OK, Now You Got Me All Riled Up

[zardoz]

OK, please let me know if I'm off base here.

Bought a PTR 91 a week ago, my first .308 rifle. Been sick with the crud, and did not shoot it till today. Love it! My highest power 30 cal rifle cartridge previously, had been the 7.62x39 out of an SKS, but this was a whole new experience.

So, now I get to looking at this paper patching thing, and decide it is worth a go. Just ordered a mould for 180 grain boolits, push through sizers for .308" and .309", and a set of reloading dies. Also got a Site-Lite laser boresighter for a scope I have for the thing, atop a claw mount. Today I was just shooting water jugs at 40 yards, and knew immediately this was something I needed to get into a bit more.

So, I was reading in the Midway reviews on the 180 grain Lee boolits, one doctor had a great experience with paper patching these out of a "Lee-mented" mould, sized to .308", paper patch, and resize to .309". Amazingly, a lot of the stuff I wanted was on sale at Midway as well.

Am I on the right track here? I never spent much time on this forum section, having been totally pistol boolits so far. I read here that magazine fed auto-loaders are possible for paper patching, and guess I just got "aroused".

Am I nuts? I may need some help here, but will try to absorb previous postings here on a whole new world of shooting cast at high power.

Thanks, from a totally insane newbie to PP.

[leftiye]

Magazine feeding may present you with some frustration (patches may be scraped off some while chambering). But it has been done (made to work). Might be even more fun with autoloaders, but stranger things have worked. Paper patching was first used in sniggle snots, and is still the easiest way to go.

There seem to be two ways to patch. The usual way is to size to bore plus say .0015", patch, and size again to groove plus .001 or .002". The other way as you have layed out involves in pretty much sizing after patching. This compresses the paper to "harder than lead", and sizes the boolit as necessary in one pass.

[303Guy]

I just tested out my latest aquisition - a really old rifle with a worn throat - with patched boolits and a load I developed entirely in my test tube in my shed and it worked superbly! So much fun to be had with paper patching.

I bloodied the rifle on a turkey and there was a sense of satisfaction in having used boolits I had made and patched (using my own mold). Yup, you're on the right track all right!