Bear season opens Monday

[762nato]

Hunting with .303 Br and Lyman 314299. Hopefully have some pics....

[pmer]

Good luck hunting. I'm new to bear hunting, are you going over bait? Have you used the .303 on bear before?

[Bullshop]

The 314299 is a bit pointy in its nose shape to make a good hunting design as is. When I used that design to hunt caribou I was a little worried about that pointy nose penciling through without causing enough damage for quick kills.
What I did to remedy that was to bump a meplate on the nose.
If you have a lube sizer nose bumping is quite easy and can produce very uniform results. All you need is a flat top punch that is too large to enter your sizer die.
After the boolit is sized and lubed re adjust the depth stop on your sizer so that when you run the boolit in nose first the top punch will contact the die top and stop the travel before the boolit nose bottoms out in the die. Then holding the press handle down with the top punch in contact with the die top turn the depth adjuster up until you feel it come in contact with the ejector punch in the die. At that point you are in contact at the top and bottom of the boolit but are adjusted for zero bump.
Now lift the press handle and give the depth adjuster about 1/8th of a turn upward. Now slowly pull the press handle back down and at the very last little bit of travel you will feel the bump as the boolit nose flattens in the die. From there you adjust up or down to get the desired amount of bump for the amount of meplate you want.
You can go too far with this and begin to distort the entire nose diameter but done moderately works good to convert a pointy type boolit nose to one with a bit of meplate.
The end result for me was excellent terminal performance on caribou. Just something you may want to consider.

[nekshot]

bear hunting already, you are lucky! One of my great desires is to someday get a bear. Good luck to you all!

[Djones]

if making a flat meplate with your lube sizer, make sure you do not make the nose riding portion of your boolit too big for your rifle. Make sure you chamber check a boolit before you alter a bunch and find out later that they are too big in diameter at the nost to chamber. just my 2 cent