Had a chance to talk with Matt yesterday. It seems as if every time I drop in at Lively Machine to see Jeff (the owner/manager) or Matt to say hi or ask (beg) for help Matt shows me some new tooling wrinkle. Yesterday he showed me a CNC lathe setup that uses a specially ground 5/16" carbide drill to put an accurate, round, on-center hole over 8" through solid stainless steel of an ugly-to-machine grade in less than 10 seconds. Light feed for the first 1/10 of an inch to start the hole straight and then WOW! Up went the RPM and the feed and BB size chips started coming out like they were being poured from a bag. Amazing.
Anyway, Matt says thanks for the feedback, he really appreciates the advice and comments. He knows a lot about guns and shooting, just not so much about cast bullets. But he is really well informed about lever guns and reloading. I would feel safe around him shooting his reloads or hunting or anything else. He is doing the necessary research to find out what would be safe and legal. He could very easily have turned up brass slugs and shot them out of his .45/70 if he wanted to, but until he's convinced it's safe I don't think he will.
By the way, thanks for pointing out the legal problems with ammo that falls within AP class. Not sure that would be a problem, the shop does subcontract work for the military and some civilian arms companies and has a class 7 license. I think they said they could legally make anything short of an A-bomb!
