A friend of mine has a a nice Marlin 1895 CB with a 26" barrel, he loads for it using Varget, 4198, and home cast 405-459-hb bullets from a Lee mold, lubing with Alox. His lead is very, very, very, hard, I suspect pure Linotype, it will not lead his bore even in the absence of lube. I've slugged the barrel, the bullets are coming out the right size, bullets recovered from a snow bank show no signs of skirt blowout. 55grs of Varget behind one of those bullets, and it will only do about 8" at 50 yards. I fired that group, then with a 50gr load of 4198 and 405gr Speers instead of cast, I printed one of about 1.5". So, in my mind there's something up with the bullet. Is it possible for a bullet to be too hard to shoot well? I'm out of ideas, I shoot cast in most of my handguns, cast bullets aren't unfamiliar territory to me, but this has me baffled. Could it be that the bullet just doesn't want to perform at this high of a velocity? Weight variation of a random 10 showed 3gr of extreme spread, all average around 396-397gr.