The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: Dirty Bob on February 10, 2021, 02:14:52 PM
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With guns, ammo, brass, powder and primers all in short supply(!), is anyone else turning to black powder?
I wrote a 6,000+ word article in 2019 on the subject, for SurvivalBlog.com, under the alias "MB." I covered the making of powder, caps and bullet lube, as well as some testing of all of the above. Here are the four parts:
Part 1 (https://survivalblog.com/2019/10/08/black-powder-self-reliance-part-1-m-b/) (10/8/2019)
Part 2 (https://survivalblog.com/2019/10/09/black-powder-self-reliance-part-2-m-b/) (10/9/2019)
Part 3 (https://survivalblog.com/2019/10/10/black-powder-self-reliance-part-3-m-b/) (10/10/2019)
Part 4 (https://survivalblog.com/2019/10/11/black-powder-self-reliance-part-4-m-b/) (10/11/2019)
The thing is that it's easy to make caps, and not hard to make powder, and not hard to cast bullets or make bullet lube. Best of all, I don't have to haunt the online vendors, hoping to find a few boxes of scalper-priced ammunition. I'm even thinking of buying an inline that's set up for hunting in the Northwest, with musket caps instead of (near-unobtainable) 209 shotgun primers. I think I can make musket caps, and inlines are typically fairly easy to clean.
And I get to do some fun shooting with a freakin' .50 cal that I can afford to shoot as much as I want! And it's different enough to satisfy some of my gun hipster urges (before the gun/ammo crisis, I was hunting for a revolver in .41 Colt, and I recent talked myself out of a hard-to-feed .44 Colt conversion cylinder, in favor of a more practical .45 Colt). How can I not shoot more black powder?
Anyone else?
Oh, and BTW, that's me shooting a Remington New Model Army ("1858 Remington") with homemade powder, percussion cap, home cast bullet, and homemade bullet lube (olive oil and beeswax). I loaded only one chamber, as the pleated percussion caps from my Tap-O-Cap don't fit as tightly as regular #10 caps. I was worried about leakage causing a chainfire. As you can see, there's plenty of fire to get in, under the edge of a cap.