Rossi Rifleman

I have heard that shooting a few expensive jacketed rounds after a lot of cheaper lead rounds will prevent lead fouling of the barrel. Sounds like an old wives tale to me. But sometimes there is an element of truth in any 'tale'. Does anyone have first hand experience with doing this? Anyone have any problems with cowboy loads (SASS type) in their CJ?

Unless you have an usually rough bore, I can't see shooting jacketed bullets improving leading. Leading is usually caused by bullets too soft for velocities reached, bullets not sized properly for the barrel or both.

The IDEA is that firing jacketed after lead will help scrape or push out any lead fouling.
This is mostly a false idea and there is little to no benefit from the practice AND if the gun is badly fouled with lead firing ANYTHING through it without removing the lead first is a problem.

Yep, guys are right. Not sure there is any value to it that I've ever noticed and I've mix loads a LOT over the years.

And besides that, shooting SASS cowboy action loads should NOT be causing lead fowling. The whole point to them is to shoot loads that are exactly hot enough to be accurate at the distances the scenarios are set up at and no more. Any more just adds recoil and slows target acquisition. So any loads intended for SASS should be a sub sonic.

As a matter of fact, I believe that there is a rule that all ammo used has to be at least a minimum of 400 fps and a maximum of 1000 fps in revolvers or 1400 fps in rifles or they give ya a penalty.

Not sure WHY the penalty for shooting hot loads. You'd only be hurting your self by using them since they slow down your times...but they do. Guess they figure it just kind of violates the whole point of cowboy shooting since John Wesley Harden couldn't get rounds that hot. LOL

But ya should not be getting fowling from properly loaded SASS ammo. I've shot thousands, heck, TENS of thousands of pure lead, sub sonic smokeless and black powder rounds and never had any fowling from any sub sonic round I've shot. If you are, Archer is right. You need to look into it. Cause the chances are, you got some other kind of problem going on. I'd hate to see it cause an otherwise great day at the range to go very sideways! ;~)