ORIGINAL: ijimmy
I thought the recipie for max load on the older style slow twist rifels was 1 1/2 times bore diamiter , or 75 grains for a 50 cal ? . The manuel definately is what you want to go by .
I don't know where this idea came from, but 75 grains is on the light side for a .50 cal. of reasonable quality. The "rule of thumb" used bythe mountain men
when loading REAL Hawken rifles was that the "standard" load was one-halfthe weight of the ball. So for a 180-grain round ball in the .50 it was 90 grains. "Double-charge" was twice that, the powder measure being filled and dumped into the barrel TWICE, for 180 grains. A real Hawken would stand such loads, and due to their slow-twist rifling, the point of impact vs the standard load did not change much, except of course at longer ranges where the trajectory was flatter due to the higher MV. When the Hawken was 'double-charged", it was referred to as "loaded fer b'ar", and the idea was to increase the killing power of the round ball for use on dangerous animals at close quarters.....
Of course, the Hawken rifles were made for and used with round balls,although it is possiblethat some Hawkens were shot withconical bullets of some sorttoward the end of the fur trade era. I'm not sure that there's any documented proof of this, however......