frkelly74
06-14-2012, 10:02 AM
I was finally getting around to trying out the Lyman 311644 mold that I got in trade from another member here. These boolits are kind of odd appearing in that they have two lube grooves at the back and two lube grooves at the front and a truncated cone nose shape. They taper from .301 at the front grooves to .310 at the back grooves. they are cast from scrap lead with a few wheel weights added and air cooled. I tumble lubed these and put them through a .311 size die to crimp the check on. The weight is about 193 gr with the check on. I loaded them into a batch of well used neck sized FC brass over 32 gr of IMR3031 powder. This is at the low end of charges listed in my Lyman manual for this exact boolit. Usually I have to do some extrapolating to get to a load but not this time. boolits were seated so that the base of the boolit was just starting to enter the body of the case. I did not use any filler for these. I shot them from my Howa 1500/ Weatherby Vanguard that I just got a bipod fitted to. It is kind of a light rifle and recoil was noticeable but not punishing. I got a nice little three shot group of about 1" at 50 yds all arranged in a straight horizontal line. It opened up as the barrel heated up and ended up at about 2" at 15 shots. I did notice that the trigger pull which I had thought was good seemed rough when I was using the bipod to hold the rifle. When I was concentrating on hold the trigger was not as noticeable in other words. The bore was still shiny at the end of shooting. These are not what I would consider light loads and were fun and satisfying to shoot. I will be making some more of them. I wanted to recover some boolits to see how the rifling was engraving but could not find any. Penetration must be good.