Mould for Enfield 1853

[Bad Ass Wallace]

I use both the Lyman PH copy and the Lee .575"

[dave951]

I have that Lee mold. It casts the bullet on the left. It’s the ONLY Lee bullet that works in any of my guns that take a 575-6 bullet. If anybody wants that mold, good luck. Lee discontinued them. I go two off eBay.

[barnabus]

I shoot a Parker Hale in North South Skirmish competition. A couple things you need to do for best results.

1) VERIFY your ACTUAL bore dia and that means measure it.
2) For best accuracy, bullets must be pure lead, sized to .001 under the measured bore size.
3) Use real black powder, either 2 or 3f and start with a moderate charge.
4) Avoid using ANY powder or caps labeled with “reenactor”

A word on molds. Lee are built to a price point, but there are much, much better options. In my gun, I use the RCBS Hogdon with extended base plug. The ONLY Lee bullet that shoots well in my gun is the Target minie with a large flat nose but Lee has discontinued this mold in 58. You’ll only find some as used or old stock. Avoid frustration and use pure soft lead. I get mine from a local scrap yard. Any medical facility with an X-ray room has lead lined walls. The stuff is as pure as it gets short of Rotometals and my local yard usually has a good supply.

My competition load- RCBS Hogdon, 43g 3f Old Eynsford, RWS caps, 50/50 beeswax/lard lube. This will shoot 2moa or better consistently in my Parker Hale.

at what distance do u get two inch groups

[carbine]

2 MOA implies 2 inches at 100 yards or 1 inch at 50 yards. I believe he is talking about 50 yards a one hole group

[Good Cheer]

A couple of tricks that some may find useful.

1. When trying to determine the bullet diameter for your minie ball gun a few cast minies can be machined down using the rifling to do the machining. Grip the nose of the minie with your favorite set of big pliers or channel locks and feed the bullet into the bore tail first while twisting it and doing your best to keep it straight. Try that a few times until you think you're getting pretty good at it, make up your sampling set and then write down multiple diameter measurements off of each one. The resulting data should give you a definition of the diameter that will pass into the bore of your rifling.

2. The older various designs of Lyman minie molds used base pins of fairly large diameter and could be swapped out from one set of blocks to the other. Four different bullets could therefore be cast using the components of two molds. Nine different bullet designs could be cast using three molds. So if you bought old molds on the cheap you were way ahead.

3. OK, I'll go for a third. Because the molds had base plug channels of diameters very close to one another it's also possible to have an interchangeable adjustable length base plug. And in those 48" twist guns (pretty quick twist for that big a bore!) that opens up just a whole bunch of fun.