4 Attachment(s)
A 93 Mauser in 35 Remington and a CBE mold
20 plus years ago my wife, now of 30 years, took a Mauser 93 action of my dad's and had it barrelled, stocked and chambered for 35 Remington. This was a birthday gift for me (yep, she's a good one). Over the years I shot many 100's of jacketed bullets through it, mostly Sierra 200 RN. Then about 15 years ago I started casting and have since tried to find a good cast hunting-accurate load without much success. My biggest problem was that I was pushing the bullets too fast for the alloy. In the last year or so I stumbled onto a load that is working pretty well using a CBE mold I bought. I don't have it to MOA yet and might not ever make it but hope that by tweaking the load it'll be close. The load is a 275 grain bullet water dropped from a CBE mold. The alloy is ww with a little tin added via 50/50 solder. Bullets aren't sized and are tumble lubed with LLA. The current charge is 30.0 grains IMR3031 followed by a 1 cc dipper of corn grits. Bullet is seated to the beginning of the bore rider portion. All this is seated over a CCI 200 primer. It gives about 1760 fps measured 15 feet from the muzzle. The targets shown were shot off bags at 50 yards in a brisk wind today. The powder charges were dropped from a Lee perfect powder measure. I weighed each 10th load. I have individually weighed each charge before and had slightly tighter groups, but this is much quicker loading.
The rifle still has the military 2 stage trigger and is sporting a tasco 4x scope. It's a great hog and deer outfit.
All in all the load isn't world class or anything but it is fun and I've made progress. By the way this is my 3rd CBE mold (mould) and they all cast beautifully.
David
A few pictures: