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I've recently purchased my first muzzleloading gun - Uberti Cattleman in .44, which I've yet to get my hands on.

I'm just wondering exactly which Lee moulds would be appropriate. The Uberti manuals suggest a 454 or 457 round ball mould, or a 454 conical bullet mould. A friend suggested a conical bullet might be more accurate, so I wanted to explore this route. Lee appears to make conical moulds in 450 (MOLD D C 450-200-1R - maybe too small?) and 456 (MOLD D C 456-220-1R) but not 454. Does anyone know if the 456 conical mould would work well? Or should I stick to round ball, and if so, which size?

Any advice welcomed.

J.

Conical bullets do not generally work well in revolvers, due to the difficulty in seating them absolutely straight in the cylinder. A 454 ball should be OK.
Fred

What Fred said, round ball is spot on for pistol ranges in revolvers.

Easier to cast and load as well just make sure you use a near as you can get to pure lead.

Size depends on your gun, I would go for at least a thou over the largest diameter chamber mouth on your gun and make sure that this is at least two thou over groove diameter of the barrel.

Thanks both. I don't have a source of pure lead unfortunately. I've heard one can damage a loading lever/stand if not using pure lead.

Possibly but mainly because hard bullets BP or smokeless are usually inaccurate and cause leading.

A broken loading lever is as much lack of feel for and sympathy with the firearm as a hard alloy.

If you need to force it unduly then stop and find out why, really people who ignore such things should not be hand loading.

Jamesthut wrote:Thanks both. I don't have a source of pure lead unfortunately. I've heard one can damage a loading lever/stand if not using pure lead.

I accidentally mixed up a small batch of my regular bullet casting lead with my pure lead once. I'd been clearing out the garage and some of my old wheel weight lead ended up in the wrong box. I cast about fifty balls of the hard stuff.

You will immediately notice the difference the moment you try to operate the loading lever - it just won't budge.
Even the least experienced BP shooter will immediately think "this ain't right."
You'd have to be some kind of Frank Spencer to try and continue - you'd need to really lean on it hard. These are the guys that bend levers.

Your local 'scrappy' will sell you scrap flashing or pipe lead.
Watch out when melting pipe as residual moisture can cause a serious problem!

the little loaders kranks sell are a bit rubbish, I extended the handle on mine to make it seat easier.
I also prefer to use the slightly larger roundball as I get a nicer shave of lead when seating in the chamber,
conicals are a pain in the bum with cattlemans, they also need seating deeper so if using nitro you'd need to back off even further on charge weight, or you can't get as much BP in.

Just wondering if anyone using one of these revolvers is using Pyrodex? Just bought one and can't get my exp. licence for BP as the local F Dept aren't issuing new certs at the moment due to Covid. Do have some pyrodex in stock though.

The only dimension that matters for the ball is the chamber diameter. Too small a ball and you risk flashover (if not using grease to seal it) and the awkwardness of having the gun jam because the balls moved forward under recoil. 3 thou is a surprisingly large amount to sewage off the ball using a fitted loading ram so try fitting ball to the chamber mouth and start with the smallest diameter than wont go in. There’s no set factory diameter and new cylinders will vary significantly, as the previous poster wrote, sometimes on the same cylinder.