Bought this one from the auction. Finish is mostly gone, but bore is nearly new and the wood appears to be original. The firing pin would barely move, and the trigger broke at about 35#. It took several days soaking in Kroil and a little session with the heat gun to get the block open so it could be cleaned. After cleaning and light oiling everything works like a new 1880s should. 385 grain .406 bullets and 420 grain .411 bullets shot well, but the larger ones split a few cases. A little excavation in the mystery molds box yielded a completely unmarked, warped brass mold that cast a 330 grain .410 bullet that sizes easily to .408. That bullet shoots like a hot damn. A few hundred strokes on a diamond stone got the mold into shape again and a little modification of my casting technique to reduce the pressure of the pour stopped cat whiskers into the vent lines. I'll post photos as soon as I read the instructions.
Oh how sweet it is, giving renewed life to a chapter of our history. .40-65 or .40-63? I have a treasured Ballard Pacific in .45 Govt... I bought it as a box of parts, luckily when I got it home, everything was there except forearm wood and wiping rod. Larry Gibson over on Cast Boolits coached me on feeding a rough bore with cast...and the whole project turned out well in the end.
Well this is a fine pickle we're in, should'a listened to Joe McCarthy and George Orwell I guess.
Most excellent! Ballard are addictive - I have a .32-40 and a .40-65 plus a handful of .22's.
I'll guess it's a .40-70 (.40-63 Everlasting)? Heavy trigger pull? Might benefit from tweaking the trigger spring.
My .40-65 (re-barreled by me) Ballard Pacific also has a .408 bore and I much prefer a 330gr. bullet also, sized to .410. The 400+ grain bullets are enough harder on my shoulder that I shy away from them!
Black powder or smokeless? I stick with 4198 for convenience and pressures are compatible for black powder velocity in the neat but weak Ballard.
I'm barreling a 6 1/2 Ballard action with a .38-55 barrel for a buddy this weekend. Pretty straightforward job, but as always I'm not looking forward to cutting the extractor slot though. I have the late John Wills' treasure trove of Ballard parts, jigs and fixtures.
"You can lead a man to logic, but you cannot make him think." Joe Harz "Always certain, often right." Keith McCafferty
It's a 40-63, but since I'm not going to even attempt to reload the 40-70 SS original ammo I have, I'm using fireformed 30-40 Krag brass and Holy Black to load for it. Where I hunt there is almost no chance of a shot beyond 150 yards, so the plan is to get it sighted for 100 and hold over if a longer shot is all I can get. That's very modest goals, my 40-65s are all capable of hunting accuracy to well beyond 500 with better rear sights but this one will remain the hunter it was built to be. I cast about 200 of the 330 grain bullets last week and ordered another mold from Accurate Moulds that may decrease the number of winged wonders I'm making with the brass mold. @gnoahhh is absolutely on point about Ballard being addictive, they just seem to appear out of thin air while the safe doors are closed. My wife can probably offer a more plausible explanation of how they get here, she pays the credit card bills.
Haha! Luckily my better-half remains blissfully ignorant of the extent of my "gunnery stuff" (as do I about her household decorating stuff).
A friend lathe turns .40-63 Everlasting cases for himself. Very laborious and he gets a lot of rejects, but he swears by them even though he swears at them. Seems like a lot of work for little gain to me though. He loads with nothing but black powder and is successful, but I gotta wonder how well the soft brass would hold up to higher smokeless pressures. A moot point as it's a Ballard and not a High Wall or somesuch that's up to withstanding such shenanigans.
This conversation has me dusting off my .40-65 Ballard. Haven't shot it since my move last fall. While I would love to lug it out into the wilds for some hunting it's not likely I'll do so as it weighs over 13 pounds all-up. (30" #4 weight barrel + 16x Fecker scope.)
Side note: the Ballard .38-55 barrel fitting went well. Got lucky in that whoever had threaded and chambered the barrel had gone in a touch too far with his reamer and by the time I had faced off the barrel and breech end to get the barrel indexed in the receiver, and breech block camming sweetly into battery, the headspace was still good. Dodged the bullet of having to touch things up with the rental reamer, which is always a crap shoot if it matches the original chamber. The extractor let us down though - turns out it is for a .38-56 (and so very faintly, almost invisibly marked as such), and as such its lip is a bit too far back to gain solid purchase on the .38-55 rim, but fits in the notch nicely. Simple installation of a .32-40 extractor should work, and I know I have one somewhere around here....
"You can lead a man to logic, but you cannot make him think." Joe Harz "Always certain, often right." Keith McCafferty
@gnoahhh, 830singleshot and I had a go at converting 38-55 to 8X58R Sauer recently. It mostly worked, but the cost of the dies made me crosseyed for a month. Then it turned out that the only thing it would shoot even nearly accurately was 00 Buck used as a round ball. A whole lot of work for not much return. Decided to have the barrel converted to 38-55, but that got nixed, light rifles and heavy loads are no longer of much use to me. Going another way with that project now. Not packing a 16# rifle very far either. Those old-timers must have been tough customers.
