Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Cast bullet how to's

Well, I gotta step into the fire so to speak. Different campers use different tents and blah, blah, blah. Short version? YMMV, nothing is engraved in stone and you never know until you try.

One of the things one should accept as truth is that most of the advice tendered here and elsewhere is valid in broad terms. It sets the stage for informed beginnings. To do otherwise is almost guaranteed to result in failure. OTOH, there are circumstances where the anomaly will work just fine. Case in point is my experience with cast flatbase and GC bullets w/o the gas checks.

I started casting about 15 or so years back. My first effort was for an ancient ML built just after the Civil War. .50 caliber slug gun that shot strip patched bullets first cast then swagged into final form. It was successful and brought home a 2d place finish at a match out in Cody, WY a decade back. Then I started tinkering with odds and ends. One of those oddities was a .30-30 Mod 94. Everyone said I needed a harder alloy and this and that and so forth. Keep the velocity down they said. Well, it shot 1" groups at 50 yards with an alloy of 10 BHN at a velocity chronied at a bit over 2150 fps. Good enough for deer, pigs and misc. obnoxious cretins.

I grew up and stepped into the wildcat game with the "legendary" .30 Sneezer. Steve Brooks made me a mould and here ya go....


They shot OK.


But of course I am a fiddler and while the Brooks bullet kills pigs, I had to try something different. Hell, I tried everything different at some point.
Enter the Lyman 311041. Now I'm not comfy with using gas checks in a silencer for what I hope are obvious reasons, so I figured, WTH, let's see what it will do!

All I can say is, uh, WOW!




So ya, I'll use GC bullets w/o the checks now and again. And when I want to impress the ladies I'll use the shiny torpedoes pictured above. That's just the way I roll.

DD