A friend gave me two new boxes of Speer round balls .440" and .445".What caliber would these be used in?They fit just snug in 45 colt brass but would be kinda small going down the barrel.They would make some mean shotgun loads.

They would be used in .45 muzzleloading rifles. With patch, they'd come up to .45 cal.

wheelgun101...They're useable in the .45 Colt.

Bump them in a sizer to .451/452 and load two over 6.5 grains of Unique.

The bumping will give a slightly flat shape to the top and bottom. I dip mine in thinned Lee Alox lube and let dry before loading.

Accuracy, spread and power out to about 25 yards is good enough for small game use in my Blackhawk .45 Colt. After that, it's kind of iffy./beagle

You can size them down to 430 in a luber and shoot them out of a 44, I find them very accurate at short range over some bullseye.

regards,
Graycg

I found a load for .444 Marlin with them. I run them thru a .430 sizer, lube them with liquid alox, use a charge of 25 gr. H-335,put in a ball, then a .44 cal. cap & ball revolver Wonder-Wad, a ball, another wad, and a ball on top crimped into place. They really hit with a thump! Both ends! Real accurate with 10 gr. unique at 25 yds out of same gun loaded singly.

Hobie is correct, 45 cal muzzleloader (t/c hawken 45 cal.)with a patch. They are pure lead. To soft for anything else.

As modified IAW some posts they are usable but not ideal. They were intended for ML use...

Curiously, the 440's and 445's also fit the early Colt Walker replicas by Replica Arms Co. These were exact copies of an original, and I was surprised the find that the cylinder chambers on my serial #63 were cut to BORE and not GROOVE diameter, which latter was in the 0.457" range! This was later confirmed by Colt, when they were setting up the specs for their "Second Generation" replicas. They checked original Walkers, Dragoons and the earliest Navys and found they were all chambered this way. (The replicas, to the best of my knowledge, are all now chambered to or slightly over groove diameter.) I never recovered any of the fired balls, but they must have ended up real "flying pancakes" after bumping-up to fit the bore! floodgate

floodgate,

Imagine that after a charge of 60 gr. of BP went off under them!! No wonder they knocked men down, they were short WC in form...

Hobie: "Short WC" hell!!! Think of it as a lead wad! floodgate