Originally Posted by captchee


I would agree with the others here . The 45 is a good deer rifle and will do the job just fine even for NW Mule deer . that�s my personal experience

Now that being said . If your barrel is a 45 . It will be . 450 bore . Thus you will be shooting a .435 or .440 ball .
If you bore is .440 then you have a 44 cal not a 45 .
If you do some historical reading on the American long rifle , you will find that they were of small caliber .
50 + were big bores .
In the L&C journals , you will find that Clark and others write about Clark taking even elk size game with his Small rifle . He describes this rifle as shoot 100 to the lb . thus it would be a 36 cal .

The problem wasn�t that it wouldn�t kill elk size game the problem was that it didn�t leave a big enough hole to leave a good blood trail . but again thats a 36


Quote
August 8,1804 (from the diary of John Ordway): "the Capt. [Clark] Shot Several times at one [elk] but his rifle carried a Small Ball, took 2 men went to hunt it and he did not Git it." Again, on August 24, 1804, Clark mentioned that in addition to killing two bull elk that evening he wounded two others, but could not track them by blood drops because "my ball was So [too] Small to bleed them well."


get to know your rifle and become able to consistntly place your shot . do that and you will have no problems

Not so for size. If you want accuracy you NEED the patch to engrave the ball .005" at the bottom of the grooves. A .445" ball and .020" patch will just do it. In the old days when I started we used a .450" ball and .010" patch and it still works with the proper rifling that is deep enough. The problem is that TC started to make shallow rifling and removed the accuracy a ML is capable of.
This is what you should get at 50 yards with 5 shots, with the proper fit.
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