Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders 50 cal. for elk

Anyone use a traditional M/L and a round ball in 50 cal .for elk? Just asking--Thanks

Back when I black powder hunted, we used T/C Hawkins with T/C Maxi-Balls or Maxi-Hunters.

Round balls are only about 180grains. Years ago,I looked into it briefly. Maybe in a 58 cal or larger, but I figured that the 370 gr maxi-balls would get more penetration and thought the 180 gr pure lead ball might flatten out too much, too quick. However, I have always been a heavy for caliber type person

My friend Randy has killed 8 elk with 8 balls from his TC Hawken 50 cal. The trick is to use hard balls. Not pure lead, but wheel weigh metal.
He had an exit on every single one of them.
Me, I have killed 1 with a 54, one with a 58 and all the rest were killed with my 62 cal.
All were shot with balls cast of WW metal and I have never recovered a ball from a deer or elk or the 1 moose I killed with a muzzleloader.
I have recovered 58 cal balls and bullets cast from pure lead from one deer as well as a few cattel.

Never thought of using harder lead. Most I know use pure lead. After putting on the third barrel of my TC Hawkin, TC warned me against it,but all I ever used was pure lead.

I think Speer is harder than Hornaday. The wives tale around here is to use hornaday for expansion to put the energy in the deer before it exits. We have small whitetails around here, so pass through is really not an issue. Elk is a different equation, and I have no experience in that area.

I would use a 54 with ball because I have that choice. The 54 has 25% more wight to drive through. Of course if you have the right barrel, and it is legal, I would be using a conical/sabot/maxi. PA at one time was ball only. DRT went up when guys started using maxi's. Back in the day, guys loaded a maxi/conical for the first shot and carried ball for the wardens. Point being, because the pressure is low in BP, speed is hard to get. Terminal energy really goes up with projectile weight.

I had an old GRRW 1/2 stock Leman Flinter. 50 calibre. Ron Paull had built it for his wife, i believe. Had too short LOP for me. I traded it for something. She took several elk with it so i was told. .50 RB's.

Ran across it (rifle) about a year or so ago. Forgot another old friend had ended up with it!

I've taken 8-9 Elk with a ML.

Two or three were with .54 cal and a 600 grain Maxi-ball using 120 grains of Triple 7 when it was the newest choice of power on the market.. The rest were with a 50 cal. using a sabot with a Hornady 250 grain 45 cal XTP hollow point and 150 grains of Triple 7.

Almost every single one of them dropped in their tracks. Never had one go more than 30 yards.

Shot placement is key. Longest shot was 137 yards. Most of them were taken at less than 50 yards. The only complete pass through's were with the 54 cal and Maxi-balls. The XTP would expand to approximately .75". All but one were taken with inline rifles. One was with a Hawken.

I did try round balls, never did harvest an Elk with them. Not because they wouldn't do the job, I just did not see any Elk to shoot at. I'm sure that if you have the right opportunity, a .50 cal round ball would work.

Good luck with your choices.

Saddlesore, TC did only recommenced pure lead, but not because it would "wear out" a barrel. It was because their barrels were rifled only .003" deep and hard lead would cut patches because they had to be thin. So many people complained that the hard balls would not shoot well. Hence the recommendation.

For years Green Mountain made drop-in conversions barrels for the TC rifles for that exact reason. But no more unfortunately.

What Randy did was to put a lubed patch on top of the powder as a wad. His gun just had the standard TC barrel, but he got excellent accuracy with hard balls and 95 Gr of 3F. The wad cushioned the patched ball in front of it, well enough that he good good accuracy. It's a trick I have also used at times with deep rifled barrels and it really does make the guns a bit more accurate if you run large charges. Not every gun, but a lot of them.

The barrels I use on my round ball rifles have grooves cut from .009 to .0012 deep so you can use thick patching. It makes for much easier loading with hard balls because a patch of .016 to .019 is a LOT easier to compress then a patch only .006 to .008.
There is just more cloth to use, so it gives a better cushion and a thicker "gasket".
In my experience with making muzzleloaders, if you have a clean barrel of any quality, and you are not getting good accuracy, 19 time in 20 the problem is the patch,and/or lube, not the gun.

I don't know if it is valid, but I recall reading a minimum magical energy number for game. I think deer is 800fpe, and elk might be 1000 or 1200. Anyway, heavier projectiles have and hold more energy out of a ML. It might be BS, but I respect the 800 number as a goal for deer. I really dont like recoil, but I try to keep the energy up that area.
I know guys kill moose with 22s, but I like to have more than a minimum for any game. I think 50 ball is OK, but more is probably not overkill.

Minimum "foot pounds of energy" is really not valid. You see, a 223 has almost the same FPE at 100 yards (925) as a 45-70 does (1000)
But the old black powder 45-70 is the single most successful round in US history for killing buffalo followed by the 44-77 sharps. Most hits on buffalo with 430 to 500 grain bullets would exit the other side, and when they didn't they were found on the off-side skin.

I don't think many men here would place much money of the likelihood of a standard 22-250 doing that.


But with that said, I do agree that for elk, a 50 cal is probably minimum if you shoot balls.

Not because of any mathematical theory. But because I have seen it done, and have killed elk myself, and I have been into muzzleloaders now for most of my life. At 60 years old and having started to hunt with muzzleloaders when i was 13, I have some background in the subject.

If we were talking about hand made barrels in the old "weird" calibers maybe a 48 or a 49 would be just as good. But today the jump is made from 45 to 50 cal, and that's a pretty large jump. The 45 fores balls of about 125 grains to 128 grains depending on allow and exact diameter. The 50 fores balls of about 177 to 180 grains So there is a fairly large jump in weight as well as the diameter of the wound channel. The 50 will go through an elk if the ball is hard. A 45? I don't know for sure, but I doubt it.

I have been on hunts with men who killed deer with 45s and many if not most recovered their balls from the animals. So that makes me thing penetration may not be all we'd want on an elk.

The best sources to learn from is simply the writings of the old timers. When flintlock muzzleloaders were the "assault rifles" of the day, men would shoot anything that presented itself, with anything they had in their hands. Reading those old letters we do see a lot of wounded game that got away from a lot of shooters and if you look at the rifles they carried you get a very good idea of what was effective most of the time, and what was not.

I have been a muzzleloading hunter for most of my life, but if I look at the old timers, many of them killed more deer and elk in a month than I will in my life. Most didn't keep technical notes, but some did. Those that did are a gold mine of info.

As a rule what was considered to be "elk rifle" in the early m800s fired balls of "40 to the pound" I have read that number from about 6 old hunters. Well there are 7000 grains in a pound. 7000 divided by 40 =175 grains. That's about 49-50 caliber. So it was then. So it is now.

As TerryK said, you can kill elk with a 22, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice for your elk rifle.
I have read more such reports from hunters in India and Africa then in America, but an 800 pound animal in a different location still weight 800 pounds. If the balls are doing the job and going clear through I think that will show us about what to expect.

I own and shoot 2 flintlock for my hunting. One is a 50 and the other is a 62. The 62 has put a lot of game in the freezer. I killed one moose with it, and after breaking both upper leg bones it still exited. I doubt the FPE would have been impressive to someone shooting a 338 ultra mag, but the moose seemed to be VERY impressed.
Boom and down.
Get my knife out.

I shoot hard .605" balls ( about 326 grains)with 140 gr of 3F Goex. The chronograph says I am getting 1800 FPS + or - about 15.

I killed that moose at about 80 yards. I don't know how fast the ball was going when it hit the moose, but I can tell you faithfully, it was fast enough.

I don't use .50 RBs on elk because of a bad experience I had using them on a whitetail buck. I recovered the buck, so I know where I hit it, which was exactly where I was aiming. He was standing still, broadside, at 30 yards.

He wasn't impressed and neither am I. There are better projectiles for elk.

Every animal I've shot with the 50cal patched ball has complained about feeling light headed, dizzy and an unexpected loss of blood pressure

No problems...more than enough,just like anything else..placement.

Agreed. With 370 grain maxiballs it does offer some very nice penetration though.

Shot placement with my buck was as good as it gets. Double-lunged but no exit broadside at 30 yards. The deer ran off probably 250 yards and died in a thicket, almost didn't find it. I talked to some old-timers who said they'd seen the same thing, and that sometimes an RB will flatten slightly, turn sideways, and slide through like a disc.

I've never had that happen with a full-sized lead conical, with elk or deer.

In CO it's the legal minimum.

Wyoming too.

" I talked to some old-timers who said they'd seen the same thing, and that sometimes an RB will flatten slightly, turn sideways, and slide through like a disc."

Yup that's exactly correct.

And not just 50 cals. Any ball that is made of soft lead. I saw it one time when I was in High School from a 75 cal Brown Bess shot by a buddy of mine. Killed a mule deer and we were shocked to find the ball in it's rear leg after Jerry shot it in the chest more-less broad side.

THAT is the exact reason I tell hunter to use WW metal.

I have seen elk shot clear through many times with 50 cal balls cast from W.W. and I have shot through every animal I have ever killed with them in 50, 54 58 and 62 cals.

Blaming the caliber is exactly like those that shoot a 30-06 with 130 or even 150 grain thin jacketed bullet and have poor performance, then say a 30-06 is not enough gun for elk.
The bullets must hold together to penetrate. A perfect mushroom of 70% or better basically turns into the front half of a ball. That's what we are trying to get with every good big game bullet. So a 180 grain 30 cal if it expands perfectly and doesn't blow up will come to rest at about 140 grains and the part doing the damage is going to effectively be close a 50 cal ball. A Jacketed bullets also loose about 40% of their velocity in the act of expanding. This was an very interesting test we did when i was CEO of Cast Performance. Using clear ballistic gel, and shooting high speed we found that the 40% rule was pretty accurate across the full line of hunting bullets that hold 65% of their weight or more. Bullets the came apart didn't do as well.

So a 180 gr 30-06 that leaves the muzzle at 2700 FPS will hit the elk at about 2400 FPS in many cases. If we take 2400 FPS and deduct 40% we see the bullet is going about 1300 FPS 2" into the animal. So we see the wound made by the 50 cal hard ball and the 30-06 are about equal, and now we can see why. Makes sense. The "kill-strokes" (for lack of a better term) of the 50 cal flintlock and the 30-06 are almost exactly the same. but the 30-06 will carry it a lot farther away. Ballistic coefficients and sectional densities are all about flight characteristics, but when the bullet hits we want it to turn into a BALL!

However if a ball flattens it becomes a disk. NOT GOOD! It will "float" on liquid like a snow saucer. Meat is mostly made of water. Such a shape will not travel very straight and as soon as it tips it's going where the path of least resistance takes it.

So the stories of how the old smokepoles just don't kill well is both true and false. Just like the stories of how a 7MM MAg just doesn't kill well. And for the same basic reason. Wrong bullet! 50 caliber and heavier balls kill VERY well as long as they stay mostly round just like .284" diameter bullet kill VERY well as long as they are not reduced to metal sand.


It's not the gun. It's not the shell.
It's the bullet hole that kills.

If any bullet doesn't work well, the hole ( the real goal) is not what we want.

But when they hold their shape they blast right through most game.

szihn: Where did you see me blaming the caliber? For the last 10 years I've hunted elk every year with a .50 caliber rifle and brought one home each year. .50 caliber rifles are all I've ever used and I've never seen a need to use a different caliber or said so.

What I said was, there are better projectiles for elk than a 177 grain round ball.

Would you dispute that?

Where can I buy .490/177gr WW Metal roundballs in Michigan? Who online sells them?