When you need very light .312” bullets for the Mrs’s "new" .32 S&W purse pistol and the store wants as much for the box of 50 plated lead bullets as a box of 25 cartridges and NOE wants also as much for a mold as what the pistol was purchased for...you build your own.bullet..
Thanks to a small core mold I had on the shelf for a 7.62 Tokarov project a couple of years back and some finagling with a .308 Corbin half-jacket and a little bit of swaying at the bench in a 95degree garage and some swaging in the press itself and boom...50 brand new Round Nose Flat Point Jacketed bullets with a concave bottom to help bump the base up from its current .311” to fully engage the barrel’s rifling. They weigh out at 66gr so they are 11grains lighter than the old black powder bullet but I also don’t want to try to create a hand cannon or a hand grenade out of the 110year old pistol. Starting loads of 1.4gr of Red Dot or 1.1gr of Bullseye from Lyman’s CB book should be more than enough for the small cartridge. Hand measuring the powder on the scale will be all trickled-work of course. This is load data for a Lyman 77gr RN bullet and the swaged bullet being lighter should give a little more velocity without a bad pressure spike. These loads are only going to be developed for basically 7yd distance accuracy. Basically if the bad guy is not within 21ft of me, I won't be planning to shoot it. But I will tell you that after I put 5 shots into a bad guy, the little pistol could be easily used to bludgeon a bad guy with the steel butt of the pistol if he decides to laugh off the little bullets (I've advised my wife if she uses it to aim for right about the belt buckle as that's all soft tissue there and the bullet should penetrate well there despite it's low velocity which is not a guarantee it would make it past a rib bone like a chest shot and face shots are too difficult for a casual shooter to master in a stressful shoot situation.
The reloading dies and the Starline 32S&W brass are due in from Midway this week and once they come in, I’ll start assembling the cartridges for the next range trip.