Well it was 16 above and sunny and that's good enough for me. So I went out to the range and discovered I was frozen in at 35 yards. Seems the stand will be there for a while. So that's where I decided to shoot. Or I could have broke the stand.

I decided to shoot a rifle I had not shot in a while. Its a .54 caliber New Englander. I bought it NIB and also got a 12 gauge barrel for it. I shot a lot out of the shotgun, but very little out of the 1-48 twist barrel. So I had read, these will shoot powerbelts, roundball, conicals, and sabots. I have shot and sighted the rifle in with roundball.



I started with 300 grain Speer Gold Dot .452 hollow points in some Harvester (red) EZ load sabots. I am sure glad they were EZ load or I might not have got them down the barrel. The circle in green is the sabots. They actually did not do to bad. I did swab between shots or there was no way I could have loaded the next one. I was shooting 90 grains of Graf's & Sons 2f powder.

I then swabbed and switched to 405 grain copper coated hollow point powerbelts. Since FG always preaches not to load these things hot, I lowered the charge down to 70 grains of 2f Graf's . These are the blue hits.

Now I was concerned. Is the gun really this bad I thought? So I swabbed and loaded 90 grains of Graf's 2f and my home cast roundball, with moose milk juice as the lube and pillow tick patch. That is the black circle. That made me feel better as I knew it was not me or the gun. Actually thats a pretty good group.

I had also brought out some 250 grain Speer Gold Dots and decided to try them. I loaded 90 grains of Pyrodex RS and shot. The unmarked are the 250 grain. Here is where all the trouble started. I got terrible and I do mean terrible hangfires with the Pyrodex RS. I was using Dynamite Noble caps so I knew it was not the cap. And it was not a misfire, but you'd pull the trigger and had time to scratch your nose before the boom. Well maybe not that bad, but it was a big delay. Also, I swear them 250 went in side ways. Now at 35 yards I doubt it, but the holes are sure strange.

I then changed targets to some frozen cakes of water and smashed them with roundball until I was finally tired of shooting.

Why the monster hangfire with the Pyrodex I have no idea. It was a brand new jug. It was not clumping at all. I was swabbing with alcohol between shots. And the Graf's went off just fine, so I knew the fire channel was clear. Maybe just not Pyrodex RS's day. Tomorrow I am going to try the Pyrodex RS in a different rifle and see what happens.