44-77 continuing development

[Distant Thunder]

As I continue the load development with my Shiloh .44-77 17-twsit it is quite apparent that the rifle prefers the BACO JIM430520 bullet if I'm going to seat my bullets a bit deeper in an attempt to use less powder.

The .44-77 case will easily hold 90+ grains of my Swiss 1 1/2 with a shallowly seated paper patch bullet. I just don't see the need for much over 85 grains for any of my shooting. I have progressively seated my paper patch bullets shallower and shallower in my .45-70 and .40-65 and with very shallow seating in those two cartridges I have found an improvement in accuracy.

Doing the same in the .44-77 SBN also give very good accuracy, but requires more powder or some sort of a wad stack. Since I have never personally had any luck with multiple wads in and BP cartridge and noting that others have had success with the .44-77 with their bullets seated deeper as well a deeper seating being used in original .44-77s and .44-90s cartridges I decided to give that a try.

The deeper seating, around .300" in the case, has shot better than I would have thought, but I noticed that my .44-77 shoots even better with a bit more compression than I was using with 86 grains of my Swiss 1 1/2.

At a recent gong match I tried a few different loadings, two with the 430520 BACO bullet. I should note that I opened up this mold to cast at .432" because it seemed to be a bit looser in the bore than I would like and that is when it started to shoot even better for me.

The only difference between the two loads using this bullet was the seating depth. I seat some of them with .030" more compression and that was the load I shot at 400 yards at the match last weekend. Just shooting at gongs it seem to shoot as well as the same load with .030" less compression.

The third load I tried use a BACO 441505EPP bullet and 85 grains of Swiss 1 1/2. That is a 2-diameter designed to seat pretty shallow for Shiloh's standard chamber. I thought I would seat it deeper and see how that did, which didn't prove to be very well at the match at 500 yards.

So this week I decided to shoot both of these loads here at home at 220 yards from the prone off sticks so I would get a good picture of what each is doing shooting under match conditions.

It quickly became obvious why I had trouble at 500 with my 2-D EPP bullet seated deep. The core group was around 4" but the was one way high and one way low! and that is exactly what I saw at 500, a perfect pin wheel followed by a miss low and then a miss high.

The 430520 (432") shot very well with two shots that were just out of the group and totally on call and a third one that was a lot more right that I thought it broke. Some of that right may have been the gusts that were starting come as a front moved in. By the time I was done shooting this last group the gusts were rolling in from the left pretty noticeably as I walked down to retrieve the target. The rain followed behind the wind. I had finished my shooting just in time. The target in the picture is the 430520. The core group of 7 shots are pretty impressive as are the two sights at 6 o'clock before I raised the scope setting 1.5 moa.



I clearly need to work on my hold so I can break more of my shots in the center. That's one thing I don't like about a scope it's that you see every little movement as the crosshairs dance around in the middle of the target.