Beverage moulds???????

[littlejack]

Hey fellas:
Can anyone give me some history on Beverage moulds? What were the years
produced? What was/is the quality?
Jack

[Bent Ramrod]

Henry Beverage was a single shot rifle enthusiast who made molds for himself and apparently for other enthusiasts. I believe he operated in the period between the 50's and the early '70's, but this is just a guess. I never saw any advertisement for his services, at least as far as I recall. He wrote a good article on making a mould for his Pope rifle in one of the early numbers of the Handloader magazine. In the article, he made the cherry on a lathe with a milling attachment. He cherried the mould blocks with the cherry in a drill press and the blocks in a special set of handles with long alignment rods through the blocks, squeezing the handles together by hand rather than using a double-acting vise. I seem to recall that the mould blocks he used were brass. Apparently his pilot holes were accurate enough, and his skill level high enough, that he could get a well-centered cavity in the blocks by this method.

He also wrote an article on turning a Winchester high wall into a .25-35 varmint rifle in the Rifle magazine of the same time period.

[littlejack]

BR:
Thanks for the history. There were a few of his moulds just sold on flebay. They sold from 36.00 to 71.00. All were single cavity and brass. The interesting thing about them was that they all had a very radical taper to them. One went from .316 on the front band to .333 to the rear band. It was stated that most were for oversized 32 caliber. I contemplated bidding on one for my Mosin Nagant. I could have sized it down to perfectly fit the leade in my rifle chamber (.317).
I decided not to.
Jack

[Buckshot]

..............I also have an article by Mr Beverage where he was going to compete in cast BR, maybe at his club or some such. The pertinent part I recall was that he was going to be using the Lyman 311284 design so he ordered 5 double cavity moulds from places all over the US. His reasoning was that he'd get moulds of different manufacture dates, ergo the cherries would (hopefully) all have been different. Of the 5 he got, he said 3 would have 'worked' but 2 were much better and he picked the best of those 2 and sold off the other 4. I also have the article Bent Ramrod mentioned.

................Buckshot

[littlejack]

Thank you Buckshot. That is interesting history.
The way the Lyman moulds are nowadays, all over the place, ( mainly small) this may be the
procedure needed again.
Jack