Scoped the .45-70 guns

[rfd]

Blackhound 1-6x24 LPVO on the H012GCC lever and an LR 4-16x44 for the H015-4570 break open. The lever's LPVO scope will eventually be removed and replaced with a Skinner receiver peep and a Lyman 17A front sight peep. The single Henry will be fed black powder paper patched cartridges (BP PPB) exclusively at distances out to and hopefully beyond 400 yards. Are we havin' fun .... yet?

[Travlin]

Having a Rolling Block 45-70 I am very interested to know how the paper patched loads work out. I thought that it took a special chamber for a rifle to be accurate with P.P loads.Please include the mould used.

[rfd]

PPB Cartridges 101

Paper patched bullets (PPBs) or slicks (bullets have lube grooves, slicks are smooth sided bullets with no lube grooves and are specifically meant for paper patching ... or powder coating), for either smokeless or black powder loads, are all chiefly about bullet/slick diameter and patching paper weight/thickness.

Smokeless powder PPB cartridges require that the bullet/slick is patched to the rifling groove diameter. Black powder (BP) PPB cartridge require that the bullet/slick is patched to fit snugly into the rifling and thus the final PPB diameter for a .450" bore is somewhere +/- .445" in patched diameter - this is a bore rider, and there is no need for cartridge OAL nor any need for ogive length. PPBs are paper jacketed projectiles and that eliminates bore leading - clean up with black or white powder is easy peasy.

PPBs require no special chambering to work well for either powder type load. Back in the mid to end of the 19th century PPBs were how most cartridges were built. Yes, chambers for PPBs were then, and can now, be special cut for bore rider PPBs. I've had several rifles in both falling and rolling back actions that were custom chambered for PPBs and greaser bullets would not chamber. Also, back in the day rifling was cut very shallow to between .004" and as low as .002" for PPB cartridges. Bottom line is that PPBs for modern rifles work quite well and I've won more than a few BPCR matches with .45-70 modern replicas of Sharps and Rem rollers that had greaser bullet chambers. Again, the key is all about what kind of powder used and the final diameter of the PPB. It's not that difficult to figure out if you can acquire a good mold that will drop tin:alloy bullets or slicks to an under bore diameter and then select a patch paper weight (thickness) that will patch up to barely under bore when the resulting PPB cartridge is chambered.

For a .450 bore .45-70 rifle, greasers (lubed bullets) will typically be well over bore, something like .459" diameter for cartridge loading. For creating smokeless powder PPBs I've used Lee .454" and .452" sizing dies to create .452" bullets that I paper patched back up to about .457/8" diameter. They worked quite well, with good expected hunting accuracy out to 200 yards.

I've had and used dozens of molds for paper patching bullets and slicks. Some were custom via BACO (Buffalo Arms Company) and they're in the $200-$250 price range each. Big slicks in the 525 to 540 grain range, stuffed over 80+ grains of compressed Swiss 1-1/2F black powder and a .060" LDPE wad. I'm out of the BPCR target game these days but still enjoy the benefits of PPBs and get my slicks mostly from Tom @ Accurate molds for less than half the cost of BACO slicks. A good .45 slick is the Accurate 44-405P.

Many years ago when I was intrigued with black powder long range Sharps and rollers the data and info about building BP PPB cartridges was either hard to find or incomplete, so I spent the better part of a year researching the process. I eventually wrote an article, a primer on BP PPBs with the .45-70 as an example. Here's that document in PDF form - https://rfd.cc/ppb/ppb.pdf - it needs some updating that I'll be doing, but it's still spot on for what's needed to get into the BP PPB game.