I picked up my Lee 90315 6-cav mold- 358-105-SWC and wasn't really wanting one; It was in a package deal off of eBay- it came with a partner mold, a discontinued 6-cavity 358-150-SWC that I actually wanted at the time and a set of 6-cav handles. The whole mess was maybe $50 shipped to my door iirc, not an awesome deal but not bad if I do say so myself. The molds needed some TLC and that's what they got. The 105-SWC sat on the top of my safe, unloved, for nearly two years because I already had a TL-356-124-2R for my 9mm's and heck I'd used RNs in 9mm since forever coz' that's what you do, right? I recall thinking, as I cast the 105-SWC mold into purgatory, who the heck would want to shoot that tiny little thing in 38 special? I figured I'd trade it off one day.
Fast forward about two years to last week. I'm in a mood to tinker. I need some more 311-93-1Rs for my 32 Long and I started casting them in my 90308 6-cav. I had lead left in the pot- smelted range scrap, that I know BHNs about 8-10 and hits 12 with water quenching- and figured, what the heck, let's try out that 105-SWC.
After a LONG warmup (Seems to me the small Lee 6-cavs take a lot longer to warm up and start behaving than the big boolits like the TL-429-240-SWC for example) it started tossing out these little 1/2 scale models of the classic H&G #68 200-gr 45 boolit that everyone and their uncle uses in 45 acp. It was a cute little button thing. Purdy, shiny, and oddly tempting. Despite my renewed feelings of "What is this good for?" I went ahead and once she got good and hot next thing I knew I had spat out maybe 300 of them. Measuring them in groups on my digital scale (a postal scale, not a really accurate scale) showed that the bullets were right on for weight, roughly 67 of them was a solid pound which is as close to 105-grains as I can measure with a digital postal scale.
I then got the wild idea to load them in 9mm. They were a bit out of round but generally .358"-.359" and cute little things. I tumble lubed them in ALOX and pushed them through a Lee .357" sizer and gave them another light coat of ALOX. I used mixed range-pickup nickel brass with 4.5 grains of Alliant Promo and Wolf SP primers to an OAL of about 1.10". This left a bit of the upper driving band exposed but not too much.
I loaded up 8 with dead primers and no powder first to function test them in my Sig P6. They cycled just fine despite having been cast just 24 hours before and not fully hard yet. There was a tiny nick on the side of the nose from something. But they fed and cycled by hand just fine. So I went for it.
They functioned and fired just fine, nothing out of the ordinary- until I checked the target- it was full of perfectly round holes grouped in the middle of the target. Wow! With round noses I get ragged sort of cuts in the paper, these SWCs really did leave nice clean holes in the paper. And they shot well, too! I went through that first hundred I had loaded rather quickly, intent on having fun and not really on marksmanship. At 30' or thereabouts as I paced it off in my back yard, I was keeping all of them on a piece of printer paper as long as I provided minimal guidance to the pistol. Impressive! The last 8 I saved and shot onto a 3"x5" purple card from the craft bin. All 8 on the card from 30'.
I have got to say this little boolit made a believer out of me. Nice clean target markings and quite economical to shoot. Going from 124 grains to 105 grains is roughly a 15% savings in lead required!
Going to have to load up some more and try them in some other pistols. This could be my new favorite 9mm mold. And ya know what? I never have yet cast any real number of 150-SWCs, which was the mold I originally wanted to begin with! I have 3000 or so Lyman 358156s and a couple thousand 158-RFs to use up before I need any more.
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