350 Grain Cast Gascheck Bullet load, .416 Rigby

[eldeguello]

I have found a good load for my CZ 550 in .416 Rigby. It consists of the RCBS-style 350-grain flatnose gascheck bullet sized .417", Brinell 22-25 hardness, with 112 grains of AA8700 powder, Federal 215 primers, in Jamison cases. Bullet seated to crimping groove.

This load groups about 1.5" @ 100 yards. IV @ 10' from muzzle = 2100 FPS.........

[BruceB]

My .416 Rigby loads have used only the RCBS 416-350, which I believe is the design you're using, too. Cast from my straight-wheelweight alloy, they weigh in at 365 grains. I've loaded and fired over 2000 of these boolits to date.

My rifle is a Ruger #1, and it delivers rather good results with quite a few different powders. The hunting load I took to Alberta last fall had enough XMP5744 to give 2100 fps with a TWO-alloy cast softpoint from the RCBS mould....pure lead back to the crimp groove, wheelweight alloy from that point back. I haven't used slow powders much for anything except high-effort jacketed-bullet loads, with the exception noted below, which used IMR 4831.

The fastest I've pushed this cast bullet is around 2650 fps, still with good accuracy and no leading...but with considerable trauma behind the butt! It was mostly just as an experiment, and it was "interesting". The rifle has also delivered 300-grain X-Bullets at very close to 3000 fps, and that is a very energetic load indeed!

Powders from Unique on the fast end to 4895 on the slower side have done very well for me. There's still a lot of room for experimental loads, and one powder which I intend to follow-up this year is 4198, which has given some interesting signs in the few loadings I've already attempted with the stuff.

Your groups of 1.5" sound a lot like my results, and are plenty good enough for hunting ranges to 200 yards or so. I zeroed my rifle at 170 yards last autumn, and found that impacts were about 3" high at 100 and 2" low at 200. This will give any critter a great deal of grief. The energy, I suppose we could say, is "sufficient"!!!

If 8700 costs as much as the other AA powders, I think I'd stick with my lower-volume charges for most purposes. 55 grains of 5744 would be a lot less expensive than 100-plus of 8700. I use dacron fill to take up the leftover case volume in low-density loadings.

[eldeguello]

Bruce-thanks for the info. I will put it in my notebook. I see I have a lot more to learn about shooting cast bullets in the .416. I am impressed by your ability to get a wheelweight bullet up to 2600+ FPS w/o leading. Yes, I believe the bullet we are both using is the same one. I think 350 grains is plenty heavy enough for anything outside of Africa in this caliber!

I once made some similar "dual-hardness" bullets for my .45/70 by casting the Lyman 457122HP plain-base bullet of wheelweights, (342 grains) then heating them up to around 460 defgrees in the oven with the bullets standing on their bases in a jar lid with holes in it and a bail on it for handling the lid. When the bullets had been heated for over three hours, I removed them from the oven and quickly immersed the base portion of the bullets up to the second grease groove in a shallow pan of cold water to quench them. This hardened the base section and left the nose portion down to the bottom of the hollowpoint unhardened. Hand-lubed them with LBT Blue.

I shot them with an inverted gascheck on the top of the powder charge of 60 grains of Re 7. MV was 2350 FPS, and the load was quite accurate. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to try this load on game.......