I have a .50 Renegade that I am thinking of having Mr. Hoyt bore to a larger caliber for me. I was thinking of .54 smoothbore, but wanted to see if anyone would offer a different suggestion. I currently have .45, .50, and .54 RB twist rifles, and .50 and .54 1:48 twist ones (in addition to the Renegade). I figured I could shoot my .54 RBs through the new Renegade, or use it as an (approximately) 28 gauge. Should I stick to the .54 or is there a good argument to go to .56 or .58? I don’t currently have any .56 or .58 RBs, and I am not looking to make this a complete cannon to shoot (ie thump at both ends
). Also, any reason not to go smoothbore? I will probably mostly use this for fun and if I hunt with it, it will probably not be for anything larger than Eastern whitetail. I appreciate your insight, gentlemen.
‘Poet
It's great to see that Bobby Hoyt is still around and working his magic on ML guns. But even 20 years ago, when my wife and I stopped by and helped him in his shop for couple of days while on a long road trip, he had a huge backlog of work to do. Of course, boring out rifling and then reaming for smoothness isn't so big a task and maybe he has one or more good assistants.
Of note, the bigger the ball, the more it will tend to stay on its path without spin. None of the old smoothbores meant to fire ball were smaller caliber, to my knowledge. And that's why all the old time military smoothbores have bores around 10 ga. in size (upper 70s in caliber). The balls were a loose fit for ease of loading in combat, usually held down on the powder by some paper. Hence these muskets made your chance of being hit by one at 100 yds. mostly accidental!
Physics: the smaller the ball, the more the drag in the air, so the faster it slows down after firing. Like a pingpong ball, it soon starts to veer off course if not spun. And the bigger the ball, the greater its mass, so it tends to maintain velocity better, and not to veer off course as easily as a smaller, lighter one. So keep this in mind if creating a smoothbore rifle. Larger bore is going to do better with accuracy with a patched and well-fitted RB load.
So if you bore out your 1" across-the-flats rifle, take it to at least 20 bore (.610") , if not 16 (.660") or even 12 bore (.725"). Smoothbores produce very low breech pressure with BP or suitable substitute, compared to rifled barrels. Remember, you can shoot patched roundballs in a ML shotgun just fine, with breech pressure lower than with the usual shot charge due to decreased bore friction. Ask Bobby Hoyt about needed breech thickness for the smoothbore.
A bit off-thread, but useful here: for International ML shooting, in the flintlock pistol class nowadays, everybody was using 40 or especially 45 cal. pistols (rules say
smoothbore, so some were using original pistols as for duelling/target work, others used exact reproductions of same -- often extremely fine ones), but accuracy was relatively poor at 25 yds. I told a friend they all needed to up their 20 or possibly 25 gr. powder charge, maybe to 40 gr. 3F BP, to increase the spin rate on these relatively small-bore balls. He was shocked, claiming it might blow up the barrel! I told him if you can use 60 or even 80 gr. in a .45 ML rifle barrel, you sure can use 40 gr.! These folks are used to very lightly recoiling pistols!
He and others had tried all sorts of things seeking accuracy, but finally he let me shoot his expensive .45 smoothbore pistol with 40 gr. 3F. Same barrel, same twist rate, same patched ball, but greater velocity and thus greater spin on the ball. Voila - great accuracy! And I built my own competition smoothbore pistol in 60 cal for exactly these reasons, using 35 gr. 3F BP, making it long-barreled and relatively heavy to tame recoil. Could certainly take a deer, probably to 50 yds. using a rest.
Aloha, Ka'imiloa
