Wheeler
10-23-2011, 06:17 PM
As an experiment for some IDPA loads I had dreamed up, I bought 100 .355/124gr. RNL to load in a .38 Special case. My ultimate goal was a light load that would produce a 3-3.5" group at 20 yards, which for the purposes of IDPA would have been more than acceptable. I picked th 9mm RNL because the sharp pointy shape would hopefully facilitate reloads.
Short story: Accuracy was horrible. I tried these loads through three different guns and got three wildly varying results. I decided to put the project on a back burner, shot a few through my J frame for a little trigger time, and tossed the remaining 5 rounds in my range bag.
I decided to take my son plinking last night and wanted to introduce him to my Winchester M94 Ranger in .357 Mag. He did very well shooting and towards the end of the session we had the remains of a 20 oz. plastic bottle hanging fom a treeat around 20 yards away. He wanted to shoot at the bottle cap hanging from the tree but decided he couldn't make the shot. He then in turn handed me the rifle and said "You do it." Talk about pressure :)
I didn't have any .357 loads left and after pilfering around, found the remaining 5 .38 loads with the 9mm bullets and thought I'd try them, if nothing else to recover the brass. I could see the bottle move everytime I shot but never did hit the bottle cap. I sent him to recover the bottle and police up our mess and got to looking, I had put a 5 shot group in an area about 1/2" below the cap about the size of a quarter. That's outside edge to outside edge, not center to center.
I said all that to ask the question about shooting cast bullets through a lever action. Especially with the smaller diameter boolits. Has anyone else done something like this with similar results? Whycan I get such good accuracy out of the rifle that should have roughly th same bore diameter and abysmal accuracy out of three different revolvers, two S&W and one Ruger?
I'm now tempted to buy some more and work up another load and see how it prints on paper.
Short story: Accuracy was horrible. I tried these loads through three different guns and got three wildly varying results. I decided to put the project on a back burner, shot a few through my J frame for a little trigger time, and tossed the remaining 5 rounds in my range bag.
I decided to take my son plinking last night and wanted to introduce him to my Winchester M94 Ranger in .357 Mag. He did very well shooting and towards the end of the session we had the remains of a 20 oz. plastic bottle hanging fom a treeat around 20 yards away. He wanted to shoot at the bottle cap hanging from the tree but decided he couldn't make the shot. He then in turn handed me the rifle and said "You do it." Talk about pressure :)
I didn't have any .357 loads left and after pilfering around, found the remaining 5 .38 loads with the 9mm bullets and thought I'd try them, if nothing else to recover the brass. I could see the bottle move everytime I shot but never did hit the bottle cap. I sent him to recover the bottle and police up our mess and got to looking, I had put a 5 shot group in an area about 1/2" below the cap about the size of a quarter. That's outside edge to outside edge, not center to center.
I said all that to ask the question about shooting cast bullets through a lever action. Especially with the smaller diameter boolits. Has anyone else done something like this with similar results? Whycan I get such good accuracy out of the rifle that should have roughly th same bore diameter and abysmal accuracy out of three different revolvers, two S&W and one Ruger?
I'm now tempted to buy some more and work up another load and see how it prints on paper.