With my apologies for hijacking Pashooter's thread asking about 45-70 target bullets, I thought I'd start one reflecting my recent experience, including a bullet recovered from the sand at 1540 yards.

This is a 535 gr. Buffalo Arms money bullet, cast from virgin lead and tin at 16:1, .444 diameter, patched to .451, which is as close as I can measure the same as the bore of the Badger barrel on my Browning BPCR 45-70.

The load was 80.0 grs. of Swiss 1.5, topped with a a .060 poly wad and a .060 fiber wad. No deep science, just something I put together that worked out well. A successful SWAG.

I've never had a patch failure with this combo, knock on wood, and the accuracy is self evident. Patch releases at the muzzle, and the bullet slugs up to take the rifling engraving nicely.

One thing that is interesting is that the base of the bullet, in addition to being impressed with a perfect image of the twisted patch, also shows slight concave dishing of the original flat base. Obviously, it took a hard hit from the force of the charge. The bullet nose is too deformed to measure the effect of slugging on bullet length, but that would be interesting too.

Paul

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Stupidity has its way, while its cousin, evil, runs rampant.