Ideal 308279 ???

[nighthunter]

My father gave me an old Ideal mold a few days ago. Its number is 308279 200. I realize the 200 is the designed cast weight. In an old Lyman book the closest I can find is 311279. It appears to be the same bullet. When cast the bottom two bands measure .311 in diameter. The front driving band measures .325 in diameter. Why would a bullet have such a large front band? Does anyone know anything about this design?
Nighthunter

[45 2.1]

Its a stop ring type boolit meant to lubed and shot as cast in target loads. Basically you deprime, reprime, charge and seat the boolit in the fired case neck then load and shoot. Stop ring boolits were copied from the German Scheutzen shooters. The stop ring limits the seating depth into the case.

[floodgate]

nighthunter, 45 2.1:

Boy, that sent me scurrying into my files, where the only listings in my nearly complete set of Ideal Handbooks are in No. 17 (1906), where it is shown in shortened, 158-gr. form with a single base band as #308279; and in the 1958 Lyman "Handbook of Cast Bullets", under the same number, in 200-gr. form with the two base bands yours has. It sits among several other bullets in the same 1904 - 1908 cherry number range, several of them - like this one - designed by Dr. W. H. Hudson (hence the "H" on the engraving in the HCB), many of which show variations of the large "stop ring" identified by 45 2.1 in the previous post. (The "size-to" prefixes "#308..." and "#311..." were used sort of interchangeably during this period.)

FWIW, you can get a serviceable reprint of HB #17 from <www.cornellpubs.com>, but to save you the wait, the entry under the shorter version reads: "308279. Sub-Skirmish for the Krag Rifle. Weighs about 158 grains when made with Ideal alloy / Designed by Dr. W. G. Hudson. The proper load is 6.6 grains' weight of Laflin & Rand 'Marksman' powder. The whole skirmish practice may be obtained at ranges one-third the distance of the regular skirmish range. Write Laflin & Rand Powder Co., Wilmington, Del., for their sub-skirmish booklet. / Price of Armory Mould [a big, 8-cavity mould formerly made by Ideal]....Net, $10.00 / Price of Single Mould....Special List, $1.50". Your longer version was clearly intended for full-charge use at the normal, longer skirmish-practice ranges.

Although I do not have a copy of the Laflin & Rand booklet, I do have a Xerox of an Ideal pocket manual from 1904, entitled "Instructions on how to load and reload shells for the / .30-40 KRAG / and other high power rifles". It is too early to show this bullet, but covers earlier ones in this series; it includes an interesting discussion of the design of this bullet family by Dr. Hudson, from which I take the following: "...The great obstacle which still confronts us when we attempt to increase the powder charge .... is the fusing of the base of the bullet [especially with the "hot" early smokeless powders of the day]....the fusion has a great tendency to extend in streaks up the side of the bullet [sound familiar?]....I sought to remedy the fusion and gas-cutting by making the front band (c [in an adjacent cut of bullet #308256]) of much greater diameter than the rest of the bullet (.319") and tapering it slightly, aiming thus to cork up the rifled portion of the barrel gas tight in the course of closing the action, and before the explosion occurs."

So, it looks like the "stop ring" had the dual purpose of stopping the hand-seated bullet in the mouth of an un-resized case (for leisurely target practice) AND serving as a "throat plug" jammed into the leede to preclude or minimize blow-by.

Even though this particular bullet only appears (so far) at two places in the Ideal / Lyman literature, and cherried to two lengths/weights, with different prefixes, the cherry must have hung around the Ideal shops for many years and been used for special orders by the cognoscenti of the period.

You've got a real treasure there! Lemme know if you ever decide to part with it.

floodgate