A question I am often asked is whether or not you can shoot buckshot out of a musket. This short article is my reply.
Any smoothbored musket is just a big shotgun. Since the barrel has no rifling, the gun can be loaded with a single round ball, a load of loose birdshot, a load of buckshot, or a combination of buckshot and a single ball known as "Buck and ball".
Today's article will be confined to loading with buckshot, other articles about different loading methods will follow.
First, we'll take a look at the powder charge. For any muzzleloader over .50 caliber, DO NOT USE FFFg granulated powder. FFFg is for small bored guns, .50 caliber and under. As of this writing, we do not carry any guns with bores that small so you shouldn't be using FFFg in our guns at all. For large bored guns you should be using FFg or Fg powder, with the norm being FFg. In a flintlock, this should be real black powder only, not one of the substitute black powders.
How much powder should you load? There are many misconceptions about this based on things people heard from someone who heard from someone, who heard from someone else. For some reason, folks are under the impression that 120-180 grains is the norm for a military musket. That is just plain WRONG. That kind of load, in addition to being wasteful and not contributing to accuracy, is a dangerous overload.
There is a simple rule of thumb with a long gun:
Use the same amount of grains as your bore diameter in 1000ths of an inch.
In other words, if your gun is a .75 caliber Brown Bess type musket, then you use 75 grains of FFg. If your gun is a .69 caliber French musket like a Charleville, then you use 69 grains of FFg.
Simple huh?
Now what if you have a pistol? To work out the load for a pistol, you use the same formula, only cut it in half. So, if you have a .69 caliber French pistol, you would use 35 grains of FFg. A .62 caliber pistol uses 31 grains of FFg and so on.
Of course, in order to measure the powder, you need to pour it out of the flask, can, horn or whatever you carry your powder in. This not only allows you to carefully measure the powder, it also keeps you from breaking the cardinal rule of never, ever pouring powder directly from a horn or flask into the bore of a gun.
OK, so now that you've measured out the powder and poured it from the measure into the barrel, you'll need to ram something down to separate the powder from the shot. Historic shotgunners would use a handy natural material, such as the grey papery stuff that makes up a wasp nest, wads of grass, tow, etc. but for the past century we have had access to premade fiber wads. They are available from many shooting supply places such as Track of the Wolf, The Log Cabin Shoppe or Dixie Gun Works. You could also get your hands on a wad punch and cut your own out of cardboard.
An overpowder wad is important. It gives more complete combustion, scours the bore for a cleaner reload, and for accuracy purposes, the wad spreads out the force evenly across the entire load of shot which makes a big difference in your pattern.
