My peep sighted .58 TC/GM Hawken shoots quite well with its favorite load - 85 or 95 grains of GOEX FFg and a pillow tick patched .575 cast lee ball.

Here's the last target I shot with that load. (Yeah, I'm real proud of that one. )



But that load is mighty hard to get started in the bore. It goes down just fine after it's started, but takes one heck of a whack on the short starter to get it down the first two inches or so. After three or four loads my hand is sore and I resort to hitting the short starter with a foot long chunk of wood.

.570 balls shoot almost as well and load a little easier. But I don't have a .570 mold and Lee doesn't make one. (I refuse to buy lead balls. ) They do make a .562 mold which a lot of guys have success with.

I got a .562 mold a few months back and gave them a quick try. But didn't get the accuracy I wanted.

So Saturday I thought I would try them again. I started off with 85 grains of GOEX and a .018" thick pillow tick patch. Man, was that a nice loading combination. But the accuracy wasn't there. Here's the target with that load.



Next, I moved up to a .022" denim patch with the same powder charge. It was comfortable loading also - about midway between the easy .562 ball/.018 patch combination and the hard loading .575 balls.

This is what I got with that load.



A tad better, but still no match for the tight loading ball.

I thought maybe upping the powder charge with the denim patch would do the job. So I tried a big jump from 85 grains to 105 grains, and got this.



Still no joy. Looks like I'm stuck with pounding that larger ball into the bore. It's really no big deal for hunting, when I'll be loading one or two balls in a day. But I'll have to keep a mallet handy for range work.