Argentino M1879 Rolling Block. Is it worth restoring?

[Claven2]

I think I'm going to have to respectfully disagree that Wheel Weight alloy is not suitable for BPCR. I shoot wheel weight all the time in Martinis and rolling blocks without issue. What makes the difference is the projectile design. If you have many narrow driving bands or paper patch, the alloy isn;t that important. If you shoot solids with long smooth sides, then yes, you need very soft lead. On my PP loads, I could probably use solid steel projectiles with no ill effect as the projectile is actually 1 thou under bore size. The grooves are engaged by the paper jacket only.

On my unpatched rounds, I use beeswax/crisco lubed bullets with several wide grease grooves. The bearing surface on the rifling is comparatively small, allowing harder wheel weight alloy to be used satisfactorily. The bottom line is that bullet design is as much a factor as alloy.

Here are my martini bullets:

On the left is a 440gr paper patched bullet, on the right a 490gr beeswax and crisco lubed bullet. I shoot these in Jamieson cases through a bone-stock Enfield made MkIII martini. with no issues whatsoever. Load is 85gr of GOEX FFg by volume.

At some point you will have to decide to either use real black powder (recommended by me) or substitute (not recommended by me, but others will try to steer you that way). IF you use black powder (I also don't recommend BP substitutes for a variety of reasons including pressure curves), you will need to learn about wax cookies, pan lubing, double-boilers, wad cutting and a number of other arcane 19th century rituals




Left to right: Kynoch commercial round, two of my PP loads, and a 1902 British Ordnance cartridge:


And to prove I'm not just spinning a dit, here is a recovered lubed 490gr with obvious Henry rifling on it