New sight, new patches, new lubes, choice of powder, sunny day and it's worse. Only 4 holes today.

Chuck Beasley very kindly sent me Lehigh Valley patch lube, some of his favourite pillow ticking for patches, even some leather patches and a pot of home brewed grease. I was most grateful and thoroughly impressed, unfortunately the Baker was not.

The new foresight fits on the bayonet rail and adjusts up, down and sideways. When the Baker fell over today, the sight took the dent, God bless it. Must be more careful.

I reworked the ball mould to get a shorter sprue. When the ball solidifies in the mould it sets from the outside in. The contracting core can only pull in more lead while the sprue remains molten so a short sprue makes for less cavities.

The patches wer either incinerated or had holes, presumably because I was loading with/without half a lubed wad behind. Picture is an interesting one, clearly showing with the seven grooves of the rifling. Question is, has the cloth burnt away over the groove or worn away over the lands???

Quite discouraged, but thought about it on the way home. I decided that despite that one perfect patch, the ball could not be engaging the rifling so I pulled the breech plug before I cleaned it. Rather surprised to see a blank wall behind it. I had that once before on an Enfield which had the remains of a Minie ball smeared around the inside of the breech, ( I had visions of some poor squaddie tring to extract it with a worm before the Sergeant found out), but this time it was just a thin layer of hard baked gunge.

Behind the gunge the rifling was indistinct and I couldn't clear it with my brass spike so I reckoned it had to be hard rust. That could explain a thing or three. Anyway, I degreased the bore, greased the plug, closed the touch with a rubber sheet under a clamp and filled the bore with organic rust remover.

This is an extreme close up of the rifling at the breech end. You can see where the rust has been completely removed from the pitting in the damascene. The scrape marks are where I was just making sure it had all gone, the touch hole is top centre. The rifling looks crisp and unworn but the surface isn't exactly what you might call smooth. Have to think about this, but at least the crut is out...