Lyman Plains Pistol question

Been a while for me to Revwarnut ,i went thru a spell where i bought and traded several muzzleloaders trying to shoot the best groups at 150 yards, my range had 50, 150 , 200 and 300 yards, for rifle.

All were 50 cal, most had .520 groove dia. , and .500 bore. i ran .010 , .015 patches and .490,.495 and .500 ball . When you get over .490 with .010 patch it starts getting a little harder to load and you need a heavy starter and rod to load with. but you can load and shoot these tight patched combinations just fine, without problems.

The tight stuff is target loads, were as the lighter patched stuff would be for casual plinking or hunting loads were you would not have a heavy rod to load with in the field, were you can load with a light rod that would be kept on the gun.

An easy loading load would be to fill the bore size with slight patch compression, meaning if your bore is .500 , and your shooting a .490 ball and you had ..010 patch you would have .510 load. your groove is .520 or mine is, so you still have room but your are compressing the patch .005 into the groove, for a nice easy loading combination. Or basically you want the ball and one thickness of the patch to add up to the bore size.

you want to check your patches after firing to make sure you have a nice groove marks without allot of cutting into the patch.you can find them on the ground out in front of the bench .

My most accurate loads were compression loads, with .495 ball with .015 patch. these were loaded with a 3/8″ Steele starter and 3/8″ Steele T handle loading rods.

You can get store bought patches in .005 , .010 ,.015 , .020 , and you can get pillow ticking material at wal mart in the cloth section , it usually runs at .015 , to .010 , take you calipers and measure and get differant thicknesses .

I would have some .010 patches just in case you dont want to wrestle with the .015 patches, but i bet the .015 patches would be a slighly better shooter.