Cops and casting

[Geraldo]

I was doing some research on something else and stumbled onto this, a history of the Boardman Twp (OH) PD, and it included a list of purchases from 1964.

http://www.boardmantwp.com/police/police_abad_history.asp

The list is:
A purchase order from the winter of 1964 shows the equipment and technology the officers were limited to:

- 1 Winchester mode riot gun
- 50 lb. Lead for bullets
- 1 long range training shell
- 1 B-2 clue spray powder
- 1 B-1 clue spray powder
- black powder
- 2 boxes 12 go. 9 pellet
- 3 boxes .357
- 3 boxes .38
- 2 rolls of film
- one bullet puller
- 12 flashbulbs
- 100 50’targets
- 25 man sized targets

I wonder who did the casting.

[S.R.Custom]

Back in the day, it was common for depts to load their own practice ammo for budgetary reasons. Prolly the case here...

...or someone was supplying their hobby on the public dime.


More interesting is the "clue spray." I thought clues came from diligent detective work. Who knew you could buy them in a spray can?

[mold maker]

Our local PD Chief, was a reloader and when time allowed, he cast from plumbing joints. He was also in charge of water/sewer, and dogs.
It wasn't unusual for him to show up at an emergency scene in dirty overalls driving a 1 1/2 ton truck full of pipe, or arrive in a patrol car to cut off/on your water. He and one other part time officer/worker, took care of all our needs for quiet a few years.
Now there are 39 line officers and 7 in the PD office. The City Maintance Dept. has 31 workers and a staff of 8.
Do we have that much more crime, and bad pipes?

[Boz330]

Several of the cops I use to shoot IPSC with, reloaded the practice ammo for their dept. They had a dept C&H progressive reloader that belonged to the Dept. They bought their boolits from Star.

Bob

[deltaenterprizes]

I was loading practice for my Sherrif's Dept in the 80s to save them money. Problem today would be components mainly primers in large quanities.

[MtGun44]

I've heard some big depts had trustees casting thousands of from H&G 50 gang molds and
running Star lubrisizers and loaders to turn out mass quantities of full wadcutter training
ammo. Not sure I would trust them that much, but that is the story I was told.

Bill

[WILCO]

Richard Lee spoke of this topic in his book and the N.R.A. Cast Bullet book lists bullet lube of police departments from back in the day. Good stuff.

[Crusty Deary Ol'Coot]

Back at least 15 years now, I was working at surplus stores/recycling at Washington state university.

One day, the campus cops who had a storage locker in our building, surplused a Star loader set up for .38s.

BEing a reloader, it caught my eye quickly so I ask the lady in charge about it.

I had already checked it out and found it wasn't operating, so I got it for a good price, took it home and worked it over, it only needing cleaning and lubing after years of setting in storage.

Got to looking and found out it needed something to feed in the empty cases, so checked out the locker and sure enough there was about a half dozen tube laying there that no one knew what they were used for.

A friend did some wheeling dealing and it went to Midway as I recall, as they were thinking about designing and bringing out their own line of progressive loaders.

Never did see anything come of it.

Keep em coming!

Crusty Deary Ol'Coot

[NoDakJak]

About a year ago I bought a Star loader that was set up for 38 Spcial wadcutter. It provided untold thousands of rounds of practice ammo for an eastern North Dakota Police Department. It is the basic Star setup and only needed cleaning and lube. Neil

[man.electric]

A local retired cop used to swage bullets for the PD however nobody seems to know what happened to any of the equipment other then a cannalure tool.

[376Steyr]

FWIW, Skeeter Skelton wrote of having a trustee cast bullets for him.

[45-70 Ranger]

In my old PD I loaded thousands of .38 WC's on an early RCBS inline progressive. The press was my own and being a licensed Ammo Mfg. at the time, the PD covered me with their insurance. (Never needed it, but was nice that they paid that!) So, yeah, back in the early days of police work, a lot of PD's loaded their own. Mosty now due to liabalility (hope I spelled that right!) only factory ammo is used. Must make it easier to sue if there's an incident...

[9.3X62AL]

My agency was just getting out of the bullet casting and reloading business as I hired on (1977). We were shooting the "trusty handloads" during my academy time, and it was sorry stuff. So too were the issue sidearms, Colt Official Police X 4" that were in bad need of gunsmithing or outright replacement. Before hitting the street, I bought a Colt Trooper Mk III to enable all 6 shots to discharge when called upon to do so. It was a simpler time, but you would think after Newhall 1970 and the SLA shootout in 1974 that a bit of consciousness-raising might have onset. It took the 1980 Norco debacle to embarrass our leadership into making a show of giving a &&&& about officer safety, and even that was grudging and ran in fits and starts.

[nicholst55]

FWIW, Skeeter Skelton wrote of having a trustee cast bullets for him.

+1; I well remember that article. He bought the guy all the coke he could drink while he was casting, and gave him $5 cash out of his own pocket when he let him out of jail. IIRC, Skeeter said that he was basically a really good guy who just got caught on the wrong side of the law.

[Geraldo]

I know that a lot of city and suburban departments reloaded their own .38 practice ammo, what struck me about this township was that they were casting boolits as well. They had twelve officers and bought 300 rounds of factory ammo, so they needed something to practice with.

[Bret4207]

IF you loo back through the old Rifleman up into the 70's anyway it was very common to see match reports from various police leagues. It was real big back in the 30's and 40's. I knew some of the guys on the last NYSP pistol and trap teams. Those guys, and the teams, are long gone.

[cajun shooter]

When I first signed on to the reserve program in the early 70's it was very common for most depts. in our area to have trustee's and others do some casting. We had two that were sent to the range every day and they sorted brass, cleaned it, and prepared the range grounds. We had enough tax money to purchase our bullets from Speer in the tubes to fit the Camdex machine. The scariest problem was that the office had the motor pool that was run by Sheriff's Deputies with all prison labor. It was attached to the prison and they walked over. We had many units fail that could have caused death. My entire steering box froze up after it was rebuilt by prison labor. My partner and I hit a electrical pole while involved in a pursuit. The heads of administration figured the office saved money if if a few things happened, without worry of the officers or public. There was a Jefferson Parish Firearms instructor who would shoot things out of trustees hands and caused the end of using prison labor for range work.

[3006guns]

The list is interesting to me because my Dad was a cop during that time period and yes, they did load their own practice ammo. I remember seeing the machine but knew nothing about it (probably a Star).

It's also interesting because it looks like a shopping list for any one of us (excluding the clue spray) on a good day. Yet, this was supplies for an entire township!

Sidenote: Our little local PD qualifies about every three months with "store bought" .40 S&W, by the case. I help out by cleaning up the range afterwards.......heh, heh, heh.

What the heck is a "long range training shell"? Department owned howitzer? Or maybe one slug round for the shotgun?:razz:

[ReloaderFred]

I was the full time Rangemaster for our department from 1977 to 1979. One of my duties was to load the .38 Special practice ammunition, and with a force of just over 600 sworn Deputies, plus roughly 300 Reserve Deputies, I was at the range many, many evenings loading on our Ammo Load machine, which would load about 1,500 rounds an hour, as long as everything was working properly.

About half the department was carrying issued .357's (S&W Model 19's) and half were carrying issued 9mm's (S&W Model 59's) at the time. We purchased the 9mm practice ammunition and I loaded an average of about 60,000 rounds of .38's per year. We weren't allowed to carry .357 Magnum ammunition, and were very glad to see them come out with +P ammunition for duty use.

We ordered primers by the 100,000 lot and bullets were ordered in the same amount from Ron Gromak. He swaged his bullets and they were match quality. One of the first things I did when I took over as rangemaster was change from wimpy wadcutter loads to a SWC bullet and duty level loads.

When I promoted to Sergeant and had to leave the range, the guy who replaced me convinced the department to buy their practice ammunition. They were able to buy from the state and get a pretty good deal. I wish I knew what happened to that Ammo Load machine and the Hollywood Turret Press that I used to load the shotgun shells on...........

Fred

[Geraldo]

What the heck is a "long range training shell"? Department owned howitzer? Or maybe one slug round for the shotgun?:razz:

My guess is that it was for a 37mm gas gun.

[gon2shoot]

I loaded 1000's of rounds in the early 70's, with the dept picking up the tab. They bought only cast wadcutters, but I got to shoot for free.

[bgokk]

"My guess is that it was for a 37mm gas gun."
Sounds right to me. The Memphis Police Dept. used the Federal 37MM tear gas gun and we reloaded both long range and short range practice projectiles. The propellant was Cannon size black powder.

We also cast WC and RN boolits for the 38 Special. There was a large built in, gas fired lead pot, probably held 300 pounds of lead. We had 10 cavity H&G moulds.

The reloading machine was IIRC a MagnaMatic made in St Clair Shores MI.

I was transfered from uniform patrol to the firing range in 1968 and worked there as instructor and gunsmith for 12 years.

[lead-1]

Back in the 80's when I bought my first 1911 it was from an ex-deputy that used to cast and load practice ammo for a bunch of the guys. He said that not all the guys were keen on shooting lead thru their duty weapons and some would only shoot factory ammo.

[Maineboy]

I started working for a 17 man police department in 1977. Back in those days, you were basically given a badge, a gun, and a uniform and turned loose on the street. Maine had a police academy, but I was on the job 15 months before I was able to attend. Anyway I went in to get my equipment from the chief the day before I started. My service revolver was a S&W model 10 heavy barrel; with 6 rounds of "duty" ammo (round nose standard velocity) and half a box of wad cutter reloads for my ammo dumps and for "practice". Oh, ya, the uniforms didn't fit either.
I soon found another officer who liked to shoot and we did quite a bit of casting and reloading, but for ourselves, not the entire Department. The two of us shot 10 times more than all the rest of the guys in the department put together. While the model 10 was wonderfully accurate, I soon was carrying a 5 inch model 27 with my own cast boolit reloads. In the six years I worked there, I can remember only one department wide qualification and that was quite a fiasco.

[trooperdan]

Back in the the early '60's I was stationed at FT Bliss TX (El Paso TX) and shot with the local cops. They had trustee's loading their practice ammo. That ended when the chief using inmate-loaded ammo blew the top three cylinders and top strap of his Chief Special into low earth orbit! They cast their own boolits, back then, at least some toothpaste tubes were pure tin and the residual toothpaste added an interesting and not unpleasant aroma to the melt!

[KCSO]

We loaded our own ammo up inot the late 80's. The first department I worked for had a Star reloading outfit and the Sarge and I would use H and G 10 bullet gang moulds to cast up all the bullets and then load 1000 rounds of ammo every other week for the pistol team. We had those heavy H and G moulds hung in his garage on door sprigs from the ceiling and we polished the ammo in GI sand bags full of corn cob media tumbled in an old dryer. Lead was scavenged from tire shops and was free for the asking. When we shot at the local armory we got to sift the sand pile when the shooting was done and we got to keep all the brass the army guys shot.

[9.3X62AL]

All these remeniscences prompted a thought or two here. Yes, it can happen.

A lot of U.S. police departments stayed "married" to the 38 Special for a very long time. There is a LOT to like about the caliber, both as a sporting round and as a defensive tool. No, it isn't a 40 S&W or 45 ACP--but it does a lot of things very well, including its reload-friendliness. It has to be among the most-reloaded calibers extant, and I think a lot of that has to do with the success most people have with it right out of the gate when they do refills of their emptied brass.

I try to look at developments in our hobby field in the context of the times they occurred within. A survey of the responses in this thread shows that cartridge reloading played a major role in LEO firearms training regimens. I would submit that the economy allowed by cartridge reloading had a role in the over-long retention of the 38 Special revolver as the primary armament of U.S. police officers, delaying adoption of autopistols and/or more powerful revolver calibers. I think it is more than coincidental that adoption of autopistols en masse by law agencies was contemporaneous with the abandonment of cartridge reloading by agencies as a means of providing training ammunition. Kind of chicken/egg question.

[LaPoint]

When I started 22 yrs ago there was a Star progressive reloader & a Star Lube-Sizer in the armory. Both of them in .38 spl. Also there was a confiscated WWII 9mm Schmeizer sub-gun. There were also several select-fire M1 Carbines. Eventually it was all traded on several Mini-14 Semi-Auto rifles. Before it left I was able to fire the sub-gun several times. It wasn't as civilized or controllable as an MP5 but it was just pure fun to shoot! I was issued a S&W mdl 13 (heavy barrel mdl 10 I think?). We could purchase our own semi-auto from a list of approved pistols. I purchased a 1911 Combat Commander as soon as I was off probation. Things have certainly changed in the last 22 years.