[Mike Irwin]

Trail Boss is a relatively new powder, within the last 10 years.

It's the closest thing we have now to a smokeless bulk replacement powder for blackpowder. It's not a 1 for 1 replacement, but it is close.

It works for just about any cartridge, but is most at home in the large blackpowder era cartridges like the .44-40, .45 Long Colt, and .44 Special.

In smaller cartridges it will work, but the penalty is reduced velocity over what you would get out of smokeless.

The benefits are a powder that will fill the case for most of the older cartridges while providing near blackpowder velocity.

It provides exceptional ballistic uniformity, and meters very, very well even though it doesn't look as if it should.

Because of its burning characteristics, it is also very much at home in rifle cartridges.

I pretty much won't use anything else in my .44 Special, and I've used it quite a bit in my .32-20, but I'm not as happy with it in that application.

The biggest concern that one has to watch for when using it is not to compress the powder. If you start breaking the donuts (it's donut shaped) the burn rate gets VERY squirrley.