Beaver Grease

Pre cut patches for round ball muzzleloaders.

150 pre cut, pre washed, machine cut,100% tight woven cotton patches for use with round ball muzzleloaders. Available in three sizes, .31-.36cal, .40-45cal and .50-.58cal for your convenience. Three thickness (nominal) to accomodate all barrel and ball combinations; 0.014 inch, 0.017 inch, 0.021 inch (0.014 and 0.017 inch only in .31-.36cal). Colours may vary.

SAMPLER patch kit, per cut, pre lubed.

I am very happy to launch this innovation. The SAMPLER kit contains 30 each of 0.014 amd 0.017 in .31-.36cal or 20 each of the 0.014, 0.017 and 0.021inch thickness patches for either .40-.45cal or .50-.58cal. Per cut and pre lubed with Beaver Grease™ Patch Lube this kit allows you to find out the correct thickness of patch for you rifle without buying 450 patches first. Every barrel manufacturer has their own nominal bore diameter and rifling depth. For peak accuracy it is necessary to trial different thickness of patch and diameter of balls to find out what is best for you purposes. Choose a mid range load for you rifle (eg: 45-50gr 3Fg for a .45cal) and shoot a 3 shot group with each patch thickness and preferable two diameter balls (eg: for .45cal, 0.440 and 0.445). Ideally a patched ball should take a good whack on the short starter to seat at the barrel muzzle. You will be surprised at how the different combinations group. Be sure to recover your fired patches. They should be intact without cuts, tears or burn holes and good enough to shoot again. This is the sign of a good load.

Why not prelubed patches?

I have yet to find a mechanized way of applying my patch lube sparingly enough that there is not too little but not too much. Sure, I could take a bunch of patches, drop them into melted patch lube and then squeeze the excess lube out of them but the reality is the remaining lube is STILL too much. Over lubing a patch is sure to blow your groups wide. Lots of experimenting has shown that just a light coating of patch lube is more than enough for the job at hand and it is this amount of lube that contributes to peak accuracy. These days my loading regime is to wipe the fouled bore, drop the powder charge, start the patched ball and seat it home with a dry patch over the jag. Upon removal of the loading rod the dry patch on the jag removes any excess lube from the barrel and this action promotes gilt edge accuracy.

Bottom line is this - I will not produce, sell or distribute a product that is going to produce less than favourable results. As such, the only prelubed patches listed are those in the Sampler packs and all those patches are painstakigly hand lubed, a very labour intensive exercise but one I firmly believe is worthwhile to assist other shooters in not reinventing the wheel as I have done so many times.