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Minie ball bases: to lube or not to lube?

9K views 22 replies 17 participants last post by  bones92 
#1 ·
I'm getting ready to lubricate a batch of minies for the upcoming black powder season and was curious about the board's opinions on filling the bases with lube. I have seen people recommend both filling the bases and leaving them empty, so I am curious as to what those here do and why?
 
#2 ·
I tried filling the base of a .476 Webley bullet, it is like a minie, and fired into a (not deep enough) bucket of water, all the grease remained in the base. Drill a small hole through the bullet, and the base grease will be blown out in front of the bullet
 
#3 ·
I have been filling the base cavity for 45 years of my .58 minnies fired in a Zolli repro Remington Zouave with Crisco. The Crisco seems to keep the fouling soft, making reloading easier. If I do not use the Crisco, the fourth ball becomes difficult to reload without swabbing the barrel.
 
#4 ·
Minie was designed to be shot with the hollow base being filled with a plug (usually baked clay wedge), not lube. Ball, of course, had grease grooves.

I don't shoot a Minnie rifle, but the folks I know who do seem to be divided between lube-filled cavity and dry cavity. They seem to have pretty similar results.
 
#5 ·
None of the bullets use in the Civil War were lubed in the base. Filling the cavity defeats the entire premise of the mini ball. The lube cushions the skirt and it will not properly expand in to the rifling. The wood plug idea was abandoned shortly after it was tried. I have disassembled several original paper ctgs and none had any lube in the base.
 
#8 ·
Snider ammo of all types had the base plug. There was a lot of debate in period (1860-70) literature about how important the base plugs were for expansion and the concept of the plug being driven forward causing expansion was doubted by many. Some felt the plugs were important for other reasons. I glue wooden plugs in the bases of my Snider bullets- fast and simple and lightweight. I've dug many out of the bank at the range and the plugs have not moved. The bullets I'm using are sub-bore, as with the originals, and seem to show good stabilization and, by inference, expansion.

Ruprecht
 
#9 ·
Have heard both sides, never lubed my bases in 25 years. Didn't make a difference except more mess. On another note, If you are using beeswax/Crisco mix or even plain Crisco actually, don't lube the Minies until soon before you will shoot them ,the lube gets hard and crusty and No Good.
 
#10 ·
As Ruprecht noted, plug bases are common with the Snider; essentially a minie used in a modern cartridge.
I use an undersized, .575 to .577, Minie bullet with the hollow base filled with auto repair Bondo. This gives me
the best accuracy with my Snider carbine. With the base left unfilled shots are all over the place. Cannot explain the physics but that is my experience. Others on the Snider forum at British Militaria report the opposite! That said, when shooting the same Minies out of my Parker Hale 2 band Enfield I do not add lube to the base; only the lube grooves which I believe is consistent with practices of the period.

Skirmisher
 
#11 ·
In many years of shooting in the N-SSA I never used anything in the base. As others have already said, the original Civil War Burton bullets had nothing in the base cavity. After each skirmish I would "mine" the backstop and recover a lot of bullets from a variety of weapons. I often would find .58 cal bullets with the remains of grease packed in the base, usually with a good bit of unburned powder that was picked up by the grease. Contaminating the powder cannot be a good idea, since it is likely to happen unevenly and thus effectively vary your powder charge. The debris in the base is also not uniformly distributed, so I can't imagine it doesn't tend to destabilize the bullet.
 
#14 ·
I have shot about 6 zillion rounds in a 1858 Enfield with a repro barrel. I have only used a mix of ABOUT 60% bees wax and 40% Crisco. Have been shooting this mix since the late 60s. Have never had a ball seize from lack of lube, or be hard to ram. Also nothing in the base. Use a Lyman sizer- luber to apply this mix. And yes you'll have people swear on both sides of the question that theirs is right. Sort of like the large or small end of the egg controversy.
 
#15 ·
An old guy I used to see at the range back in the early 1970's cast some minie balls to use in his rifles. This coincided with the Gallagher carbine I had recently bought & was shooting with .54 roundballs. He let me try his minies & they were great fun to shoot. It wasn't until I was living 200 miles away that I began casting my own minies & used a tube of "Spit Ball" lube on them. It was odd stuff that dried out & flaked off, so pre-lubing wasn't the way to go. OTOH the old guy lubed his with something that looked like the hardened lube on lead .22 ammo - it adhered well enough that even clanging around in an old tin, the lube stay put. All I recall him saying was that he used some old floor wax used on the High School Gym floor.

Fast forward to casting & loading .45-70 black powder cartridges recently & a lot of the guys mentioned using JPW and some solvent mixed with stick bullet lube to make a tumble lube.

Ends up that JPW is Johnson's Paste Wax, a carnuba wax used for polishing wooden floors. Warm it up, mix it with some melted beeswax & tallow and some naphthalene or even mineral spirits & it makes a great tumble lube. My hollow base Frankford Arsenal style 405 gr. bullets for my trapdoors loves the stuff. When the bullets are coated, the solvent evaporates out & the result is a hard waxy lube that is permanently attached to the bullet surface.

I've never purposely lubed a hollow cavity of a bullet, in fact, I usually put a thin fiber wad between powder and hollowbase bullet. Avoiding petroleum grease and lubes (even Alox and paraffin) for shooting black powder will greatly reduce fouling accumulation.
 
#17 ·
Tucked away I probably have 15-20 pounds of "original" Minnies that I picked up around Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia and Johnston's River Line running south from near Kennesaw Mountain and the Battle of Ezra Church. Maybe 10%-15% of these do not have circular rings around the base, and the cavity is evenly hollow to accept a wooden plug fit into the base. A few of these still have the peg intact in the base, and I'm thinking that these were probably just dropped and not fired. Most of the Minnies are the standard type with rings around the base and a "V" shaped cavity. (These were picked up back in the late 40's-early 50's when I was a kid, and Minnies were easily found back then.)
 
#19 ·
The smooth ones are Pritchett bullets for the .577 Enfields, which were used by both sides. Originally .564, the Brits redesigned the cartridges and went to a .550 diameter around the end of the Crimean war. The Pritchett bullets used a basswood or clay plug for expansion and were loaded while still in their lubed paper cartridge. The Pritchett was specifically designed to be a paper patched bullet.

The US Burton bullet and cartridge, on the other hand, was designed to be loaded without the paper cartridge. Burton's design has a larger cavity with thinner walls to facilitate expansion into the rifling.

While I recognize that their are countless ways to skin a cat, and regardless of the method the only thing that really matters is your down range results, I will point out the official instructions from the extensive testing during the development of the US bullet in 1855:

from: Reports of Experiments with Small Arms for the Military Service, published by the United States War Department in 1856

"care should be taken to remove all of the grease from the bottom of the ball, lest by coming in contact with the bottom of the case, it penetrate the paper and injure the powder"
 
#21 · (Edited)
I shoot .580 soft lead RCBS minies dry from my Navy Arms 1863 Springfield Rifle-Musket. Loading has never been a problem even with >100 rounds shot in a day (battle of Cobb's mountain VA). Accuracy did not suffer, but it was a little crunchy near the breach. Each bullet fired leaves only it's fouling behind it and scrapes out the fouling from the shot before it! Works for me YMMV :thumbsup: BTW, I should mention that I was shooting 60 grains of Pyrodex.
 
#23 ·
I have shot very little in the way of Minie ball loads, but I have noticed that the fouling builds up after about 4-5 shots. I use a mix of about 60% beeswax and olive oil. I do not fill the base cavity. I suspect that the smoke/powder residue sticks to the walls of the barrel, aided by a warm coat of lube. Although there is a bit more resistance in loading once this fouling occurs, it is not difficult to do... perhaps just a bit more friction going down the bore. But at the same time, I believe my shots begin to group much tighter after this fouling occurs. I was shooting an Armisport 2-band Enfield.
 
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