First Paper Patch Boolit from my 1940 ShtLE

[303Guy]

This came after seeing how dark the bore was and how the first greased boolit didn't look like it was going to work too well. It was only a powder pugg load into my test tube.





That's the inside wrap that survived whole. The outer wrap disappeared into dust. Even worse, note how uneven the rifling impression is! Clearly the boolit doesn't fit the throat too well. Anyway, I'm going to need to fire something like a hundred patched boolits through it to polish up the bore. Or I can cheat a little and fire-lap it first. The rifling is strong and the throat not oversize so just polishing is needed I'd say. I am a little concerned about the off centre firing pin strike and the canted boolit though. I might have to centralize the cases for fire-forming (this powder puff load couldn't even fill out the primer, let alone fore-form the case.

[wmitty]

303Guy, are you starting out with lubed patches or dry? Is that one of your tapered boolits?

[303Guy]

Dry patch. It's actually a two diameter boolit with a taper transition to the slightly tapered nose shank to suite the throat of another rifle. The paper was lined notepad with a thickness of 0.064mm/.0025". I figured that since the load was so low and the objective is to clean the bore I would try dry and see what happens. Well, it got through the bore so maybe a few more of those would be in order. The objective is to use this rifle with naked cast.

[wmitty]

Keep us posted on your results; for some obscure reason very few SMLE's seemed to have made it into north Texas and those that have are priced out of my range.

Looked to be a fine fighting rifle.