45 Caliber Conicals

[HEAD0001]

I am interested in seeing what conicals you guys are shooting out of your 45 caliber MZ's. And how are you sizing the bullets in relation to the bore of your rifle?? Are you undersizing them for a slip fit?? Or going slightly over sized?? Tom.

[rhbrink]

I am using the Lee 405 HB mine cast about .460 out of pure lead and about the same with 30/1. If I'm going to use it as a grease grove boolit I first run it through a .460 sizer in a Lyman 4500 with DGL lube. Then I run it through a Lee .454, then run it again through a Lee .451, This then is ready to shoot. I do like to run it through the Lee sizers base first this seems to keep the base of the boolit cleaner. If shooting a grease grove boolit it should be small enough to just slide down a clean barrel almost by its own weight.

If paperpatching I smear some Moose Snot on the boolit and size the same and go one step farther and size down again to .446 (had this sizer made by Buckshot). I then use a drop of Dawn dish soap in some warm water to get ride of the lube, dry and wrap with 9# onion skin. Let dry and push through the .451 sizer. A paperpatched boolit should be able to start by hand and slide down a clean barrel with the weight of the ramrod. Shooting the paperpatched boolit I do have clean for every shot or you can get one stuck and tear the patch, been there and done that, something to avoid believe me. The grease groove you can shot without cleaning as often.

It does work better to use a card or wad under the boolit. All this sizing doesn't seem to hurt the accuracy much that I can tell by shooting at 100 yards. Getting enough confidence up to soon try the 200 yard line. I'm sure if you were to shoot at long range 500 + a proper boolit would do much better and there will probably be one in the future sometime but I just wanted to see if I could make this work.

Check out Idaho Rons sticky at the start of this forum he has much more experience than I do and has some pictures of some of the groups that he has been able to shoot. I have been able to shoot five shots under a 1.5" on a good day most of the time 1.5 to 2" groups at 100 yards with iron sights and I consider that pretty good for myself.

Try it, it's a learning experience.

Richard

[mooman76]

I tried the REALs in mine with a 1-66 twist. Seems it was on the edge of stability. Shot pretty well but not great with occasional fliers. Good enough for minute of deer but I since bought better guns for conicals.