It's working just fine, don't worry about that. I simply see the patch as not being quite thick enough. It would be better and quite likely
more accurate if you used .445" balls with the same patch. Being 2 1/2 though larger PER side, they should tighten up your groups. In the
.45, I used mostly .445" balls and 10 oz denim that I measure at .022" to ..025" thick. I use that material with every gun I have, except for
the .69, which prefers even thicker patching.
I have used the same patch, for a 5 shot group, picking it up, re-lubing it and shooting over and over. The group matched groups exactly, that
were shot with new patches.
Indeed, when Taylor and I tested his re-worked Hawken, we used recovered patches for all the shooting. Mind you, I was not used to this rifle,
however the sights were 1/2 decent.
The second line of targets below, were with the shortened barrel and re-claimed/re-covered .034" patches I had sitting in my tackle box. after
shooting them in the .60 cal rifle, they were still useable. The grooves were very deep in this barrel, so we used a .595" ball and the .034" patches.
Accuracy, with 0 load development was fairly good
The first line of targets was shot with the same gun, but before 1 pound of steel was cut off the barrel(shortened). Note accuracy is about the same, however we used 85gr. 2F and a .022" canvas patch with the first run of targets. The patches had scorch marks & some gas-cutting which showed some blow-by, but not enough, as in
your .45 rifle, to burn up the patch completely.
Note the best accuracy was about duplicated between the 85.0gr. load and the 125gr. charge. Interesting.
A further test should have been carried out using the thicker patch and the 85gr. 2f load.
