As some know i have been playing with the Lyman Plains bullets Sized and Paper Patched in .50 and .54 Cal with really good results, yesterday morning i took my old stock 1:48 twist .54 Renegade out to shoot, the bore on this rifle is tight, i tried sizing to .539 and it loaded way to hard, i had to drop down a Size to .538 to get a decent fit, I shot a total of 13 shots, My group was horrifyingly horrible, i was lucky to hit a 2 foot sheet of plywood! I shot this gun day before yesterday with PURE SOFT LEAD and a lighter charge with decent so so results, about a 3" group but only 50 yards away. Yesterday was the same Lyman Plains bullet except harder, a lot harder, about 9.5BHN, after shooting all over the place i noticed something odd, Onion skin papers at my target, some of them had made the entire trip to and THROUGH my paper target at 50 yards away, (i am shooting through a piece of old plywood with a 10 circle cut out of it so the fragments of wood don't destroy my targets, i set my targets so i am shooting through that 10" hole and going through the paper target only) I actually found a couple onion skin papers behind my target. I did not notice this day before yesterday with my soft lead bullets, and my group was decent.
Moral of the story, When you paper patch an oversized bullet and SMASH it through a reducing die, be prepared for this to happen, SMILE Lee S&W 500 Shooters, this is happening to you as well, I GAURANTEE IT!! There are 2 ways that i see to fix this, 1 is to do like Roger says and cut a slit down the sides of the paper before loading, This might work depending on lead hardness and how much the paper is 'bit in to the bullet' (i have always sized my bullets first, cleaned them off, wrapped them and sent them back through the die, Doing it this way would help combat this problem a tiny bit, but stil no gaurantees the papers wont stick) In my personal opinion the only definate fix for this if you plan to stick with your 20 dollar Lee mold is to buy a couple different sizing dies (38 bucks a piece) and go in steps reducing the bullet diameter down to .493-.494, THEN wrap your paper and send them through a .498-.499 But at that point wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a quality mold that drops a bullet the correct size to begin with? Something to think about!