Everything was fine except I knew the rifle was shooting high, so I took myself to the range to adjust this. I confirmed that yes the rifle was shooting high at 50 metres, about six inches high, I had it on the wrong rear sight elevation notch...no wonder I had hit those deer high.
But I immediately discovered a further problem - after loading up some new cartridges and when shooting a group at 50 metres, the rifle that I had thought was accurate, shot a very large disorganised group. Five rounds went all over the place. This is with black powder. I changed to an old smokeless load with H4198, the rifle shot better again.
My black powder loads no longer were any good.
I went and looked at the original targets I had fired before I went hunting. I had only fired one group at 100 metres to confirm the zero before I took it on the hunting trip. It had performed well enough in that test - five shots into a three inch group. I had been perfectly satisfied. Now I found I could not shoot better than a six inch group at 100 metres.
Perhaps that first group had just been lucky. Perhaps I was under a misapprehension.
Now began an intensive series of sessions over the last few weeks of loading, shooting and testing the .44-40 to try and get this rifle to reliably shoot a three inch group at 100 metres with a black powder load and cast bullets. I have shot a lot of lead and blown up a lot of powder and washed a lot of cases.
( I didn't like the colour case hardening on the Uberti, and so I blued the receiver. It came out pretty good I reckon, it now has a dark worn-looking gunmetal look. The rifle now looks like it was made in 1916, that has had a new barrel put on it. Which is fine with me.)
I have had very little encouragement from the rifle when there is black powder involved. Everything I tried resulted in five to six inch groups with black powder. With smokeless and the same bullet and lube, I could reliably shoot five shots into four inches, with a 220 grain bullet at slightly over 1300 fps - which is certainly good enough for anything I wanted to do with a .44-40, but I wanted this rifle to be a black powder shooter. The smokeless loads are for my '92 carbine.
First I tried lube. Maybe I hadn't got the mixture right. I tried duplex loads with a primer of smokeless under black powder. This produced some abysmal groups and one particularly encouraging one. But it showed that it probably wasn't a fouling issue. Fouling seemed to be fine when I cleaned the rifle. I know what hard fouling is like.
I ordered a better powder, rather than our local product. Possibly my powder wasn't right.
I got some German 3F Schuetzen. Groups with 36 grains of 3F remained in the five inch group size. Belatedly, after doing a lot of shooting I did what I should have done at first and fired a group while cleaning the rifle inbetween each shot. I got a target like the one above once more. Five inches. It wasn''t the fouling.
I remembered John Kort writing that Winchester used to use a thin card wad between powder and bullet. I knew that other who shot BPCR used card wads. I tried them. Different thicknesses. This was interesting and resulted in some interestingly erratic results - a lot of narrow stringing up and down, most of a good group with wild flyers; enough encourage me to keep me on this road for a while, until I realised that taking several targets as a whole, it all probably amounted to gibberish. I was seeing patterns because I was looking for patterns. I was seeing meaning in the shadows of leaves. In the flight of sparrows.
I wondered if perhaps it was my shooting. I am shooting open sights, the original factory buckhorn. To my eyes the buckhorn notch on the Uberti 73 is too wide. I researched the original Winchester 73 sights. On photographs I have seen, the original seems to have a much narrower - and shallower notch, which would be better.
I do a lot of open sights shooting and have done it well, I know what works for me. But maybe the eyesight in my right eye is not what it was. I went to the optometrist. I got new contact lenses.
I took my Springfield 1903 to the range, with its peep sight. I put five shots into 1.5 inches, which is what it will do. I took my mighty Winchester 94 carbine, the most accurate .30/30 I have ever met, the one I refuse to put a peep sight on or a scope, because I will not touch the bead and factory rear sight it has in case I smudge the magic, and I put four rounds through the centre of the bead at 100 metres.
The Uberti factory rear sight didn't help I decided. I have no problem with the buckhorn sight design, I do not look down upon it at all. I understand it and I work with it fine. But on this rifle the notch was wrong. It's too wide and too deep I decided. I was having trouble judging elevation. I also wondered it it was too close to my 46 year old eyes to focus properly. I measures sight distances on my other rifles. I took my SKS to the range which has the rear sight the same distance away from the shooter and the same sight radius or less. I put five Chinese military FMJ into three inches.
I took the Winchester and I knocked the rear sight out and put it in a tin. I found a flat top, U- notch three-leaf sight from a 1950's Husqvarna Mauser bolt action, and fitted it into the dovetail. It fitted perfectly. It was also a couple of inches further forward which could only help bring things into better focus. I measured carefully and judged that the point of impact would be in the ballpark.
I was satisfied with this sight. (I didnt even have to touch it at the range after I tapped it in - It turned out to shoot exactly to point of aim at 100 metres, or a little low with some loads - which is good, I dont want it too high at 50 metres.)
But it didn't help. I still shot the same five inch to six inch groups.
I needed a control. Was it the rifle or the loads? Now I was worried about the rifle. Now I wanted to see a good group of any kind. Anything less than five inches would do. I was feeling a little bit of desperation.
I loaded some 240 grain Jacketed XTP's as a control. I tried them with the H4198 smokeless bulk load, and lastly I tried the best version of the duplex H4227 / blackpowder load.
At 100 metres the smokeless load put five shots into a neat two inch group. The duplex black powder load shot four rounds into slightly over an inch, with one flyer pushing the group out to three inches.
This didnt solve my problem because the rifle cannot feed 240 grin XTPs - too long for the elevator,I couldnt use those cartridges for anything. But I was relieved. The gun shot fine.
It had to be something about the bullet.
If it wanst the lube and it wasnt the load, I thought, maybe its the bullets I am casting. They were made from pure lead, sized one thousand over diameter. The design was valid. I got it from Accurate Molds, its John Korts's version of the Lyman 429 bullet with a large lube groove intended for black powder. It shot very well in my Rossi with smokeless loads.
I started thinking about bullet alloys. I tried adding tin. I bought expensive solder and added it to my pure lead mix. I shot groups with 1:50 alloy. I tried 1:40 alloy. 1:20 ally. I bought cheap old pewter tankards from the local junk shop and melted them down. I tried 1:16 alloy.
With my Duplex load of 6 grains of H4227 under 32 grains of Schuetzen 3F, compressed .20 of an inch, in unsized brass, with loads made from each alloy mix I was shooting three inch groups at 100 metres. The black powder 36 grain load didnt change from five inch groups.
At 1:16 alloy, the duplex load started shooting groups similiar to the jacketed control results. The photo below shows a jacketed group at the top, and a 1:16 cast bullet group at bottom, which measures 2.5 inches and with four shots in 1.5 inches.
This is about the best I can do. I am satisfied with this duplex load and will use it. Shooting black powder with a smokeless priming is time-honoured also, Townsend Whelen wrote of it. Target shooters used it for decades last century. I didn't come up with it, again, as with many of the successful things I have tried with the .44-40, I have been pointed in the right direction by Mr John Kort, whose experiments and writings on this forum and others, and personal correspondence, have been invaluable. (My prayers for his health at this time.)
I would really like to have a good pure black powder load, but I have not yet achieved it. The best of an average bunch so far is 40 grains of Schuetzen 3F under the same 217 grain 1:16 bullet, which I can shoot four - five inch groups with.
If anyone has any insight into achieving that let me know. I no doubt have missed trying something obvious, but I am all out of ideas at the moment. I am shot out.
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