45-70 Fun
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45-70 Fun OR How to Make A Squirrel Rifle Out of Your 45-70

 

The 45-70 is one of my favorite calibers.  For years I thought of it as an oddball for specialty use only.  Not really an all-around caliber.  After all, it could never do the things the .308, .270 or 30/06 do! The more hunting experience I gained the more I realized that the 45-70 would have been well suited to most of my big game hunting expeditions in the past, including for antelope.

Recently I picked up a TC .45 caliber barrel that, once cleaned up, made a dandy drop in barrel for my near 30 year old TC .50 cal Hawken.  Once in hand, I recalled an experiment of several years past in shooting .433 round balls out of my Lyman Great Plains rifle by loading them in Hornady sabots designed to shoot .44 bullets from a muzzle loader.  Results were excellent and it seemed logical to try shooting .350 (000 buck) out of the new .45 barrel so I picked up some .45/.38 Hornady sabots.

The next thing that came to mind was adding to the versatility of the 45-70 by loading the sabots in the standard 45-70 case with a .350 ball or a .357 slug.  I settled on a load of 19.8 grains of 2400 with a Winchester WLR primer.  The round ball charged sabots were pushed all the way in to the case mouth because they seemed to have a tighter fit in the case that way.  The .357 slugs were from Bullet Meister and are 158 grain RN/FP cowboy style slugs.  The .357 slugs were seated so that the sabot did not interfere with chambering the round.

The picture below shows how they looked once loaded.  The next picture is of the components used in the project.

 

 

 

The first test shoot was informal at about 35 yards.  No set-up was available for target stands so the shooting was at a couple of small plastic water bottles.  Not very scientific!!  Results seemed very good.  With no sight adjustments the test gun, a Navy Arms 1885 Winchester, was putting the shots into the dirt just a bit high and to the left of the bottles. 

The only way to judge accuracy was by studying the impact point close up.  Doing so showed that each of the two different loads had impacted within the same inches wide spot on the dirt bank.  There was no way to compare the relative accuracy of the ball vs. the bullet.  More testing will have to be done on paper from the bench to determine how accurate these really are.

Here is a photo of several of the fired sabots picked up about 20 yards beyond the muzzle.

The 2400 left a lot of residue behind and is probably not a good choice for this project.  A lesser charge of a faster burning powder would be more suitable and will be tried in future experiments.