Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 700NE Project - Custom Build Complete Story - Shooting Video - Long Story

Wow, that's one heckuva truck gun! Just make sure you HAVE to shoot that truck!

And to think I've been complaining about turning necks for a 22ppc with a 243 neck. Great gun great write up.

Thanks for the write-up and the video. I am glad to know that there are still those who posess the skills and craftmanship to build such rifles.

My first thought was 18 lbs. ????

Then, after I saw the torpedos you were loading in the video clip, I said,...weight about right!!

Excellent!

Incredible. Thank you for putting this up. What a rifle!

Hello to all for the replies.

I love to share the details of my projects with my fellow gun enthusiasts, so that they can see that anything is possible if you have a mind to do it.

I've fired this one over 400 times since it was built. (practice makes perfect ?) Its ready to go hunting in November for our elusive Wisconsin Whitetail.

I am pretty sure that you are the only one in history who can say that they are downsizing to a 700NE for deer from a howitzer!



LINK for the story

Keep the interesting posts coming!

John

Man, you have the passion! Thanks for sharing you're builds, better than article I've read in a gun magazine in over 20 years.

And I thought forming 350 Rigby brass from 375 H&H brass was a pain.

Wow, what an incredible project! Everything from making the brass to a beautiful old donor shotgun to the first class gunsmithing.

Please excuse my ignorance, but I thought no caliber above 0.5 was allowed by civilians?

What an awesome rifle. You are a brave man, that amount of recoil is just too much for me. I would be afraid of detaching my retinas shooting something like that!

Just awesome! Wow!

Jesus Christ. How big are the deer in Wisconsin?

Buckstix - fascinating project!

Thanks for sharing the detailed description & photos. Not something I'd be interested in doing myself, but dang! You've got quite a project there, ended up with a very interesting and good looking rifle.

Am pretty sure that you now have "enough gun."

Guy

Hello All,

Here's another problem I solved for the 700NE Double - BULLETS.

Although Woodleigh 700NE bullets shot very good, they are really expensive. The cost $385 for 100 - THAT'S NEARLY $4 EACH.

To save money, I had ordered a custom bullet mold from Accurate Molds in Utah. They build a top quality mold for a very reasonable price. I designed a 1000g bullet with 2 grease grooves and a crimping groove. The cast bullets were perfect, and weighed exactly 1000g with wheel-weight alloy.



Here it is compared to a Woodleigh 1000g Soft Point.



Although I've had excellent results using these molds for other calibers, and although this mold casts a "perfect" bullet, these cast bullets didn't shoot worth a crap! I tried everything, hard lead, soft lead, different lubes, oversize bullet, undersize bullet, wad under the bullet, I even tried powder paint coating the bullets - nothing worked. (and I have no explaination as to why) I shot patterns, not groups. Random holes were over 12" apart, and not repeatable.

Since no one makes 700 cal gas-checks, I couldn't try that. But, I did do something that I had tried before to solve a similar dilemma.

First, I modified the Accurate mold by removing the grease grooves.



Next, I went to the hardware store and bought a bunch of 1/2" copper pipe caps. The kind you solder at the end of copper pipe when plumbing. They measured about .705 dia and were 5/8" long. I cut the copper cups to uniform length to match the modified mold, then sized them to .699 dia, and drilled a 1/4" hole in the bottom of the cup.



Finally, I placed the copper cups into the mold, and cast the lead through the hole in the bottom of the cup.

The copper cup simply repaced the grease grooves, making a nice half-jacket bullet.



I'm still optimizing the manufacturing process for consistancy. Preliminary results are promising with initial groups in the 6" range at 50yds. Hopefully the groups will get better as the uniformity from bullet to bullet improves with practice.



And the good news is: These bullets only cost me about .35 each, insted of $3.85 each for the Woodleigh bullets. However, I will say this, the Woodleigh bullets will be hard to match. My average groups using the Woodleighs, are averaging under 2" at 50yds, with several unter 1-1/2". If I can improvise my half-jacket bullets to shoot even double that ( 4" average ) I'll be happy. Plinking with 35 cent bullets will be very satisfying, even if the groups are bigger.

And, another factor driving this project is; I can't find any Woodleigh bullets for sale anywhere in the U.S. I bought the last ones and I'm told there won't be any more available until about July.

During my on-going testing, I discovered that the copper cups were a little loose on the cast bullets because the lead shrinks more than the copper when it cools. That might explain why I was getting 6" groups instead of 2" groups when I tested them yesterday.

Fortunately for me, my son-in-law is a Master Machinist. We spent a couple of hours in his shop today and he made me a pound die to "bump-up" my half-jacket bullets.

The pound die has a precision .700 hole drilled through it, into which you place the cast half-jacket bullet. Then you insert a .700 diameter nose punch, and give it a couple of raps with a 3 pound hammer. This compresses the bullet and expand the lead into the jacket. That eliminates all the looseness.

The results were GREAT! They shoot almost as good as the Woodleigh bullets.

Here is a picture of the pound-die with the nose punch. The die is kept heavy to keep if from sliding around when pounding.



The punch has the bullet shape ground into its end and fits snug in the .700 dia hole in the die. You insert the cast half-jaket bullet, strike 3 blows with a 3 pound hammer, and out pops a finished, sized, and shaped bullet with a tight copper jacket.

The bullet has a small semi-wadcutter edge which punches a perfect hole in the target.

So .... now I have a continous supply of .700 dia. bullets.



I let my son-in-law shoot some of the new bullets, and then I let him try shooting the Woodleigh bullet load. As you can see by his target, he did real good.



To start mass production of 700NE bullets, I ordered bulk packed in bags of 100 pcs. They are very, very well made. They appear to be cast and drawn. They are very uniform in shape and length, and are much thinner than the other brands of cups I've tried.




Since the cups are so umiform, I decided to try a different approach. I modified my mold by removing the original sprue plate and adding a sprue hole to the bullet nose, thereby making it a "nose-pour" mold.



By doing this, I was able to place the copper cup directly into the base of the mold, and cast the lead into the cup through the nose. The sprue plate was removed because the cups stick out of the mold slightly. The cups are just large enough in diameter that the mold halves "pinch" together to hold the cup in place during casting. All I have to do is drop the cup into the mold, "tap" it lightly to seat it against the mold's crimping groove, and then squeeze the mold handles together.

I didn't want to waste copper cups by casting to bring the mold up to temperature, so I preheated the mold by placing it quarter way into the molten lead for 60 seconds, and then I started casting.





The bullets dropped freely from the mold with the cone shape sprue still attached.

This method eliminated several time consuming steps; no more having to trim the cups to length, and no more having to drill a hole in the bottom of the cup.

After the bullets cooled, I used a small side-cutter to snip away the sprue.





Finally, each bullet was placed into the pound-die and pounded to final shape. The small irregular nose snips, are ironed away by this last step.

Bullet weight varied somewhat between 1020g and 1040g based on slight variations in the length of the copper cups. I will conduct some shooting tests to determine if a 2% variation in weight affects accuracy. I doubt that it will, but if it does, I'll sort the bullets by weight and use the high & lows for plinkers.

By streamlining this manufacturing process, and eliminating the machining and drilling of the cups, I was able to produce 25 bullets in 25 minutes. That's a savings of $225 per hour over the cost of the Woodleigh bullets. A very worth while project.


If they are acccurate as cast, my production rate rises to over 180 per hour. At that rate, I'll be able to stock-pile 400 bullets in a little over 2 hours.

Further testing has shown that accuracy was improved by annealing the copper cups prior to casting and pounding. Targets like this are very repeatable.

Great project and write-up

Thank you for this post. It is fascinating reading.

There is an exception for sporting rounds, hence the 570 NE, 577 T-rex, 585 Nyati, 600 NE, 600 overkill, 700 NE and there might be a few more wildcats I'm forgetting. Also if there wasn't an exception shotgun slugs would be illegal.

Thank you for the clarification. Learned something today