I have a side hammer Peabody being barreled in .40 cal and it is being chambered in 40-70 Sharps BN. Does anyone have a good starting load in Black Powder for me? 
Thanks
Mike

I have a Rolling Block chambered for the 40-70 SBN,which I've had for 27years and never experienced that brass problem.The load that I've used which has shot consistently is as follows:
               2Fg Goex--60 grs
               LDP wad on top of powder
               Federal 210 primer
               Barley crimp mouth of case
This worked for me,Fritz

When loading a bottleneck case with black powder there are 3 things that you do not want to do:

1. have the wad below the bottleneck
2. have the bullet base below the bottleneck
3. compress the powder to the point that it forms a constriction at the bottleneck

If you use an expander plug with a case mouth belling angle, etc, make sure that the expander can get all the way through the neck before starting to bell the case. That is one problem that I had. I had to have CH4D make a custom expander so that the neck was opened up all the way through.

I had a 40-70 SBN that I rebarreled. I gave the barrel away and sold the dies and brass to the gentleman that has the barrel. It is shooting pretty well for him. My rifle wanted to be a 45-110 more than it wanted to be a 40-70. 

Some folks over on the Shiloh board have had good accuracy 

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go over there and do a search. on that site, when doing a search, "RIGHT CLICK" on the search result and have it "OPEN IN A NEW WINDOW" otherwise when you back up to the search result, you will lose the results and have to REFRESH the screen. that is the major bad thing about the shiloh site.   

dc