[Rockstar]

Blackpowder is pretty straight forward, cartridges like the .45-70 government or .44-40 were specifically designed with black powder in mind, because that’s all there was at the time. The first two number is the caliber. The last two numbers are how many grains of powder it holds. Fill the damn thing up with Blackpowder, knife off the excess, press a bullet in and you’re good to go. You really can’t screw that up, I mean you can, but it’s hard to do.

As for modern day smokeless powders. Reloading manuals will have those powders listed with min & max fill. Always, always start with the minimum and in small increments work your way towards max. For example: If I were wanting to achieve the same results as 40 grains of black powder in my .45 colt. I would start with of 8.2 grains of Accurate No.5 smokeless, and work my way up in small increments to a max fill of 9.6 grains, which I have done. But it’s slow and tedious work which just isn’t for me. The other problem is the powder shifts around inside the massive cartridge which can affect its performance.

But god forbid if I were to dump 40 grains of No.5 smokeless that gun would explode in my hand and cause serious bodily injury or even death. No joke, it would be like a fragmentation grenade going off in my hand.

With any powder charge what you are really looking for is that fine line between energy and accuracy. Light loads are great for competition shooting but may not get the job done if hunting or self defense. Too much can send the bullet places you didn’t aim at. I think pneumatics have the same issues.