I have three guns that I hunt with: a .50 cal CVA Accura V2 that uses a .45 cal XPB in a black crush rib sabot. The .45 cal CVA Kodiac uses the 195 grain .40 cal Barnes Expander in the plain blue Harvester sabot. My Optima CVA .50 cal pistol uses a .44 cal XPB Barnes on a green crush
rib Harvester sabot. Smooth sabots are the starting point in sabots and if your gun loads stiff with a smooth sabot, then use a crush rib and you’ll usually find them a bit nicer to play with. MMP makes a line of several sabot options as well and the three petal often offers some bit of relaxed loading pressure. But to clarify here, sabots are loaded dry, absolutely nothing on them as far as lubricants goes. And Bore Butter is one of the worst of all patching lubes ever put on the market for blackpowder use. Don’t ever put that stuff in any part of an in-line or side lock or black powder revolver of any kind. Just don’t even buy the stuff.
I’ll add this here about the BH209 powder: this is a semi-smokeless powder, nitro based, so it cleans up with a couple patches damped with the same solvent you’d use on your handguns or centerfire weapons. ALL other black powders and subs are heavily sulpher based and require hot water clean up. 209 powder is a snap at clean up time.
All three of these guns shoot the XTP bullets just fine with the same exact charges the XPB bullets use with zero adjustment needed at the sight it distances. I can literally switch bullets and not see any change in point of impact. The difference and my preference is to the Barnes bullets, First, the are solid copper….no lead whatever. Secondly they expand into a flower at a much lower velocity and third, they shoot significantly flatter beyond the sight in distance. On deer, I suggest the XPBs.
On the Powerbelts. The bullets are soft, pure lead that’s been copper plated, not copper jacketed. When pushed at higher muzzleloader velocities they’ll grenade when connecting to soft tissues, often so bad that there is little left to punch thru bone line a shoulder blade. I’ve seen entire front shoulders turned to mush on the outside of the animal with not so much as a minor fracture to the shoulder bone. Many of these issues come from people choosing to shoot pellets instead of granular powder. Generally they’re shooting two or three 50 grain pellets or two 60 grain “magnum” pellets and the velocities achieved by these loads at common deer shooting distances is just too much for soft lead projectiles…often in the 1800 to 2000 fps range. The pellets don’t allow for loads to be somewhere in between 50, 100, 120 or 150 grains and way too many people think that loading to the max is the best medicine. NOT! Personally I’d like to see pellets come off the market because they just foster lazy shooters. The Powerbelts are fine as long as they are not run down range at over about 1400fps.
