My brother and my son recently got into muzzle loaders, and I tag along as often as I can when they go shooting. Seems there is a lot of advice concerning accurate loads (patched roundballs) requiring fairly anemic powder charges. Brother is shooting a custom made .54 flintlock and Son is shooting a .50 cal CVA kit built. I remember reading an article a while back that stated, that for cals. up to about .60, hunting loads should run about 2 grains per caliber. After lots of fiddleing around for a few weekends, they could only get acceptable accuracy w/ reduced loads of around 70 grns. They did experiment w/different patch thicknesses and lubes, but things stayed about the same. After thinking about this for a bit, I suggested that they use max loads (100 grns. Goex 2f in the .50 and 110 of the same in the .54) add 20 grains of cornmeal on top the powder charge and then patch and ball. So, no burned patches, one hole groups at 25 yards and 2 to 4 inch groups at 100 with both rifles are the norm now. I came up w/ this after reading somewhere that the old timers would use some crumpled up paper wasp nest as an over powder wad. We did try lubed felt patches, and had good accuracy results, but the patches were burned, which indicates to me a less than perfect seal, although I think that for the one or two shots fired while hunting would be fine. Is there another way to skin this cat besides using a filler over the top of the powder? I find I'm getting sucked into this ML thing, like I need yet another bad habit! BTW, my son killed a nice antelope buck last weekend at 118 measured yards with his .50.
Regards, Rick