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Old June 15, 2008, 05:22 AM   #7
FL-Flinter
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Join Date: June 24, 2007
Location: West Central Florida
Posts: 207
Well, well, well....another one who's gonna get flamed for suggesting that patches may not need to be so tight that you need a 3# hammer to drive it down the bore in order to get accuracy.... watch out Sarge, you'll be taking heavy flak from all directions if you mention this topic in the wrong company.

This is something I've harped on for years yet got hammered everytime I suggested that one need not have an extremely tight patch/ball combo to obtain acceptable or even better accuracy.

Think about the concept, a sphere, being the perfect projectile as far as accurate flight is concerned, the more you deform it, the less accurate it will be. (Maybe I missed it but I didn't see what twist rifling you've got in this one - doesn't matter for this topic but I'm curious.) Anyway, if you're trying to stuff a bushel into a peck basket, something has to give somewhere. If you're beating on the ball to get it down, you're deforming the ball out of a ball shape, could be you're pounding the nose down or oblonging the entire projo but nonetheless, you're changing the shape further away from the sphere it's intended to be.

The patch need only be so tight as to provide a positive gas seal, if it's tight enough to seal the gas, it's plenty tight enough to grip the rifling provided the rifling groove depth is sufficient for the patch to grip. The only other issue is that the patch itself is of sufficient strength to withstand both the ingoing and outgoing stresses and of course that the bore is in sound condition that it's not cutting/shredding the patches.

Every barrel is different though and what works in one may not be worth a wad of spit on a forest fire in another one and this is far more prevalent in the medium and shallow groove depth button & broach rifled barrels of production guns. A barrel with 0.004" or shallower grooves isn't going to give the same gripping power or room for patch material as medium depth bore with 0.0065" deep grooves - when you get into a 0.010"+ deep groove single point cut barrel, you have a lot more options and will usually find quite a number of different combinations that work equally well.

The problem then lies in finding the combination that works in the particular barrel you have. Let's just assume for sake of discussion purposes that the barrel is perfect, no tight/loose spots or areas where the button or broach wandered for whatever reason. Experience and theory tell us that a shallow groove barrel will usually perform best with minimal patch material thickness. The reason for this is because there is less room for the patch material and the thinner the patch, the less likely that it will not load evenly.

When you go to a deep groove single point cut barrel, you will likely find that a 0.535" ball will work fine with a 0.013" - 0.015" thick patch just the same as a 0.530" ball will work fine with a 0.018" - 0.020" patch.

I would suggest you avoid the "Blue WalMart shop towels" simply because they are a paper synthetic blend and with the black powder burning at 3990°F, you can expect to get synthetic deposits in the bore that will be very difficult to clean.
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