Black Powder Pistol Shooting

[bamboomaster]

We dusted off our BP Ruger Old Army revolvers this week and participated in a black powder pistol shoot. Distance was 17 yds. for the posted targets.

The missus shot great (her load was 15.8 gr 3F, corn meal filler up to 1/8" from the top of the cylinder, .457 Hornady round balls (which, in the process of seating, shave off approx .007 of the bullet), a dab of Bore Butter over each seated bullet to protect against the unlikely event of a simultaneous chain fire from all chambers, and #11 Remington percussion caps.

She finished with the highest scoring handicap (-9, used to reduce your raw score so one person doesn't win all the eight matches) of all shooters. Here's her "fox" target (5 shots - if only she could take back the floater ):

Nice shooting, girl! web.jpg

I finished with a scoring handicap of -7 and definitely shot lucky on the "buffalo" target (5 shots) with 20.8 gr 3F:

Nice shooting, dad! web.jpg

We really enjoyed ourselves yesterday and I would certainly recommend that any folks interested in BP shooting to give it a go. Half the folks had revolvers and IMO, the Ruger Old Army's are the best - roughly the BP equivalent of a Wilson Combat where built-in accuracy is concerned (the rest of the "accuracy" equation is up to you) . The other half had single shot muzzle-loading pistols (all percussion), and many of those folks shot really well too...