Semi-combustible filler

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earlmck
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Semi-combustible filler

Post by earlmck »

I've been playing around with 38/40's the past few weeks, have posted a thing or two about my adventures now I seem to have a Win 73, Win 92, Rem 14 1/2, and a Colt. The 73 and the Colt seem to like the same loads and the 92 and the 14 1/2 like the same loads, so I'm in fairly good shape. The 73 will only feed a round-nose or round flat nose bullet and I have a nice looking 200 grain round flat-nose to load for it. But this nice-looking bullet has a real puny crimp groove; in fact I don't think it really has a crimp groove, just another shallow grease groove in the approximate crimp position (yeah, I should have looked at dimensional drawings closer before I ordered it). I trimmed some cases short enough to use the crimp groove with the 73 and add a good squeeze with the Lee FCD and still have the occasional round that lets the bullet slide back in the case a ways. Obvious solution: add enough filler that the bullet seats with enough compression of the powder charge so it can't slide back.

And I have some nice plastic "stuff" used for buffering shot for shotgun goose loads which I have used successfully for years whenever I need (or think I need) a filler in a cast bullet load. Unfortunately I don't have a whole bunch of this nice plastic "stuff" left. But I do have several jugs of WWII surplus machine gun powder (you know -- that real slow burning stuff we bought for $10 a jug 'cause we thought surely we could find some use for it). And I did successfully use it in a 264 magnum and a 7mm magnum a few times but I didn't really like shooting either one of those soulless bolt guns and they are long gone. Soooo jugs and jugs of old machine gun powder taking up space I could use for useful powders. I got the idea to use this stuff as a "combustible filler" in these 38/40 rounds.

Loaded up a set of test rounds starting with 1 grain Universal and 28.5 grains of this "WC860" and working up to 5 grains Universal and 22 grains of the WC860 "stuff". Amazingly I believe you actually get quite a bit of "push" out of this old slow powder in this low pressure application. QuickLoad thinks I'd get maybe 850 fps out of a 30 grain load of the stuff at negligible pressure. With the addition of 1 grain of Universal (you have to drop 1.5 grains of the WC860 for each 1 grain Universal you add) I got a very pleasant 1050 fps load with probably less extreme spread than I get with the TrailBoss load I have been using for my light plinking load. 2 grains Universal and 27 WC860 produced about a 1200 fps load and 3 grains/25.5 gave 1300 fps which is real close to a full power black-powder equivalent load. 5 grains/22 grains went to 1500 fps which might become my deer hunting load if I ever do such a thing. All these left a very normal looking bore, not unduly dirty appearing. I just shot 5 rounds of each over the chrono (yeah, brand new chrono for those of you who read of my chronographing adventures from last week) but standard deviations look to be equal or a bit lower than my equivalent loads I have tried to date using TB, Universal, or Lil' gun. I might mention I have only used these in the strong 92 and 14 1/2 actions so far until I get confidence they never do anything weird.

I think I may have found a use for that old machine gun powder!
Last edited by earlmck on Mon May 14, 2018 11:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Pete44ru
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by Pete44ru »

.

We've found that the material from a Wasp/Hornet nest makes a pretty good combustible filler.

When needed, we just whack a nest off of whatever it's adhered to & run like hell, gathering out harvest well after the insects vent their spleen. :roll:


.
buckeyeshooter
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by buckeyeshooter »

In my black powder shotshells, I have used a cotton ball or piece of a cotton ball to adjust the height of the powder column and also in the shot cup to reduce the shot charge. Basically, I make a 3 1/2 inch 10 gauge into a 2 3/4 12 gauge load using black and 1 ounce of shot. Cas black powder class.
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by milton »

Now that IS interesting!!! I never thought about using a slow powder as a filler in a case like that.I would love to see more information on this as you get it !
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by gamekeeper »

I had a friend that used cigarette filters in his Ruger Old Army, for a while I thought it was snowing in summer as the stuff floated down on the range.
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Ray
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Re: Combustible filler

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earlmck
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by earlmck »

Ray wrote: Sun May 06, 2018 3:07 pm worked when it worked but failed terribly when it did not, not igniting but fusing together in a plastic mess that smelled just like curing epoxy....I used to have a 45-70 case with a sticky mess of 4831 or 7828 or h 1000 inside for an example....
I'll be danged. I've done this duplexing sort of thing a number of times over the years and never had such a failure. Good to know about Ray -- thanks.

In a previous life I wanted to shoot jacketed bullets at normal or better velocities using cheap surplus powder heated up a bit with a fast powder. And I went through about 50 lbs of cheap surplus powder doing this successfully. But these days I don't shoot 200 full-power jacketed bullets in a year and can afford normal powder for the job.

But this use of the slow powder as a filler to give compressed loads to prevent bullet setback in the case, and just duplicating various useful velocity levels in a cast bullet load-- this is a whole new area of exploration for me. I will most likely mess around with this concept some more and will report successes or failures as they happen.
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Ray
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by Ray »

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earlmck
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by earlmck »

Ray wrote: Sun May 06, 2018 10:53 pm

No Earl, you misread my reply.....Using the booster under the 20mm stuff as you did is correct and essential ! It is without the primer/booster that you can get the incomplete combustion and squibs- - - those tiny logs are hard to ignite.....

J.D. Jones wrote of this about 30 years ago re. he and Lee Jurras experiments with Jurras' "howdah" contender wildcats using shortened 50-70 and .500 n.e......they thought that they could use a case full of both surplus and new imr and hodgdon .50 browning and 20mm powder but even with the hottest priming, squibs and stuck bullets and powder turned to plastic were the results.....
OK, got it this time! I missed those fellers' experiments and that would have been at a time when I'd be playing with similar ideas. So thanks again Ray.

And this stuff I am using is a sweet-metering ball powder meant for the 50 cal, so not as slow as those boys were trying. This powder is a useful powder used straight in several of the magnum cases. I just don't have those type rifles in the stable anymore. I do know it leaves a cruddy mess of unburned powder at very low pressures without a something added to heat things up, but at least I didn't ever see a glop.
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cas
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by cas »

I think I would just use a roll crimp, in to wherever you like on the bullet.
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by Les Staley »

I have had success with Duplex Loads using WC 860 and WC 872. Working up loads with a chronograph (mostly cast bullets). 45-70, 30-06 and 303 British can be shot for real cheap! These cartridges need a priming charge of 6 gr of 4198 on the primer and the main charge slightly compressed to keep the powders from mixing. In the 6.5x55 I load straight WC872 with 140 gr jacketed bullets, a full case, vibrated to settle the powder I can get 55 gr in , and seat the bullet to correct OAL. Get 2450fps. I got this stuff from Jeff Bartlet, for under $7 per pound shipped! Do a search on Duplexing these two powders and you'll read for hours.
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Ray
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Re: Combustible filler

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Bill in Oregon
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Re: Combustible filler

Post by Bill in Oregon »

Earl, you have my full respect for duplexing in this manner. It would never have occurred to me to use slow-burn surplus powder as combustible filler. What an elegant solution. I would be very curious to see strain gauge readings on this line of load development. Guys, should we all chip in and buy our friend Earl a strain gauge for our collective edification?

8)
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earlmck
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Re: Semi-combustible filler

Post by earlmck »

OK Bill, I put the strain-gauge test to the load via shooting in the 1873. Or at least, the 2grains Universal/26 grains "fill" load. Shot a variety of 10 shot strings using the old '73, the newer '92, and the fairly young (100-year old) Remington model 14 1/2.

Out of the '73 this load with 200 grain bullet gave 1189+/- 11 fps (I use one standard deviation for the +/- part). The 175 grain (with an additional grain of WC860 "fill" to take up slack) gave 1286+/-10 fps.

From the Rem 14 1/2 these loads gave 1210+/-15 fps and 1343 +/-13 fps.

From the '92 these gave 1205 +/-24 fps and 1330 +/- 25 fps. My guess is that the larger diameter bullets I was using for the 1873 caused a little tightness-of-fit in the neck area of the '92's chamber and impinged on the release of the bullet, resulting in increased sd's.

Those loads fired through the '73 and the 14 1/2 gave the lowest standard deviations of any loads I have built so far, using TrailBoss, Universal, Green Dot, and Lil' gun. So I'm thinking this is a very useful technique.

But after all this chronographing of my new "combustible fill" loads I started to put away the chronograph and discovered quite a sprinkling of unburned powder granules in the trough area of the chronograph. Consequently I have renamed this thread "Semi-combustible filler" :D
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Re: Semi-combustible filler

Post by piller »

It sounds as you are having a lot of fun with the experimentation. I have never tried duplex loads, but my oldest cartridge which I load for is the .45 Colt and the .45-70. Neither one of them seems to need anything more than the easily available recipes.

I did once make some reduced power .30-06 loads for PillHer to use by packing the case full of dacron pillow filler on top of the powder. It worked well. Less noise and less recoil for her to play with at the range. The dacron kept the powder all near the primer so there wasn't any detonation. A lot of reduced loads suffer from detonation when the powder is not enough to ignite properly because it is a trail along the bottom of the case. Dacron pillow filler was suggested to me, and it worked. I mashed as much as I could into the case using a nail. The bullets would barely start with finger pressure. The range looked like a dog had shredded a pillow after we were done.
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Re: Semi-combustible filler

Post by Malamute »

Interesting, Ive never heard of it being used packed in tightly to actually fill the volume, just more like a material to help keep the powder in place by displacing some of the empty volume by its springyness, and by friction holding it in place.

When Ive used dacron, it wasnt packed in place, it was more of a positioning material than "filler". I used a small tuft pinched off the main wad, rolled into a ball and pushed into the case with an unsharpened pencil. The ball held the powder in place by friction on the case walls. It takes up maybe 1/3 of the volume of a 30-30 case when using over a round ball load of 3 grs Unique. When fired theres no visible residue or evidence of it.

The older lyman manuals mentioned certain flat dacron batting being used, the thickness, and cut to a square a certain size (5/8" I think?), and tamped in over the powder to keep it in place in the case on loads with poor load density, like old black powder rounds loaded with smokeless.
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Re: Semi-combustible filler

Post by Blaine »

:shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:
Y'all got bigger ones than I do. :lol:
But, I'm very conserative. I rarely use a max load in anything. Well, a couple times in an 1895GS, but it only took a few shots to realize my mistake.
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