the Lyman GPR & Hunter. This is a side lock with a chrome lined fast twist barrel for conical bullets. In my opinion these hunting rifles were designed stricktly for the hunt. They are a PITA at the target range due to the problems mentioned above with 2nd and progessive reloading. On my rifle that I bought new, if you look very closely at the rifling you will see very small cross grooves cut in the grooves of the rifling. These are tiny lines that are cuts all along the groove channels. I asked a dealer about this years ago and he said it was what the manufacturer called "micro groove" rifling. I have found that it is these tiny micro grooves are the cause of first shot fowling. Even with bore buttered prb's vs conicals, reloading is so difficult that a cleaning between shots is demanded or a hammer to drive the next bullet home. A very poor design IMHO and experience.

 

[Lonegun1894]

The guy who told you that that is microgroove rifling either misunderstood you or flat out lied to you. "Microgroove" is a series of many very narrow lands usually ised in some modern guns but it is twisted like standard rifling and rotates from the breech to the muzzle. And when I say many, I'm talking (and I apologize for dragging modern guns into this) more along the lines like my Marlin 336 which has 10-12 lands IIRC as opposed to the standard 4-6 much wider lands of the vast majority of other brands. I have seen the crossways machining marks in a couple of guns in the past, and put them down and went to find a properly made gun of whatever type I was looking for.

 

[GaCop]

Thanks GAcop, I'll try that. Is the problem simply one of powder fouling, or is it possible that my bullets are leaving some lead residue, and if so should I be using a solvent in addition to the hot water when I do a thorough cleaning? It seems to me that I've read somewhere that muzzleloader velocities are typically low enough to minimize bullet residue accumulation, but then I think I read somewhere else where a guy was cleaning his GP Hunter rifle and used a solvent and got all sorts of lead crud out of it.

Combustion crud is your main problem. That's why swabbing between shots helps the loading process. I've pushed conicals prety hard in my .50 cal CVA Hawken and have yet to see any lead fouling while using bore butter for a lube, YMMV. :v

Tom

 

[nkbj]

If you can see tiny marks perpendicular to the path of the bullet there are two probable sources. Inside the rifling grooves is probably due to the swaging head going bump-bump-bump during the forming of rifling grooves. On the faces of the lands is most probably from the reaming of the bore, prior to cutting of the grooves.

 

[jbricejr]

Thanks to all who provided info on this topic, but I'm still having problems. I'm encouraged by Misfit's success, as it sounds like he was having the exact same problem with the same gun (50 cal GPH). Swabbing with alcohol just didn't work for me GaCop, not sure why, still extremely tight. Cleaning with hot water after the first shot was better, but that's a pretty thorough cleaning and interestingly even then I could notice that the second ball was a little harder to seat than the first. I then tried butch's bore shine and had better luck, with each subsequent shot seating about like the first one, but that was with a pretty thorough cleaning that wouldn't be practical when needing to reload after shooting at game. I'm noticing that there's a lot of hard junk on my first couple of cleaning patches. I'm only up to about 50 rounds through the gun so maybe it will settle down and start grouping soon, but boxes of GP Bullets aren't cheap so I think I'll spring for a mold and start casting my own. Trying to decide between the Lee REAL and the Lyman Plains bullet. Bull3540 I will try the wonderwads, thanks for that tip.

BTW, I can see the perpendicular striations on my rifling that some have mentioned. Is this death to the barrel or will they smooth up over time (I'm wondering if that is why my fouling is so bad)? I did lap the barrel with steel wool, about 200 strokes. Might that help with problem and should I give it some more of that treatment? Spikebuck mentioned JB's and I'm wondering if I should give that a try.

Any additional wisdom would be appreciated guys. I had a CVA mountain rifle in the 70s when I was a teenager and it was a good RB shooter, but I sold it in the early 80s when I got interested in other things. I experimented (unsuccessfully) with a Mississippi in the 90s, then bought a nice flintlock, but then life got complicated again and I haven't shot it enough to come up with a tack driving recipe. I want to get this GPH shooting good with a big conical so I can use it for elk, then go back to my flinter and get it figured out. It's nice to be back into BP again at 53. I'm extremely impressed by the knowledge of the folks on this forum.

 

[bigted]

Thanks to all who provided info on this topic, but I'm still having problems. I'm encouraged by Misfit's success, as it sounds like he was having the exact same problem with the same gun (50 cal GPH). Swabbing with alcohol just didn't work for me GaCop, not sure why, still extremely tight. Cleaning with hot water after the first shot was better, but that's a pretty thorough cleaning and interestingly even then I could notice that the second ball was a little harder to seat than the first. I then tried butch's bore shine and had better luck, with each subsequent shot seating about like the first one, but that was with a pretty thorough cleaning that wouldn't be practical when needing to reload after shooting at game. I'm noticing that there's a lot of hard junk on my first couple of cleaning patches. I'm only up to about 50 rounds through the gun so maybe it will settle down and start grouping soon, but boxes of GP Bullets aren't cheap so I think I'll spring for a mold and start casting my own. Trying to decide between the Lee REAL and the Lyman Plains bullet. Bull3540 I will try the wonderwads, thanks for that tip.

BTW, I can see the perpendicular striations on my rifling that some have mentioned. Is this death to the barrel or will they smooth up over time (I'm wondering if that is why my fouling is so bad)? I did lap the barrel with steel wool, about 200 strokes. Might that help with problem and should I give it some more of that treatment? Spikebuck mentioned JB's and I'm wondering if I should give that a try.

Any additional wisdom would be appreciated guys. I had a CVA mountain rifle in the 70s when I was a teenager and it was a good RB shooter, but I sold it in the early 80s when I got interested in other things. I experimented (unsuccessfully) with a Mississippi in the 90s, then bought a nice flintlock, but then life got complicated again and I haven't shot it enough to come up with a tack driving recipe. I want to get this GPH shooting good with a big conical so I can use it for elk, then go back to my flinter and get it figured out. It's nice to be back into BP again at 53. I'm extremely impressed by the knowledge of the folks on this forum.

I too took a tour thru life for several years away from the pleasure of muzzleloading guns into the "other" types of fire arms. the whole experience has given me a rounded knowledge of some tricks and possible fix's for 'stuff'

I "fixed" a newer Marlin that had these machining marks in the bore and am very impressed with the success of the work.

take a soft boolit and attach your screw to the middle of the boolit. shove this down the barrel to engrave the rifling in it along with copious greese to keep from attaching lead to the small machining valleys. now buy some "clover" valve grinding compound...[fine not coarse]...and slather it on your slug. now shove it in and pull it back out with the your ramrod attached to the boolit that is slathered with the compound. continue this "polishing" until the small machining marks are gone and shiny smooth. make another "boolit" in same fasion if the first didn't do the whole job. continue to slather the boolit with compound when it fails to have that sound that indicates it is doing its job of removing very small amounts of metal with each pass. don't get in a hurry and only scrub in this fashion till you achieve the smooth barrel that you desire. the polishing is going to be a job but well worth the effort after you get it smooth.

now after a thorough cleaning to remove all the valve grinding compound from all the crevices and breech plug/chamber area. now shoot several paper patched boolits or dry cloth covered balls thru it with no lube on the paper or cloth and this will deliver a sparkling clean and ultra smooth barrel that will clean like a wiz and not accumulate fouling like your current barrel does.

a side note here is that you can shoot paper patched boolits and with good cleaning between shots you will accomplish the same thing...a very smooth barrel that will be a pleasure to deal with.... :thumbsup:

 

[nkbj]

IdahoJohn,
Powder fouling requires something to make it soft. There are different techniques that can be used with various circumstances when loading greased or paper patched bullets.
Sometimes a good way to go is to load a lube cookie over the powder so that lube residue assists in keeping the fouling soft. I've used the lube cookie and then when reloading run a dry patch through the bore after the powder charge to push the fouling down to the powder charge (thus clearing the bore where it needed clearing), and then completing the process of loading. This technique largely duplicates the copious amounts of lube present on hollow based bullets and can be used to advantage when using paper patches in more energetic loads as water is not introduced that would be injurious to the strength of the patch.
Another means that may be employed is to damp patch the bore prior to loading the powder charge, or after, with or without an over powder card.
Have no idea how far down that trail you have traveled but hope that helps.

 

[nit wit]

Bigted nailed it :thumbsup:
Nit Wit