While corn meal and wads will work even with pits in the barrel I personally believe that getting the proper combination of patch and ball so you get a good looking patch is going to have an end result of better accuracy if you talk to the long range hawken or mountainman compitition shooters that shoot under 20 inch strings or the round ball bench shooters you will fined thays where most of them start with a gun they are getting ready for compitition. Lee