Hi all,
Its been ages since the last time I logged in - lots of dramas which I won't go into here but I'm now out of Sweden and living in France with my next/future wife and the original 1858 I had is now (sadly) long gone...
You can't keep a good man down they say so the first thing I did once I got here to France was to purchase myself a Pietta Remington 1858 NMA and the stuff I need to shoot it and still having some of my little plastic ''cartridges'' for holding measured powder loads - I brought them from Sweden with me - the first thing I did was to load up the gun using the same powder charge that I was using there in Sweden...
Its about 2 grams or 30/31 grains of black per charge...
The gunshop here that I bought from recommended .451 roundball instead of the .454 that I was using in Sweden so I first of all loaded powder into all 6 chambers - looking at it I figured there was no way my usual 10mm wide wads would fit so I decided okay, lets just do ball straight on top of the powder - the people in the shop must know what they are on about so lets seat those .451 roundballs in all 6 cylinders and do it that way...
What I DIDN'T like was the fact that I didn't get a nice complete lead ring with any of the balls as I seated them and then I started thinking ''chain fire'' with my nice shiny new Pietta Remington would not be nice...
I don't have the special tool for removing roundball once loaded so the ONLY thing I could think of - to make sure I could enjoy my first shoot with the gun without a risk of chainfire was to do something fairly weird...
Even using the ramming lever quite strongly I could see there was not enough room on top of the ball in each chamber to seat the full thickness 10mm wad down on top of the ball so I cut the wads I have into half thickness (5mm) wads and greased them and then sealed off each cylinder with a wad - with the side facing the roundball being lubed (but not the exposed side).
Apologies in advance for my long winded post - BUT, is there any reason why I shouldn't shoot my first 6 this way ? (i.e. NO wad between powder and ball but the wads on TOP of the balls instead)...
I'm sure this will qualify as one of my most weird posts ever but I thought I should ask...
Thanks to all in advance,
John.