Shooting lead or TSS shot from a rifled barrel
 

Are there any problems with shooting lead or TSS shot from a rifled .50 caliber muzzleloader barrel? Thinking mainly in terms of the rule of thumb of shooting equal volumes of powder and shot as one might do in a muzzleloading shotgun. Any ideas about what the effective choke of such a barrel would be? What might be used as over-powder and over shot wads or cards if such a procedure is possible. If feasible, this would be slightly more than a .410 load and if feasible (especially with TSS) might be a good turkey load. Thoughts and ideas?

shooting a shot charge out of a rifled barrel, although possible, is not recommended. The pattern would be horrendous as the rifling would throw the pellets all over the place.

As bronko22000 said, shot from a rifled barrel renders a pattern pretty useless. If you have a rifled barrel shotgun, run a #5 through it at a sheet of paper out to 10 yards. You might get 2 pellets on it maybe even 3. The rest will have spread out to never never land.

It's been done thousands of times, never with anywhere near decent results so far as I know (yes, I was one of the thousands :s3:). As Bronko said. the patterns are horrendous - totally useless beyond fifteen or twenty feet.

But go ahead and give it a try for yourself. You can't hurt anything. Drop about 60 grains of powder down the tube. Ball up one square of toilet paper and tamp it down on the powder. Drop some shot down on top of that - about 1-1/2 times the volume of the powder. Then ball up a half-sheet of toilet paper and ram that down for an overshot wad. It's fun and interesting to play with and, as I said, you can't hurt anything except that you may need to stomp out some smoldering toilet paper on the ground ten feet from the muzzle. So don't do it in a fire hazard area.

We went at it a bit different we used power piston wit the appropriate amount of shot with a wad of paper to hold it in place with 50 grains of 2F black in the 45 and 6o in the 54, we managed to break hand thrown trap at 20 yards regularly. This was before the inlines came about and was with slow twist PRB barrels if I remember correctly the twist was 1 in 80.