Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders I Need Patches Read, Please

Hello,

I'm barely keeping my groups in the 9 ring at 50 yards. Granted, I can't see worth crap, but I'm not liking the looks of a few patches that came from my rifle.

Patch material is .008" pillow ticking (off one of my old pillows), compressible to .0075". Load is 70gn Pyrodex FFg.


Lube moistened patch (just enough to feel it)...


Lube saturated patch (can see it standing and wets things it touches...


Same as the second pic...

I was using old T-shirt material, but was told that it was too loosely woven. However, I was getting decent accuracy and it was holding together like the number two and three patches with just spit lubed.

I think this stuff is just old and thin, and blowing apart. I know I find lots of lil' pieces in front of the rifle if they're not saturated.

The balls are supposed to cast at .490", but they mic at .492".

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Josh

josh, your patches are way to thin buddy. Get some .015 and some .018 patches to keep on hand.

Thank you, Bigblock.

Josh

Yes I would say you need some heaver patches with a patch lube T17 workes good

yep thicker patches . this should reduce the cutting thats showing in your last couple patchs

Like everyone else said,..thicker patches. When I used patch and ball, I settled on artist canvas for patch material. Some of it would be .025-.035 thick. It was very tight to load and sometimes required a little mallet. However most of my rifles gave their best performance when loaded tight.

I had the same problem when I was starting out. I cut some nice pretty circles to use as patches and then melted some lube and poured it over the patches to completely saturate them. I thought I was doing good. What I was doing was making the patch lose and it wouldn't hold together, blew apart during the shot. In other words, don't saturate the patch

Try lubing just before loading. And you only need lube on the one surface that is touching the bore.

Hope my ramblins make sense.

I've always used those Ox-Yoke 0.15 patches. I think they're pillow ticking by I'm not positive. Never had any burnout issues with them though. Good luck with your gun.

Walmart pillow ticking works great.

100% cotton Pillow Ticking from Walmart or the fabric store will do you the best. you can spend alot of money for cut patches but you can get the same results with pillow ticking.