I finally broke down and bought the RCBS 35-200-FN mold because I had tried some of them in one of my rifles and have heard nothing but rave reviews from everybody who has used them.
I got the mold yesterday, and found it to be well made and nicely finished and it came in a nice little green box.
Today, I decided to slip this baby under the silver stream and see how it does.
Heres my pot heating up with the mold to the side and my special castboolits coffee cup in the background. (just for the record I just set my coffee there for visual effect, I keep my cup well away from the melt normally)
So I cast up about 100 boolits. The mold worked well, although it took a while to get broke in and the boolits stuck to the left side like glue for the first 30 cycles. I took a break at that point and when I started back up, it was less picky.
After casting those 100, I decided to sort them by wieght, and thats when the quality of this mold realy started to shine. out of those 100 boolits, the maximum spread of weight was 1.5 grains.
I found about ten boolits that were 207.0-207.5 grains and I culled them out. I got 5 that where less than 206 and I culled them out. Other than that, I had a pile of 62 that where 206.5-206.9 and I had 38 that were 206.0-206.4. I culled the 38 and kept the 62. I took an unbiased sampling of the boolits and measured them with my precision micrometer. They all measured .3593
Next I put on the annealed gas checks and and ran them through a .360 sizer.
After pan lubing with FWFL I loaded them in my .358winchester brass over a mild charge of IMR3031.
I headed to the range with 50 rounds thus loaded.
I started out figuring to slam a bunch of them through a target just to see if they hit the paper at fifty yards.
Here's the group I shot:
That's 25 rounds fellers! 25!
By the way, thats a darn sight better than what I got at the same distance with copper jacket boolits:
After that, I decided to hunker down and do some serious shootin to see what this baby can do!
I taped up a new target, adjusted my scope, fired seven shots, adjusted my scope one last time, and fired a 5 shot group.
Here's that target (please forgive those two fliers, I punched the trigger) :
That makes this one of the most accurate rifles I own, at least at 50 yards.
Absolutely amazing.