For those who don’t know who he is, Mike Beliveau is the Blackpowder Editor for “Guns of the Old West” magazine (my favorite periodical, hands down).
I saw this video from Mike and thought to myself, “I can do that!” Since getting back into shooting my cap & ball blackpowder revolvers, now I’m looking to do other things related to this passion. You’ve all seen my cartridge box creations. I figured making my own cap & ball lubricated wads would be simple and fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgNVPC2wmWI
And it was!
Well, after I finally got around to it! Like so many other projects in my life, by the time I got around to collecting everything I needed, something else came up (usually work-related), so my project sat. For months. Many months.
Well, last week I decided to do this over lunch. It really was very easy. I just had to wait for a day when I was in my home office, had a free lunch – and SWMBO was out so I didn’t get in trouble for messing up, or stinking up, her “workshop”!!!
First thing I did was melt the lamb’s tallow in the microwave.
I then mixed in the beeswax pellets into the tallow and put it back the microwave. As Mike notes, using the beeswax pellets makes them very easy to mix in.
Unfortunately I could not locate my wife’s kitchen scale, so I just eye-balled it.
I decided that I would do the actual work in my garage. Call this just taking the precaution against a mess I didn’t want to deal with – or hear about! This is the beeswax-lamb’s tallow mixture, melted, then poured into tin-foil pan, ready for felt sheet:
I purchased the stiff/tick felt sheet from the source Mike recommends (Durofelt), and cut it into the size to fit the tin pan. Here’s the first felt sheet soaking up the mixture:
I had laid out cardboard on my garage floor, and then wax paper. Here are the soaked felt sheets drying on wax paper in garage:
I learned two things very quickly. First, this eats up quite a bit of the lambs tallow and beeswax. I didn’t get nearly as many sheets as I thought I would. Second, you need to work very fast, because the mixture starts to cool and set up quickly. I ended up taking my tin foil pan back into the kitchen and heating it up in the oven twice to get all of it used up.
A couple days later (it sets up much faster than that, but again, it was just when I got around to it), I set up in my basement to actually punch out the wads. I used an old cutting board my wife had given me, heavy mallet, and starting punching the sheet:
This is where it gets very economical. You can get a ton of wads out of these small sheets. Ox-yoke brand, which are great, usually run anywhere from $9.99 - $14.99 for a bag of 100. This whole set up with pay for itself in about 7 bags, and I’ll have countless more after that from the initial investment!
Here’s the first 100 .36-caliber wads with the punch in the middle:
And now the same 100 put into a bag for storage:
Lastly, my current inventory of punches along with a sample cut wad for each:
Easy and fun!!!
