I decided to shorten the base of these bullets, with the reasoning that ~170gr would still be heavy enough, and the extra case capacity would be useful. Removing .030" off the top of the mold brought the weight down to 168gr, and results in the same case capacity as the 147gr FN bullet pictured above.

Several powders are working well for this bullet. Clays seems to be the quietest, maxing out around 850 fps. WSF is good for 950+ fps, but is also quietest around 850-900 fps. Silhouette worked for faster loads, up to 1050 fps, but had a much sharper report (suppressed) than the other powders.

This mold was an older Lee design, with cross-hatched block faces for venting; it didn't vent well enough for this bullet, and the cross hatch grooves are difficult to clean out after machining. With that in mind, I machined a .003" section out of one block face for better venting, this worked well, I probably could do the other block as well but am holding off for now. No finning though. I also used a fly cutter to scribe vents in the top of the mold block, similar to the newer Lee molds; this seems to help base fillout a little more too.

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]