I have a excellent 44, with a pristine barrel, in 32/40. I've shot it mostly with GOEX FG and 4759, in a duplex load. It's still as good as the day I bought it.

You just need to clean the barrel, after use. It takes very little time as, the inside of the barrel and the muzzle, is all that needs cleaning.

For cleaning, I use water soluble cutting fluid,at 20/1, it has a rust inhibitor in it. 

Frank

You've been given some bad advice. I have one rifle with over 10,000 rounds through it by actual count. It is still just as clean and bright as the day it came to live at my house. Plus how ever many through it before it came to live at my house. 

If you have a bore scope you can see the throats of modern rifles begin to be eroded in just a few hundred rounds. My .270 will now chamber a 160 gr. round nose bullet just pinched on top of the brass and still not touch the rifling. With a scope the throat looks like a dried and cracked mud flat. 

The actual flame temperature of black powder is low enough that it's not erosive. Modern powders are extremely hot and very erosive to old soft barrels, even more so than to modern harder barrels. Also, old soft barrels are more easily worn by jacketed bullets, but not by soft lead bullets. So the combination of BP and soft lead will not wear old barrels, but smokeless and jacket bullets will wear an old barrel out quickly. 

Old BP barrels are damaged by not cleaning them. BP residue is is not caustic, it is hydroscopic. Because of the attracted moisture it will begin rusting the old soft barrels overnight if you're in a humid environment. Especially a  humid salty environment. When I lived in very dry Arizona it was far less critical to clean immediately.

Also, as a side note, use a chamber/bore guide so you don't damage the barrel by cleaning. The old barrels are absolutely  butter soft. But this is also what allowed them to have such a fine smooth bright finish.

BP or Duplex loads is no harder than anything else. Frankly some of the suggestions I see on how to deal with leading will do more damage than a lifetime of shooting. I think that some of this comes from people getting old guns with the throats worn. My opinion is that most of that came from the old mercuric primers that were hard on throats.

40 Rod

Speaking for my own .32 Ideal Pope, straight black works just fine, though perhaps it's relevant that I'm using Pope's mould for the gun, too.

Bill Lawrence

I suspect the idea that black powder is hard on the barrel is that after shooting black powder it seems necessary to clean the barrel again the next day to prevent rusting inside. I have had that trouble but maybe it is because I am used to shooting smokeless where you just wipe it a couple times and you can put it away. Apparently the cleaning required by black is different.

I was thinking of trying 2015 in my 25 hornet, just have not got there yet. Anyone using it? Sorry to shift gears here.

oneatatime wrote on Jul 3^rd, 2019 at 4:06pm:


That double base powders burn hotter is a myth.  A simple resort to Boyle's Law will show that equal pressure yields equal temperature.   The actual problem lies in the chemistry of the powder gases.  Double base powder gas is oxygen rich, which causes the formation of brittle iron oxide particles on the steel surface, which get scraped away by the next shot.  Single base powder gas is oxygen poor.  They do allow iron nitride particles to form, but at a much slower rate, so erosion rate is much less.

FWIW - 4198 ought to work in the .32 Ideal, and it's a single base powder.