I think I will just put the cases aside for a while till I regain my composure and then try again with more of the evil white powder while no one is looking. As a Matter of interest nobody sells grits in Australia that I'm aware of.  As a matter of fact, until I visited a M/L shoot in Friendship I had never seen grits cooked, I guess it's a cultural thing. We have things like Weet Bix, or vegemite on toast for breakfast, it's actually un Australian to not like vegemite here.
Mike.

I have used corn meal to fire form. I keep a powder measure, full of it.

One of my rifles is a 40X, 6mm Imp. and because there wasn't any CofW available, at the time, that's what I used to fire form the Norma brass.

You could probably even use small grained rice but, I haven't used it. 

Frank

Quote:
10grs Red Dot - wad of toilet paper - muzzle up - fire forms my larger brass, Starline 45-70

frnkeore wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2016 at 1:28pm:


ME TOO.

Thanks for the tip on good ol' vegemite, Mick.
Sounds like I'll stick to sweeping up grits from the range for my breakfast. 
If those cases don't go out to the chamber walls with corn meal, maybe another annealing will help. Fast powder, remember!

Yeah, polenta- same in Spanish, too. Gotta be available, Mick.

coljimmy wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2016 at 3:57pm:

No reason it wouldn't work like wet toilet paper that I can think of.

I'm in the process of doing something very similar right now ...

Several years ago I bought a Lee Enfield No. 1 single shot in .410 Musket.  They took "clapped out" barrel No. 1's in .303 British and bored them out to .410 smoothbore and loaded un-necked .303 British cases with a .410 round ball.  The magazines were taken out and a wood block fitted turning them in to single shot arms.  They were issued to Indian troops and Indian prison guards during the British rule of India.  Their reasoning was that if the gun (and it's trooper) disappeared and was then being shot back at them by a dissident it had very limited range compared to a regular issue .303 rifle.  Anyway, I digress which isn't unusual for me!

I'm finally getting around to this project gun (one of MANY) and was just up at my local range to fire-form some Norma .303 British cases into the straight .410 Musket round.  (Which is basically identical to what you are doing.)  I annealed the cases well (about 1/2 way down the case) and then primed them, loaded 8.5 grains of Nitro 100 shotgun powder, 1/4 sheet of toilet tissue, filled with bulk cornmeal to the mouth of the case, and then added another 1/4 sheet of toilet tissue to hold it all in place.  They go off with some authority and you get a cloud of toilet tissue "confetti" drifting back down over your head.  I point the muzzle straight up in the air when I fire them and they form very nicely into fully straight, square cases.  I found if you hold the rifle horizontally they push forward on fire-forming and the primers back out slightly which you can see on the two cases on the left in the photos.  Pointing the rifle straight up into the air eliminates that problem and the primers are left flat to the case head (as in the rest of the cases shown).  I only lost about 5 or 6 cases to splits out of nearly 100 rounds using this method, but in all fairness I don't know how many times these Norma case had been reloaded before I fire-formed them.

I'm ordering a .410 round ball mould so that I can duplicate the original military loading.  It'll be interesting to see how it shoots out to 100 yards ...

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