BruceB
12-02-2005, 01:08 AM
In the course of designing some starting cast-boolit 'terra-incognita' loads in my M1A (7.62 NATO), I've been consulting a lot of sources. These include soothsayers, tea-leaf readers and gurus of bird intestines....but also a few more conventional sources
In reading through various manuals looking for SLOWER-burning powder applications which might be transposed into the 7.62 NATO, I ran across a fascinating puzzler in the 1958 Lyman CB handbook.
In the '58 handbook, Lyman fearlessly published a WILD assortment of loads directly from users of their tooling, and some of them really are "interesting".
Take this one for the .300 Savage, from an anonymous contributor. Bullet is our dear old 311291, 167 grains in "hard" alloy, IPCO lubricant, Ideal gascheck, Federal 210 primer, 2" group at 100 yards. The charge is, get this: "2.5 Bullseye/20.0 4759"!
Comments from the contributor: "Get my best accuracy with duplex loads. Regular loads such as 29 grains of 3031 with this bullet in the .30-30 are better deer loads than factory ammunition with hard-jacketed bullets and just as accurate."
Notice there is no mention of any sort of filler to immobilize those two powders, and the .300 Savage has plenty of room for 22.5 grains of powder to rattle around. I wonder just what this gent was doing? I also wonder what Lyman was thinking when they printed this stuff. Without a filler, naturally the charge would mix in a totally random fashion. 4759 is extremely easy to light up, so why would he need Bullseye??
Interesting, indeed. I found a couple similar reports, with two powders in a less-than-capacity total charge, and again no mention of fillers of any sort. I'd wager that quite a few filler-less loads were fired on the strength of these recommendations. Wonder what happened?
BTW, I did find the '58 manual useful in my quest. The later Lyman manuals concentrate to a high degree on VERY FAST powders for cast boolits in rifles, but the '58 edition contains lots of loads with slower powders....which should be taken cautiously! There's also an amusing amount of "swave-and-deboner" talk about how they run their CBs at 2700fps or more, and shoot dismayingly-small groups (viewed through my jaundiced ol' eyeballs, anyway). Naturally, this is mostly with iron sights, just to rub it in a little harder.
Seeing the results these fellers reported, it's plainly obvious that SOMETHING is missing from today's scene. When we sweat blood to get under an inch at 100 with today's barrels, scopes, tooling and components, and those ol' timers easily did it in the '50s.......mebbe it's them IPCO grease wads we're missing???
In reading through various manuals looking for SLOWER-burning powder applications which might be transposed into the 7.62 NATO, I ran across a fascinating puzzler in the 1958 Lyman CB handbook.
In the '58 handbook, Lyman fearlessly published a WILD assortment of loads directly from users of their tooling, and some of them really are "interesting".
Take this one for the .300 Savage, from an anonymous contributor. Bullet is our dear old 311291, 167 grains in "hard" alloy, IPCO lubricant, Ideal gascheck, Federal 210 primer, 2" group at 100 yards. The charge is, get this: "2.5 Bullseye/20.0 4759"!
Comments from the contributor: "Get my best accuracy with duplex loads. Regular loads such as 29 grains of 3031 with this bullet in the .30-30 are better deer loads than factory ammunition with hard-jacketed bullets and just as accurate."
Notice there is no mention of any sort of filler to immobilize those two powders, and the .300 Savage has plenty of room for 22.5 grains of powder to rattle around. I wonder just what this gent was doing? I also wonder what Lyman was thinking when they printed this stuff. Without a filler, naturally the charge would mix in a totally random fashion. 4759 is extremely easy to light up, so why would he need Bullseye??
Interesting, indeed. I found a couple similar reports, with two powders in a less-than-capacity total charge, and again no mention of fillers of any sort. I'd wager that quite a few filler-less loads were fired on the strength of these recommendations. Wonder what happened?
BTW, I did find the '58 manual useful in my quest. The later Lyman manuals concentrate to a high degree on VERY FAST powders for cast boolits in rifles, but the '58 edition contains lots of loads with slower powders....which should be taken cautiously! There's also an amusing amount of "swave-and-deboner" talk about how they run their CBs at 2700fps or more, and shoot dismayingly-small groups (viewed through my jaundiced ol' eyeballs, anyway). Naturally, this is mostly with iron sights, just to rub it in a little harder.
Seeing the results these fellers reported, it's plainly obvious that SOMETHING is missing from today's scene. When we sweat blood to get under an inch at 100 with today's barrels, scopes, tooling and components, and those ol' timers easily did it in the '50s.......mebbe it's them IPCO grease wads we're missing???