u/yeeticusprime1

Saw this rifle at a gun show a few years ago and just had to have it. It’s definitely become my favorite rifle. I’ve only shot and reloaded smokeless ammo for it up till recently but all the smokeless loads are so low pressure they all have some kind of problem or leave something to be desired.

The rifle was sold to me with a couple boxes of smokeless and one box of 20 black powder rounds. I kinda shelved the BP rounds because I never seemed to have time to dedicate to cleaning it afterwards the same day and honestly cleaning BP fowling out of a gun with this many parts didn’t sound too fun. But recently I had the opportunity to take my dad with me to the range and i really wanted him to get the chance to shoot this, and I’d actually have time to clean it the same day so I figured it was a good time to give the BP ammo a chance

And boy was it fun. Not only was it super satisfying to shoot but it ran really smoothly and didn’t have the issues I was getting with the smokeless powder loads.

The only downside was the cleaning, I was right about that, taking the gun apart to the smallest pieces of the breech block wasn’t bad, but idk what powder or lube was used for these rounds and it took an absurd amount of swabs and patches to get the bore fully clean.

So you’d think I’d have learned my lesson and just gone back to trying to find the right smokeless load. But no, I couldn’t help but think “I’ve made pyrodex based ammo for another gun that cleaned up easier than this” and now I’ve convinced myself I can make better BP ammo than whatever this stuff was. I’ll likely wind up having to use pyrodex anyway for this since I can’t seem to find any real 2F powder either online or locally. So if anyone’s got a secret hookup on the 2f now’s the time to share lol.

Haven’t shot this rifle too much, was going to put a scope mount on it and even after putting just a slight pressure on my vise to hold it down I heard a pop, I’m ok with replacing the stock, but the problem right now is I was actually going to go shoot this rifle this weekend, is it safe to shoot like this or do I need to shelve it till it gets a new stock? Any recommendations for a place that has original stocks would be greatly appreciated as well.

Ive been messing around with making black powder ammo for my little smith and Wesson .32 and I thought I’d share my findings since this is the first and only cartridge I make with black powder. Mainly because for years I’ve been told/ read about just how troublesome black powder and its substitutes can be as far as corrosion. Especially with the substitutes, many people have shared how they immediately dump their fired brass into some kind of solution to protect the brass from becoming horribly corroded. Often applying such practice even right at the range.

So I decided to push the boundaries as this ammo is cheap enough to make it seemed worth it, I fired off 25 rounds at the range and they looked super dirty as would be expected. took them home, attempted to dry tumble them to see what would happen, it made them worse and even nastier than before, so I let them sit out in my garage for almost a week, figuring they’d be horribly corroded and not even worth saving when I came back to them.

Not only did they not look any different when I came to check on them, but after I wet tumbled them they came out looking perfectly fine, there’s some mild tarnish marks on some of them but they don’t look any worse than they would had I fired and reloaded a few times with a dirtier smokeless powder like unique.

Left round in picture is “new” loaded into a once fired (with smokeless powder) .32 smith and Wesson long, wet tumbled and machined down to .32 S&W length. Right case in picture is the cleaned case out of the same batch that was fired with black powder. Had to look for one with a noticeable enough mark and had to put the flash on just to get it to show up on camera. So in summery, black powder substitutes are not nearly as intimidating as people made them out to be.