Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting lee 200 grain SWC

i think it was 119 late afternoon here today.
by the way that brown cast bullets handbook on the right in the picture is the same one i still use sometimes, but mine is pretty ragged. got that sierra green book too

I have some old stuff in that book rack that only old farts like me would have around.



Here are a couple of loading manuals you don’t see very often. The NRA book is a compolation of American Rifleman articles published from 1950 to 1960. I bought that NRA manual in 1960 right after I graduated from High School. The handloader's Digest was printed in 1966.



A lot of reloaders will have one or more of these old Lyman manuals. That shot shell manual is the first complete edition of it. Prior to that, shot shell reloading was just a section in the back of their regular loading manuals. That #42 manual was printed in 1960 and I think # 43 was printed in 1964.



The best advice I got when I started reloading in 1958 was to keep my own good records. I started using a spiral back note book but over the years it became so well used that it came apart. So I transferred the information to a ring note book and now I have my own reloading manual that goes all the way back to 1958. Now I look up stuff in my note book to see what bullet, powder, primer I used and how that load shot. Then I got one of the first Oehler Chronographs that came out about 1970 and it used "Sky Screens" that were such a bitch to set up and operate. Chrony made using a chronograph easy and inexpensive.

I started recording the velocities of the loads in my notebook also and now I have an actual REAL WORLD manual of what various loads will do in various cartridges. I guess most reloaders do the same thing because of the amount of good information that can be gathered over time. Who would have ever guessed that we would have all the stuff for reloaders that we have today? Some of these computer programs are really good at predicting cartridge performance and they proved to be heaven sent when I was shooting BPCR. They could tell me within two points how much elevation I needed on my sight for a certain bullet and velocity at 8, 9,hundred and at 1000 yards. I am still amazed by that.

i dug out that remington 1911a1 purchased through the nra.
the rear sight was replaced with an adjustible one marked on the right side "micro".

I remember those and if my rememberer is working correctly this morning, they were designed to fit in the factory dove tail slot which is why a lot of people liked them. With a Micro sight, you could have an adjustable sight and install it yourself. The Bomar sight required a machine shop or gunsmith shop to install which added to it's already expensive option. But all of the sho nuff pistolero's shooting custom guns of my time used Bomar's to shoot the 45 leg of the 2700 bullseye matches.

In those days Colt Gold Cups came with a Colt Elliason rear sight and an 18 pound recoil spring for wad cutters. Of course, some of us like me put a 20 pound recoil spring in our Gold Cups and shot brown box hard ball in it. The Elliason sight was excellent, but it used a solid pin to attach the adjustable sight blade to the sight body and as we quickly discovered, after about 2000 rounds of hard ball, that pin broke and your sight blade flew past your ear off somewhere never to be seen again. So we replaced the solid pin with a rolled pin and that solved that problem.

Man those were the days. I can still smell the gunpowder and see all of those guys on the firing line like it was yesterday. On the rapid fire string with all of us shooting Bullsey powder that smokes like hell and shooting under a 50 position covered firing line using grease/wax lubes, there was so much smoke after the shooting that you could hardly breathe. But the only people who know anything about that is all of you boys who are getting long in the tooth like me and it'sa dam shame. It'sa hellofva thing to realize you ain't 10 feet tall and bullet proof any more. Well maybe some of the younger guys still are anyway. We always need some of them around and I wish them well because in today's world, they need all the help they can get.

Sorta off topic - ever tried Bullseye with coated or TMJ bullets? It hardly smokes at all. Same for Unique. Kinda makes you think twice about what that "smoke" is with cast bullets when you see the difference. Yet another advantage to coated bullets...

Ah, the classic aroma of alox/beeswax.

Funny thing. I had lubed a bunch of bullets with SPG to try it out. I didn't get back to loading them for a while, and when I did I found ants had gotten to them and were eating the lube right out of the grooves.

That's pretty funny. That beeswax does smell good!

see you are going to make me go look again. I have a gold cup race gun, gonna have to look at the sight.
as to bullseye, i picked up a few pounds of it when getting the other stuff, some of it dating back to the 60's. I might have an unopened can of it.
I did have one of those square cans of unique there the other day. I keep meaning to load some with it, then the same load with new unique to see the difference.
i want to say that one can of powder is about the size of a gallon folgers coffee can.