wool for patch material

[walt53]

I;ve heard some word on this a while ago and would love to hear more from any one who tried wool blanket for patch material .thanks  walt

[Hungry Horse]

 Where in the world would you get a blanket that thin? Also wool is rarely woven that tight, and is expensive. Linen is my choice.

  Hungry Horse

[Ezra]

I use pillow ticking, always have.  Spit is my lube, but I抦 super low tech. 


Ez

[hanshi]

I use mattress ticking, duck and, my favorite, heavy unbleached canvas.  Anything heavier or more costly will just have to wait for my lottery ticket to pay off.

[Daryl]

I;ve heard some word on this a while ago and would love to hear more from any one who tried wool blanket for patch material .thanks  walt

Walt, if you 'heard about that here at ALR, what you might have heard was using a chunk of greased army blanket as a wad over a bare ball to hold it from rolling out the muzzle.
No one here would be using a ball small enough to utilize or need a piece of wool blanket as a patch.

[walt53]

THANKS DARYL  ,so would that work as to cause less pressure ,as I ;m understanding this smoothbore thing less pressure is better. as in better patterns and groups  thanks walt.

[Daryl]

Most of us patch the ball for our smoothbores, same method as we do with rifles.
With shot, many use a couple thin overshot/wads on the powder, then shot then overshot wad.
The lack of a heavy wad beneath the shot prevents the heavy-wad blowing through the emerging pattern due to muzzle-blast.
I have a picture displaying this phenomenon somewhere - taken from W W.Greener's 9th Edition of The Gun etc, written in 1912 I think.

Photograph/shadow-graphs of the day. Cylinder bore at top, choked bore in the bottom picture. In both cases, the over-shot wad has tripped the wire well ahead of the shot cloud.
You can see in the top picture, the is a wad pushing into the shot column & expanding it. In the bottom picture the same thing appears to be happening at the rear of the shot column, but the wad/s are falling back quite quickly & a concentration of shot is outdistancing the wads and are quite tightly oriented.

In a shot column as I have noted above, with only light thin cards between the shot and powder, we would hope they would fall back quickly due to their light weight as you can see with the first wad on the left in both picture/shadow-graphs.

Both graphs show a large separation of the wads. Common in 'those;' days of these pictures, a hard card, likely 1/8" thick, was placed on the powder. Then 2, 1/4" felt or pressed horse-hair wads were placed on that, then another hard card, then the shot, then the overshot card. That is why you see 'so many' wads in the shadow-graphs.



Got called away to unload some pre-made cedar fence panels.

As with any combination, the shooter has to try them in HIS gun/s to see if they work for THOSE guns. Most guns are laws unto themselves, especially smoothbores.
With rifles, we know certain combinations of components that seem to work in all guns so we know where to start with them.  Smooth bored guns, whether shooting shot or solid ball
usually need to be played with to obtain satisfaction.

[yulzari]

If you look at a suit of decent quality you will find many made of thin woollen cloth. These appear cheaply in second hand clothes charity shops. A pair of trousers will give you many, many patches of adequate thickness. However, I have never tried it out myself and there may be a reason why it is unusual.

I do note that wool chars rather than burns. When I was using raw wool as a filler in unmentionable (but antique) rifles I would recover the wool afterwards and reuse it several times as it suffered little visible change.

[OldMtnMan]

Wouldn't a wool patch for a ball smolder?

[Daryl]

Wouldn't a wool patch for a ball smolder?

Cannot catch unless there is a lot of blowby. Pretty sure that wool will not catch even as readily as cotton.
I've not had one "catch & smolder" since the first year I shot BP, in the summer of 1972.  Lester H. Hawks,
dear friend from then until the 1990's told me I needed thicker material and suggested denim from the
sewing store.  Been using that ever since - never a smoldering patch.
I've seen a few at rendezvous, but only at B.C. Rendezous held yearly at Hefley Creek - never here. fellows
here load tight.

[OldMtnMan]

Wouldn't a wool patch for a ball smolder?

Cannot catch unless there is a lot of blowby. Pretty sure that wool will not catch even as readily as cotton.
I've not had one "catch & smolder" since the first year I shot BP, in the summer of 1972.  Lester H. Hawks,
dear friend from then until the 1990's told me I needed thicker material and suggested denim from the
sewing store.  Been using that ever since - never a smoldering patch.
I've seen a few at rendezvous, but only at B.C. Rendezous held yearly at Hefley Creek - never here. fellows
here load tight.

Yes, but you're using wool as a wad and not a patch. The patch will have direct contact with the powder firing. The wad doesn't.

Make sense?

[Daryl]

I was attempting to explain use of wool as a patch material. I cannot see it catching and burning
smoldering if used as a patch.
If used/stuff down over top of a ball & lubed with some oil that will burn, I suspect it indeed might catch as
it is riding on a flame-front.
However, I've never tried to light a piece of wool on fire. I've heard it is quite fire resistant on it's own. I do
 not know first hand. If so, it is unlikely it will 'catch' even in loose loads.

Now, if heavy with lanolin, is it more prone to burn?

[OldMtnMan]

I don't think it can catch on fire but i'm sure it can smolder. You'd think a charge of powder would be enough to make it smolder but I don't know for sure.

[yulzari]

Seems OT but be patient.

Traditionally night dresses were made of woollen cloth.  In the 19th century industrialisation of cotton processing and spinning made it far more affordable as a material for night dresses than wool and became the norm for those on lesser incomes.  At the same time the usual way to heat a bedroom (or indeed any room) was an open fire of coal or wood. 

The result was a huge increase in deaths and serious injuries from night clothes catching on fire, especially amongst children. Hundreds were dying each year. The cause being that woollen cloth chars as it burns and fire progresses slowly and is easily put out. In thin cotton cloth the fire blossoms rapidly, often too fast to extinguish the flames.

Now, we can transfer this information to woollen cloth patches. It seems probable that a woollen patch will suffer no significant burning and, if it should, it would be mere charring and less likely to cause a fire.

[bob in the woods]

Wool is extremely fire resistant. It's ignition temp is in the 600 deg C range [ 1300 deg F ?  ],  Although it will burn, it does
not support flame. In other words, once the application of heat/flame is removed, it will go out . If there is any smouldering , it isn't for long, as the material is self extinguishing .  Wonderful stuff.  That said, if you use it for a patch, and have blow by, the grease or lube may support flame or allow smouldering , regardless of the patch material itself.
We saw this at our club, when some were using a looser ball /patch combo with WD40 as a lube. The patches burned nicely !    Same lube , but with a tight ball/ patch, no problem. 

[yulzari]

Probably the key evidence is that woollen cloth used to be common yet period patch material preferences were for linen and cotton in various forms with thin leather as the least common choice. Woollen cloth hardly ever gets a mention so, empirically, wool would seem not to be a good choice for whatever reason.

[Daryl]

Wool is extremely fire resistant. It's ignition temp is in the 600 deg C range [ 1300 deg F ?  ],  Although it will burn, it does
not support flame. In other words, once the application of heat/flame is removed, it will go out . If there is any smouldering , it isn't for long, as the material is self extinguishing .  Wonderful stuff.  That said, if you use it for a patch, and have blow by, the grease or lube may support flame or allow smouldering , regardless of the patch material itself.
We saw this at our club, when some were using a looser ball /patch combo with WD40 as a lube. The patches burned nicely !    Same lube , but with a tight ball/ patch, no problem.

That catching and burning/smoldering is/was quite prevalent with loose combinations (#1) (thumb starting) and Crisco shortening used by lots of people in the 70's and 80's.
The Crisco shortening was an excellent lube for my bullet shooting .50, this, back in the mid 70's. It had a 38" twist and likely short 400gr. Lyman bullets from an obsolete mould
 as well as the TC 370gr. Maxi-ball. With double apertures, fore and aft, my 100yard 5-shot groups routinely ran 1" to 1 1/2". No wiping necessary. IIRC, the rifle liked 75gr. 2F, GO
 or GOEX of the day. I needed 85gr. 2F C&H to get the same target results.

[chilehead]

Here's all I've got:

"I could see the blanket wads coming out of the muzzles."
- Osborne Russell, describing an Indian fight in the 1830's

[Daryl]

Russel noted"wads", not patches.
We often have someone watch to see where "the patch goes"
 so we can check it and get the correct one.
Once, Taylor went down the trail alone after forgetting his patch box at home.
He simply picked up a bunch of patches from in front of the firing line & replenished
the supply as needed. Most of us shoot .022" denim or thicker, so no problem finding
good patches.


upload image online

[chilehead]

Russel noted"wads", not patches.

I just threw that quote out there as a period reference to the use of wool, in some manner, in loading a gun. It's hard to know exactly how, in this particular case, that wool was used. I'm not sure how much definitive meaning can be drawn from Russell's choice of the word "wad". It's a safe bet that he was in no position to watch those Indians load their guns in preparation for the fight. One might even wonder how he determined that he was seeing "blanket wads", unless he picked some up after the fight, or perhaps happened to know from experience that Indians tended to use them. He's silent on that. We do know that the Indians were firing balls that day, since several of Russell's companions ended up with said balls in their persons. 

[Daryl]

I agree - whether wads or patches, doesn't matter.