350 Legend and Cast Boolits

[Oldfeller]

THIS IS A STORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW PRESSURE CAST BULLET CASE, A SET OF CAST BULLET LOADS AND A GUN THAT SHOOTS THE ABOVE.

IT DOES NOT GIVE YOU LICENSE TO EXPAND THE INFORMATION HERE TO ALL GUNS AND ALL LOADS, ESPECIALLY NOT TO HOT LOADS USING JACKETED BULLETS.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT YOU DO, NOT ME.

IF YOU FEEL THAT YOU CANNOT EXERCISE COMMON RELOADING EXPLORATORY TECHNIQUES AND TO OBSERVE AND NOTICE AND UNDERSTAND PRESSURE AND PRIMER WARNING SIGNS THEN PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS SERIES OF POSTS NOR TRY TO DO THIS SORT OF STUFF.

TO YOU, IT IS DANGEROUS WATERS .......

Next, I now have people following the long thread and SPENDING MONEY COPING THE DEAD ENDS AND THE MISTAKES CONTAINED THEREIN. I feel that a tool is needed to combat these false paths, so I will add hindsight warnings in Purple text when I am giving advice on not to go there ......


Greetings all

I'm back from motorcycling land (had to give it up, poor reflexes and general health not being up to the risks involved any longer) and I am back to chasing a new gun, a AR based 350 Legend.

Occasionally, LEE provides a couple of things you may already own that can fit your bill for a Cast Boolit for a new gun.

247911

This one has a magazine filling nose which is pointed and tapered enough to feed from an AR magazine right into the auto-loaded chamber, with the bore riding nose picking up the rifling at the normal installation distance. I bought this one just now, to be my "heavy serious slug" for my 35 caliber pig and deer gun.

This next one has no current picture, as it was a longer heavier 153 grain slug of the same form that was intended for a 38 Super (38 Largo), so you have to use your imagination a bit as my slug is ~25%~ longer than shown.

247912 OBSOLETE MOLD It shoots OK but in general is not worth pursuing as it is just another plinker bullet

Lastly, a wide meplat bullet that I am not really sure is going to fit or feed and work correctly at all in an auto-loading AR. But, we gotta try, right?

247913

Powder will be from pulled down 8 pound jugs of BLC-2 for the heavy gas checked pig slug, and pulled down M1 Carbine powder WC820 for the lighter pistol slugs.

All the cast lead slugs will be towel dropped, and then powder coated with Eastwood Ford Light Blue. Then the slugs will get sized and gas checked in a .356" push through arrangement as I don't want to get wax based lube all over the inside of an AR gas system. The little bit of blue powder coating residue that will be remaining in the works will come right out with a long pipe cleaner and use of the standard AR cleaning equipment, during a standard "pivot the upper" cleaning.

Brass was laboriously neck/shoulder/body expanded from 5.52 Lake City brass and this really was a labor of love as I lost 30% of the cases due to splitting during the 6 expansion steps that I used (even with the two annealing steps along the way). I don't recommend doing this as it "lost money" compared to simply buying Grafs & Sons $17 per hundred range brass due to the excessive splitting losses already seen processing the Lake City 5.56.

:-)

Comment in passing, LEE has improved their 2 cavity molds quite a bit since the day I only had to add the set screw to the pivot shoulder screw and to burnish in some Hexagonal Boron Nitride into the cavities to get "free dropping" from the get go.

I still find the soft aluminum LEE bullet mold material to be too easily scratched and cavity edge burrs are formed too easily and the mating mold surfaces still want to seat into each other too quickly.

Still, the steel alignment pins and bushings are a refreshing thing to see and the mold block alignment does hold up better than previously.

Oldfeller

[nelsonted1]

THere is an "I wish" if I ever saw one.

[cwlongshot]

Hello Olfeller!

I decided to buy one of these and make it a CB dedicated shooter!!

I have a Saeco 396 mold that has a good profile for MSR use in the 350. But for hunting I wanna larger meplat.

I have been shooting 180 RD and a 230 NOE mold on top of 1680 & 4227. I need to try some different powders. Mine is a Ruger Bolt. Accuracy with everything so far has been good. Some not great but all useable.

That NOE 360-232 was in my last tests and I have hit my 1700 fps marker. But accuracy is 1.5 ish @ 50. So its at my max acceptable Of 3” @ 1000.

Something else I have been doing with GREAT accuracy. I buy factory FMJ pull bullets & save powder. I trim cases to proper OAL. Then re charge with 21.5g factory powder. (Dozens pulled averaged 22+ grains) Seat a re sized (356) 140 FTX bullet. These darn things shoot UNDER MOA!!! But Ill not point one at a deer. That bullet aint up to 2300 fps!! But Id love to see a coyote while holdin it!! ;)

Ill be watching to see what you come up with!

[Oldfeller]

Plinking and self defense are covered by the lighter 153-8 grain bullets. Powder coating supposedly allows you to go over 2,000 fps (with an accuracy penalty) even with plain based bullets.

I think the heavy pig/deer gas checked bullet is a good 'un, but for personal defense I'd like for the lighter wide meplat slug to work out for me if possible.

Something I would ask the group for ...... who has a LEE 000 buckshot mold that drops the little strings of 3 buckshot that are all linked together. I'd like to get a few "strings of three" still linked together just to try them out after powder coating them.

Just how much trouble do you think you'd get into with the law if you buckshot-ed somebody 2-3 times with an evil :twisted: AR?

[Larry Gibson]

Am I under the mistaken impression the 350 Legend (Winchester cartridge) can't be formed out of 223/5.56 brass?

The rim, while of .223/5.56 diameter at 0.378, is a rebated rim and the body diameter is 0.390?

Also I was under the impression standard AR15 mags for the 223/5.56 could not be used because of the shoulder rib inside the mag and the 350 Legend being a straight case the rib prohibits that cartridges use in standard AR mags?

I know there are several 30 cal cartridges based on the 223/5.56 case but is there another 350 Legend based on that case?

[cwlongshot]

247915

PP/SD isnt on my radar for this caliber. Unless its in defense of starvation :)

Here is the 360-232 NOE bullet.

I also Powder coat all and so far various colors and calibers zero leading to 18-1900 fps. Dont “need” to go any faster.

CW

[bdicki]

An article in Guns and Ammo talks about the case being formed from 223 brass. The base is swaged to allow for some case taper. So it seems it is based on the 223 case but modified in a way that would be hard for a home reloader to duplicate.
https://www.gunsandammo.com/editorial/the-winchester-350-legend-cartridge/359189

[jmort]

Am I under the mistaken impression the 350 Legend (Winchester cartridge) can't be formed out of 223/5.56 brass?

The rim, while of .223/5.56 diameter at 0.378, is a rebated rim and the body diameter is 0.390?

Also I was under the impression standard AR15 mags for the 223/5.56 could not be used because of the shoulder rib inside the mag and the 350 Legend being a straight case the rib prohibits that cartridges use in standard AR mags?

I know there are several 30 cal cartridges based on the 223/5.56 case but is there another 350 Legend based on that case?

It is not based on the .223 case as a parent case
The .223 was used as a starting point but the cases are very different
It is rebated
I do not see how you could reasonably form .223 brass into 350 Legend

"Note that due to the changes in base diameter and case shape, reloaders cannot use .223 cases to form .350 cases. Nor can .223 magazines be used in .350 rifles, as the feed lips and magazine followers for the two cartridges are markedly different."
https://www.chuckhawks.com/win_350_legend.html

[W.R.Buchanan]

I see no reason for this cartridge. It's only valid claim is it can be used in an AR style rifle. Otherwise it is a .35 Remington Ballistic Clone but on the low side. Its only other virtue is being strait walled so it can be used in Strait Wall Ammo States where you'd be better off hunting with a 12 or 20 ga shotgun like a Savage 212 or 220 or a TC Encore..

This is a classic example of the phrase that jack O'Connor coined in 1962. "New cartridges are like new jokes!"

I just can't get behind this one.

And No Larry you are not wrong about forming the cases. Only thing they have in common is the rim dia.

Randy

[Oldfeller]

Am I under the mistaken impression the 350 Legend (Winchester cartridge) can't be formed out of 223/5.56 brass?

The rim, while of .223/5.56 diameter at 0.378, is a rebated rim and the body diameter is 0.390?

Larry, when you start with 5.56 Nato you wind up with a sub-sized (diameter) 350 Legend that is running right at 1.700 trim minimum length. You anneal then fire form this brass to get to the full diameter and you wind up with a rebated rim case form and a length that is .030" below trim minimum.

I suggest going rather mild (yep, timid actually) on the case forming balloon step as somebody has already posted a pic of a split case during fire forming and after seeing a 30% case loss I KNOW 5.56 can give you a split at the mouth and at the ex-shoulder area.

So, if you reform 5.56 brass you will lose money doing it due to the splitting failures during forming. "Ballooning the case" is also something folks have always debated doing, but P.O. Ackley and his fans did it for decades before Improved brass was available to be purchased. Still, this is currently an unnecessary risk to be taking, reference the video below.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1MnyrfFe0A

The point here being that range brass is available to purchased now from Graf & Sons for $17 per hundred. This is the best way to approach the cases.

Also I was under the impression standard AR15 mags for the 223/5.56 could not be used because of the shoulder rib inside the mag and the 350 Legend being a straight case the rib prohibits that cartridges use in standard AR mags?

Yes, this is so. AR mags cannot be easily used at all. I have a 10 round 350 Legend magazine that came with the upper that is properly made for the 350 Legend.

I know there are several 30 cal cartridges based on the 223/5.56 case but is there another 350 Legend based on that case?

The SAMMI spec 350 Legend is not based on the 5.56 case. Some folks are still recovering 5.56 brass through neck and shoulder expansion but having done this I cannot say it makes sense for the economics of it nor for the amount of work involved.


=============================================


So why do a 350 Legend? My trip point was watching a You Tube of a kid shooting some steel at an AR range. He was pounding the hanging targets so hard he was wrapping the chains around the supports and the kid was actually knocking the some of the stands flat over with multiple hits.

350 Legend has far far more impact energy than 5.56 can have and for those familiar with .357 magnum carbines they have a general frame of reference that 350 Legend can somewhat exceed.

And no, it is not a run out and buy one proposition right now --- you will have to inexpensively build one up out of pieces right now. Buying an entire gun is prohibitively expensive, but uppers can be had less expensively (almost reasonably).

[bdicki]

https://www.cmmginc.com/product/rifle-resolute-300-mk4-350-legend/

[tomme boy]

Your going to have split cases on every piece. You can use 223 basic brass from Starline but why, they make the 350 brass.

[Oldfeller]

I bought an upper from Bear Creek Arsenal (a local gun works in Sanford NC) complete with a magazine for $269.

You can buy the real stuff as range brass now from Grafs for $17 a hundred. Using Starline .223 basics brass still requires you to do the balloon up fire forming to the rebated form, which is the final sticking point for using 5.56 Lake City as the starting point.

This isn't impossible or prohibitively expensive to do if done carefully and correctly. But as said repeatedly, it isn't the best way nor is it the most economical way to do it.

Now-a-days, you folks really do seem to be more into tit for tat argument sight unseen than in exchanging any form of real knowledge about real experiences.

Really guys, you are arguing with someone who has actually gone and done this and is sharing real experience based information. This sort of acrimony reminds me why I left this list for 5 years originally, the continuous acrimonious tone of the place got to be too much to take on a daily basis.

Annealing .223 case brass without overheating the case head can be rapidly done using a small soldering iron and a tip turned from aluminum rod stock, but suddenly I realize that posting that particular information would start another flock of "you can't do that" tweeties to chirping.

Posting anything here might quickly become just as counter-productive as you get no positive discussion any more, just more pile ons.

Ric, Buckshot and the original Shooters crew, where did our list go ????

It certainly isn't here any more.

[Four-Sixty]

Well said Oldfeller.

I read how you laboriously created cases with a high rate of failure. I understood how you were able to make the process work.

[pmer]

Am I under the mistaken impression the 350 Legend (Winchester cartridge) can't be formed out of 223/5.56 brass?

The rim, while of .223/5.56 diameter at 0.378, is a rebated rim and the body diameter is 0.390?

Also I was under the impression standard AR15 mags for the 223/5.56 could not be used because of the shoulder rib inside the mag and the 350 Legend being a straight case the rib prohibits that cartridges use in standard AR mags?

I know there are several 30 cal cartridges based on the 223/5.56 case but is there another 350 Legend based on that case?

Larry, the other cartridge is the 357 Max Rimless. It's based on .223 brass and has a .358 bore. I don't have either cartridge but I think they are ballistic twins.

[Larry Gibson]

oldfeller

My apologies, I did not mean to sound acrimonious as I was just asking questions about it because I was/am interested in learning. Your explanation is appreciated and I now understand how you form usable 350 Legend case from 5.56 cases. I also see where the cartridge would fill a "niche" being straight walled and quite useful for hunting where that is required. Good luck with your rifle and hunting.

[Gunslinger1911]

Just started researching the 350 Legend. Son in law and I have fun with different AR uppers (9mm, 45 acp, 22 lr, 50 Beowulf so far).
There seems to be some question on the basic diameter - some say .355, some .358 (yea, I know, no real difference - especially us casters !).
I would say if bore was .355 and you ran a .358 bullet (or boolet) you just knock back the powder a bit.
If bore .358, a .355 slug would tend to "rattle"down the bore.
One article, the author pulled a bullet, miked .355
Why go .355 nominal bore when there are so many .358 slugs out there ?
Also the controversy of Ohio stating ".357 minimum caliber" yea, I know, 0.002" But .............

[Good Cheer]

What? Nobody is paper patching .351 180 grainers yet!

[Oldfeller]

oldfeller

My apologies, I did not mean to sound acrimonious as I was just asking questions about it because I was/am interested in learning. Your explanation is appreciated and I now understand how you form usable 350 Legend case from 5.56 cases. I also see where the cartridge would fill a "niche" being straight walled and quite useful for hunting where that is required. Good luck with your rifle and hunting.

Larry,

It isn't done yet --- ballooning up the brass with a low pressure load is 1) potentially dangerous as per the video I linked and 2) you can't cycle the AR action with something meek and mild enough to be approximately safe. Going up in pressure during fire forming is contra-indicated, so a better solution is being sought.

I have ~800 cases~ on my bench at a 1.700" trim minimum (running to slightly below for variation direction) and I have a new sizing button coming in from LEE that (maybe if the planets align right) will open up the entire case into a column form that now has the base by the head jacked open to ~.390~ which will allow the column/case to go into a full length sizing die again for a new crunch to once again resemble a still slightly shorter 350 Legend case that can be fired with enough pressure to cycle the gun and get a full fire forming without failing as per the video.

My push through sizer (preferred method for sizing powder coated slugs that you want to keep your bullet lube away from) is .356" diameter and it sizes the slugs shown to .3565" right now due to a little bit of spring back. Given the proposed traffic through the simple steel bullet sizing die, it will be at .357" before very long, which is my chamber slug measured .041" long straight throat section measurement.

Wear on die and throat will tend to .3570" over time, I am sure. No fire lapping is planned for this chamber and barrel as it can "polish in" with the power coated bullets just fine.

[tomme boy]

No one is attacking you or your methods. Even if you have worked out how to use the 223 cases it is not the best method for most people. Or even the safest. I worked in a metal extrusion factory doing exactly what needs to be done to make these cases. This is not the way to go about it. You ARE going to have case head separation. There is not enough metal in the web to do this right.

247979

[Oldfeller]

I can understand Tomme Boy's point, the weakest part of the reformed case is going to be the rebate wall section nearest to the head.

That leads me back to my oft repeated recommendation to buy the Graff & Sons range brass at $17/hundred, which is as safe as houses to reload.

I also received PMs saying that the Guns and Ammo says that "(repeat large chunks of the article as needed)" and because it is G&A saying it, it is considered gospel to a lot of folks. I would say this article is a fair enough write up of the development history of the thing, and as such it is OK enough, but please don't count on it as a case making reloader.

The Guns and Ammo article has simply lost track of the reloader's perspective. This is why many (myself included) say it is just plan wrong as things really sit today.

A parent case to a reloader can be used to SAFELY MAKE the new case with a simple neck job up or down. "The little fatter web and relatively smaller mouth was done so Winchester could get enough taper into the case to assist better feeding" is so TOO TOO much of a change to make in a 5.56 case such that it cannot be used to safely make the new brass by just using neck work, even when followed by fire forming which isn't mild at all BTW as you need enough gas pressure to operate the AR action. That much gas pressure moves the brass too far too fast and it cracks and splits it open near the head.

Remember this point please, the final fire forming step is soooo much movement up near the case head that heavy wall section cracks and splits (see video above) and all that fires gas back through the relatively open AR system while being too near the operator's face. Scaring the snot out of him even if it doesn't get his cheeks dirty.

By turning that fire forming "ballooning action driven by violent gas pressure" into a controlled cold forming set of die steel operations, perhaps we can come up with a way to make 5.56 brass into a slightly shorter than spec 350 Legend that is good enough for cast bullet pressures. We shall see.

I have over 800 cases partially processed to play with, and that is my reward for doing so.

[W.R.Buchanan]

Is actual Factory .350 Legend Brass that expensive?

I see maybe needing 200 rounds for this gun in a life time, unless you are planning on using it for Tactical Purposes during the "upcoming insurrection," in which case you might need 300.

Graf's has Starline Brass for $31.00 per hundred. https://www.grafs.com/retail/catalog/product/productId/80946/inline/1

It is probably a lot better than anything you can make at home out of Range Brass.

just sayin'

Randy

[super6]

https://www.starlinebrass.com/ 28$ per 100, Free ship.

[Oldfeller]

I appreciate you guys finding all that very nice expensive new brass available to be purchased, but I seeing that I had over a thousand pieces of Lake City 5.56 just sitting around and I had Lee expander/deprimer pins ranging from .224 to .243 to .264 to .284 to .308 to .325 and a 3 station auto indexing press to put them in I stared expanding the 5.56 Nato brass neck up by stages. Once I got past 8mm I switched over to custom made pins at .340 and .355 and a final trip at .355" off a very custom expander pin made from a Lee 35 Remington expander pin which was shortened and reformed in special fashions which will be covered a few posts down the page. (more later)

Finishing trip will be through a full length sizing die which should collapse the case back down from the cylindrical form to put the proper taper back into the case. Case splitting loses on the 800 that are left will be 10% if the earlier stages are any guide.

Folks who are shooting the Legend all say that the .010" body taper will act to head space the slightly shorter cases that resulted from the hand made from 5.56 expansion by the very limited work that they have done.

I will withhold judgement on that point until I have actually done it in volume. I am also not above custom sizing the brass (by partial insertion into the full length sizer die) to tighten the fit up of the resulting "slightly short" case to the chamber of my AR such that it can enter the chamber freely and still do the rotational lock up freely but the slightly short finished round will always get a full impact primer strike indexing off the case taper.

============================================

AR people really do like having lots of ammo on hand. This is not the world of bolt guns or of target shooting, it is the world of run & gun competitions and "blasting steel". So much for the recreational uses.

Pig shooting isn't really hunting out on a farm, it is for the eradication of a farm pest, and the goal is to hit as many pigs as you possibly can before they scatter. I think the wounding of up to a half dozen pigs with a 66 grain .224 bullet is pretty much "unsportsman-like conduct" by my old grey-headed hunting standards but the farm folks who are affected by those pig swarms really don't seem to care too much about sportsmanship when blasting at swarms of invasive pigs who are rooting up their newly planted seed and ruining their crop.

Give them a 20 round magazine on a 350 Legend AR with 3 each .360" buckshot balls per case and let them go perforate their invasive pigs more quickly and effectively. 3 triple aught buck on a string from a LEE mold weights ~215 grains once powder coated, so it isn't going to be all that different than the gas checked main bullet I am working up at the moment.

Yes, if I can make the cases work out well using three repeats on a 3 hole LEE progressive press and two quick annealing steps it might could possibly be worth doing as cast boolits are inexpensive, as are the mil-surp powders I will be using.

Starting price per case is 5 cents a case at Everglades when buying 2500 case lots of their "damaged mouth" 5.56 brass. I am pretty sure you can find lots of raw uncleaned 5.56 Lake City even cheaper on occasion.

[BigBore45]

I was playing around with a couple 223 brass just to see. Necking up would be easy as pie. 243 to 260 to 30 to 35 went well. Then a fire form. But after checking the rest out from sammi spec. Its a lot to fire form. To much for me. That's a shame would of been neat but the brass is to expensive for me.

[super6]

I appreciate you guys finding all that very nice expensive new brass available to be purchased, but I seeing that I had over a thousand pieces of Lake City 5.56 just sitting around and I had Lee expander/deprimer pins ranging from .224 to .243 to .264 to .284 to .308 to .325 and a 3 station auto indexing press to put them in I stared expanding the 5.56 Nato brass neck up by stages. Once I got past 8mm I switched over to custom made pins at .340 and .355 and a final trip at .366 off a Lee 9.3mm expander/deprimer pin from a 9.3x62 which I will now tune down and shorten to expand the reformed Legend case's base to ~.390" at the rebated area up near the head. Finishing trip will be through a full length sizing die which should collapse the case back down from the cylindrical form to put the proper taper back into the case. Case splitting loses on the 800 that are left will be 10-20% if the earlier stages are any guide.

Folks who are shooting the Legend all say that the .010" body taper will act to head space the slightly shorter cases that resulted from the hand made from 5.56 expansion by the very limited work that they have done.

I will withhold judgement on that point until I have actually done it in volume. I am also not above custom sizing the brass (by partial insertion into the full length sizer die) to tighten the fit up of the resulting "slightly short" case to the chamber of my AR such that it can enter the chamber freely and still do the rotational lock up freely but the slightly short finished round will always get a full impact primer strike indexing off the case taper.

============================================

AR people really do like having lots of ammo on hand. This is not the world of bolt guns or of target shooting, it is the world of run & gun competitions and "blasting steel". So much for the recreational uses.

Pig shooting isn't really hunting out on a farm, it is for the eradication of a farm pest, and the goal is to hit as many pigs as you possibly can before they scatter. I think the wounding of up to a half dozen pigs with a 66 grain .224 bullet is pretty much "unsportsman-like conduct" by my old grey-headed hunting standards but the farm folks who are affected by those pig swarms really don't seem to care much about sportsmanship when blasting at swarms of invasive pigs who are rooting up their planted seed.

Give them a 20 round magazine on a 350 Legend AR with 3 each .360" buckshot balls per case and let them go perforate their invasive pigs more quickly and effectively. 3 triple aught buck on a string from a LEE mold weights ~215 grains once powder coated, so it isn't going to be all that different than the gas checked main bullet I am working up at the moment.

Yes, if I can make the cases work out well using three repeats on a 3 hole LEE progressive press and two quick annealing steps it might could possibly be worth doing as cast boolits are inexpensive, as are the mil-surp powders I will be using.

Starting price per case is 5 cents a case at Everglades when buying 2500 case lots of their "damaged mouth" 5.56 brass. I am pretty sure you can find lots of 5.56 Lake City even cheaper on occasion.

I think i understand your way of thinking, Sometimes the trip is more important than the destination.
I would love to be able to work from scratch to the means end. Just haft to read and learn.

[Oldfeller]

248262

Ok, let's talk expanding 5.56 Nato brass up to 350 Legend without using any fire forming step at all.

Why? Fireforming the entire body of the Nato 5.56 brass up at AR15 action operating pressure levels is a "pretty much bound to fail at the fire forming step" since about half the case is sitting out in the air. And if the case fails all that gas violently busting loose in an AR action isn't going to be something you want your face to be near, it would likely get you face dirty -- for sure it would.

Might get your drawers dirty too, that gas tries to go everywhere....... :lol:

We have all by now explored opening up the 5.56 neck and shoulder up to .355" so we understand that stuff pretty much by this point in time. It is a whole lot of fiddle work and several annealing steps are needed along the way. Case losses due to splitting will hit 20-25% so expect some losses.

The final stage of jacking the case open is the very very long .355" expansion step, the one that stops just short of bottoming out the expanding pin at the case head.

I originally ordered a new pin from LEE to do this step, but what came in from LEE was another short pin similar to what I already had. So I built an aluminum pin extension for what I already had tuned and I am using that as it is already done.

Look at the picture and you can see the .355" pin begins to run on up the extra wall thickness at the bottom of the hole, moving the expanded case form out more and more and more as the wall thickness increases to over .020" thick as it does beside the case head.

Pay attention to the form of that expander button, you want the extra wall thickness at the very end of the stroke to make the expanded web hang in the air at about the desired dimensions for where it will be when it gets full length resized and then fired with powder and bullet.

Look carefully at the inverted wall thickness in the picture. When I digital caliper the form between the largest bulge and the case head I see numbers building up from .374 (at the solid case head) ramping right on up to over .398" at the max bulge.

Pushing it back down in a full length sizing die will bring it down to .391" or thereabouts (SAMMI spec diameter at the 350 Legend case head) depending on your brand of full length sizer as some are every so slightly different. The straightened up section of that web between the rebate zone and the solid head will actually be well over .023" thick and upon firing it will move only thousandths of an inch to pick up the case wall ---- case wall thickness at that point says it will deflect only ~ 20%~ of the wall thickness to move over to seal against the reamed chamber wall. And the length of case that will be doing this movement is going to be about a 0.124" long section of the very strongest part of the case wall with the section that moves the most only moving .011" out radially at the worst case. Most of it won't move that nearly that much as it is already deflected most all of the way there.

Put it into a bit of perspective, the case mouth itself will move at least that much during firing and the case mouth is made from far far thinner material too. The mouth will split long before that .023"+ thick web section up by the head will.

Oddly enough, I only lost 6 cases with split case mouths doing the long expansion --- something good to be said about that .355" button form I guess.

[lar45]

Hi Oldfeller, it's good to see you're back.
How thin are the case mouths ending up? I'll be interested in hearing how your expanded cases work out and how they hold up to repeated firing.

[Oldfeller]

Hey Lar,

Mouth wall thickness is .010-.011 which isn't huge, but if you leave it on the outside of a solid bullet supported section when you seat the bullet it will stop the loaded case in the chamber just fine.

I think I'll get more case mouth splits in use, because I already got me a crop of them in the forming ops and every firing and resizing will bring out even more.

If I was doing this again, I might try starting with a set of blanks because the mouth thickness would be greater and you could trim it to SAMMI trim minimum, something you don't ever get up to when using 5.56 brass.

[Old School Big Bore]

The Legend article I read stated that Winchester reroutes .223 brass onto the .350 Legend line after the second draw, so it is kinda sorta the parent case, albeit by a formus interruptus lash-up. As far as forming them from range .223 brass, I don't believe I'd do it myself when there's new brass available for it, BUT then again, 'Montana Pistol Hunter' and I formed several hundred .45 ACP empties into .44 'super short' by using a big shop vise as a magnum arbor press to get them fully sized and parts of a Lee loader to push them back out. We neither of us had a 1911 at the time, as I had traded mine off for a Super Blackhawk, but had the brass just sitting, and we did have M29s, Bulldogs, Blackhawks and a B92 to feed. Yes, what ended up as a semi-rim did adequately semi-headspace (they weren't so thin as to give us misfires) and they reloaded just fine with shortened .44 dies and a .45 shellholder. And you should see how many of them will fit in the B92 magazine, especially with a Lee 210 gr button wadcutter. They looked like slightly slimmer .45 Auto Rims. As my late Dad used to say, "Poor folks gots poor ways".
So, far be it from me to carp at OldFeller for utilizing an asset. Good on ya.

[Oldfeller]

248416

Still waiting on a new full length case sizing die from LEE, so I worked on casting and powder coating a set of bullets instead.

Not intending for much very long range shooting, but instead desiring good nose mushrooming as a primary concern, I air dropped the bullets and intentionally ran the powder coat curing temperature over 325 degrees for 20 minutes, giving me a softer bullet that would upset in a feral pig or in a jug or three of water.

Powder coat is Easton Ford Light Blue and one coat yielded good coverage and flow as Ford Light Blue is wont to do. Learned from the taller gas check bullet that gravity flow is enough to overfill the gas check shank, so any future lots will be gas checked seated & not sized and then powder coated over the gas check and then sized once as a whole assembly.

Some would say "Why bother" with the gas check since this larger heavier slug won't exceed 2200 fps out of my 16' barrel gun and it would be the two smaller ones would hit the higher inaccurate speeds if any of them managed to reach up to those higher speeds.

So far no list member has volunteered to send me some as cast strings of 3 triple aught buckshot off a LEE mold for me to play with coating and loading, as I don't have a spare $60 to buy an eighteen banger mold as a "doubtful experiment".

So, no Evil AR experimental loads, sorry ....... :evil: rats

[lar45]

Isn't 000 Buck .375"? would you be sizing them down for the 350? That might make an interesting load for the Judge...

[cwlongshot]

I thought this post was gonna be about CAST BOOLITS?? :popcorn:

CW

[Oldfeller]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J9KM2eNrrI

LEE's 000 buckshot mold drops at .358" to .360" according to the alloy used and the speed/temperature that is needed to get the mold to fill correctly -- according to several user reports. Add another thousandth for the Ford Light Blue powder coat then mush the size back down some in the assembled round to get it to chamber well.

I think that stuff that drops from a LEE six banger mold counts as a cast "boolit", don't you? I admit I complicate it some by dealing with three of them still on the string, so to speak, but to me it is all the same stuff -- melted lead cast into a mold.

I also theorize that the 3 balls get separated when entering and leaving the rifling (they get slightly twisted once in each direction relative to the one in front and the one behind).

Plus the ball to ball joints get stressed by the forces of firing and the soft balls do flattened together somewhat by acceleration forces. Mild bumping up is indeed a thing you might expect to happen to that last ball too.

I see the two balls resting inside the case getting some lit powder blown in between them when the case first opens up and expands to seal against the chamber wall, leaving a pressure differential between the balls as they go up the bore that may be greater than the powder coat and twisted lead can hold together. I see the balls leaving the muzzle a part of an inch apart and at slightly different speeds, impacting at 100 yards with some small vertical stringing going on.

That last ball will want to travel ~10 to 15~ fps faster than the first ball, but the first ball and the middle ball is going to be in the way, so I see some sort of "bumper cars flying in the air" thing going on too.

My visualization and imagination still works, anyway ......

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

[tomme boy]

I want to see what they look like after you fire them.

The basic piece of brass is the same as the 223 brass. It is how it is drawn out is how it is not the same. The way the web is formed and drawn is the difference. The 350 brass it is formed from the full diameter at the bottom of the web. The 223 brass is extruded to a smaller diameter at the web. So the base is higher in the 223 brass. So you will get the ring where the brass needs to be expanded like is shown in the pic oldfeller. It can work, but like oldfeller says, "it is not for everyone".

The way he is doing this is not for anyone that does not understand what is needed to do this the right way. He is taking many more steps than I have seen others take. He is still going to lose some of these after they are fireformed. And may lose a few more after several more firings. BUT, the only thing it is really costing him is his time. So, to some that is worth the time to do this. Others do not have the time or patience to do this.

[swheeler]

Kelly you back in cast boolit shootin' business. I've still got my 7mm Soup Can, 8mm Maximum and the ever controversial 6.5 Cruse Missile. The old 8mm max would be my pick if a packy ever escaped from the circus. I still think about the Bison rancher saying take your pick, they're both about 1100 pounds,ka boom, he watched her quiver and collapse onto her hooves turned to me and said, WHAT CALIBER IS THAT AGAIN?:shock:

...and first thing that popped into my pea brain while reading your 350 Legend case forming from 5.56 was convert that FL die to a hydraulic form die, or make a new one maybe even whack a mole style. Whack it hard enough and often enough you might even get a rebate case ready to fire form. carry on

[Oldfeller]

Hey SW,

I'm back into tinkering, not ready to try to build anything from scratch or try to create a gun nor to coax LEE or Midsouth into making anything for us.

My attention got caught by the 350 Legend simply because you can buy a completed upper for one for $269 last month, so I picked one of those up ..... and then I got a $129 lower from Palmetto State so I can have me a completed gun on hand for reasonable money.

So far it is coming along OK, but being a new gun all the little bits and pieces are out of stock and pending a B/O run from whomever no matter what piece you are talking about.

So I am grinning and waiting ...... right along with everybody else.

[swheeler]

I see you are using HBN to get your molds to drop bullets out, good idea. I been tumbling PC bullets in it, just kind of a spin off of my moly coating days using Daisy BB's to impact it in to the PC. I think my next step will to be mixing it in with PC and baking, one less step. Good to see you back.

[rockrat]

Only bad thing about casting the buckshot is that the material between each buckshot is so thin, it breaks apart when releasing from the mold. You might get two buckshot together, but I have never had three stay together, otherwise, I would cast some up for you. How about loading three of the buckshot in the case, maybe each one separated by a card wad.

[.30carbnut]

so what is the weight of first one?

[Oldfeller]

I am "jest guessing" that you are talking about the buckshot, if so they weigh 70 grains each or 210 grains for a full string of 3.

If you are talking powder coated blue slugs pictured from up thread, the tall one is 200 grains and the other two are 158 grains.

Like I said, I'm jest guessing here .....

[fcvan]

Years ago, I cast small wad cutters from a .358 mold by placing a gas check into a driving band. The size depended on which band used but I could cast 25 or 40 grain wadcutters. Several were loaded under a 105 SWC for a multi projectile cartridge. This was in the mid 1980 when ‘multi munitions’ rounds were advertised. Working up the load was done slowly as they went deep in a .357 case. They worked well.

Nothing says the same thing couldn’t be done with the 350 Legend. The last hundred or so I had were given to a buddy but they were easy to make and not terribly labor intensive to cast. PCd and loaded under a suitable rn boolit might have merit.

[cwlongshot]

Fcvan, That reminds me of the button bullets we used to cast decades ago.

I also seem to remember my grandfather doing something with gas checks in molds while casting. Ill bet thats what he was doing. I dont remember him making duplex loads but Ill bet he was doing exactly that! Thanks for the memory!

CW

[Oldfeller]

If you can't get a string of 3 triple aught balls to even make it out of the mold, then force loading the string of 3 multi-ball idea is certainly a bust.

Shame, that. At least I didn't have to pay $60 to learn this little factoid.

Still waiting on a replacement full length sizing die, so I started working on my lower, tuning the trigger mating surfaces and getting a spring kit started on the way.

Having gotten that started on its week long trip to get to me, I am now gently cleaning the bore itself, getting a good feel for the barrel in doing so. I am using mild bore cleaning (copper removing mild abrasive liquid) on a tight patch so I can feel and "remove" any tight spots due to minor roughness in the nitride coating.

"Fiddle work" is what I would normally call it, stuff that really isn't necessary but it fills up the time until other bits and pieces can arrive.

Called LEE this morning about the die body, it comes out of heat treat today and ships by Friday. This smells like my long lead item now ......

[AggieEE]

I was talking with a buddy of mine and the 350 Legend came up. I had a thought for a "super" blackout. A 300 to 350 gr cast bullet, OAL would be about 1.25 to 1.375", so having never seen a sectioned case I did have a couple of question. 1) would the case need to be inside reamed to accept that long of a bullet. 2) would the twist be fast enough to stabilize a bullet that long at sub sonic velocities. The fastest twist I could find in a barrel blank was a 1 in 10. I found a couple of online calculators and I couldn't get an answer out of them as my velocity was "too slow". In a AR carbine or AR pistol with a suppressor either one should make a fantastic brush gun for hogs and just about anything else at reasonable range.

[Oldfeller]

First dumb sorta question / not a real answer is that I only have cases made from 5.56 brass. I don't have any 350 Legend brass at all.

First kinda sorta answer, I could put about an inch of bullet inside the cases I have on hand right now with NOT MUCH ROOM FOR POWDER, so your 1.25" scenario sounds a good bit more reasonable than your 1.375" scenario.

Your proposed long bullet won't go deep into the case in the existing LEE blackout format without over expanding the case to the point it won't chamber.

Next, why in the world do you need a 350 grain bullet? You won't ever stop a streamlined 250 grainer unless you are shooting a fully armored 500 pound HOGZILLA himself, there just isn't enough pig to stop it as streamlined penetrates like nobody's business.

SWheeler shot a 1,100 pound bison cow and just barely stopped a medium meplat equipped 8mm Maximum bullet at 285 grains (bowed out the thick hide on the far side as I remember, but it did expand some along the way). Streamline that bullet and it won't expand and it won't stop either, unless ol' Hogzilla is wearing metal plate armor.

There is a spin calculator on Beartooth Bullets that we used to do airgun pellet stability back when we were shooting armadillos at 900 fps, the calculator we used won't wuss out on you because you are shooting too slow. Can't say you can trust the stability results all that much when you get to the marginal side things, but it won't choke out on you.

Also realize we weren't shooting streamlined conventional bullet forms at that speed --- you could design something that looked like a lawn dart that would stabilize naturally in the air as it loafed along. Go look at the current crop of high BC shotgun slugs for some good ideas. You need one of these tricks for what you are trying to do, I am afraid.

Yes, I am saying that 16 twist is very likely too slow a twist to stabilize a huge streamlined bullet of a conventional format --- but it could toss a heavy slow low drag lead headed lawn dart like nobody's business.

They are having some real issues with the 30 cal heavy Blackout bullet LEE sells because it doesn't stabilize very well at 10 twist driven at 1000 fps and less. Indeed, a lot of the terminal effectiveness of that bullet and round come from the long slug swapping ends inside the first 6-8 inches of penetration making a 2-3" swipe wound while doing so. Past that, the bullet just plows a somewhat straight meplat driven slightly bigger than caliber wound channel using the butt of the boat tail as the flat point.

Rethink your approach some and simply say "I am going heavy and slow and the form of the bullet has to air stabilize itself like a lawn dart or a Brenike slug for me to have a thing that is sub-sonic and HEAVY and still always arrives point first accurately --- out of a 1 in 16 twist rate barrel anyway.

Or build an unstable bullet that may swap ends in the air on the long shots ......


================================


249759 THIS STUFF DID NOT WORK OUT AT ALL ---
DO NOT COPY ANY OF THIS

New thoughts based on some new experiments --- you will have to go to page 3 to see this development of new stuff.

You CAN do a very deadly subsonic based on loading 3 triple aught buckshot still on the string and a 9mm conical bullet on top of them, leaving just enough room for a moderate sub-sonic powder charge.

Is this better than a super heavy single slug that isn't going to like being loaded that deeply into the tapered case?

That is up to you ...............

[tomme boy]

Oldfeller, you can get the buckshot mold to cast all 3 balls at the same time no problem. You just have to run the lead real hot. And keep a good steady pace. It is not like casting with a regular mold. Just run them both hot. You have to figure out the right pace.

[Oldfeller]

Yes, Tomme that would help a lot -- something you can try that always seems to work once you get the mold really hot is to flux the pot good, then put the bottom pour nozzle into the cut off plate bevel and just open the valve all the way and HOLD everything tight for 10 seconds, then turn the lead off and pull the mold away from the nozzle.

This offers maximum flow, perfect centering and "hot as possible" lead delivered at maximum pressure. What it also does is makes a strongly sticking bullet, every time.

I used to do this trick when I was proof measuring runs of LEE molds, something I did several times when I was posting statistics on LEE manufacturing capabilities, back in my QC Engineer days when I had good measuring tools available to me.

The trick works, but like I said -- a sticky bullet every time. Part of that is the molds were "as shipped" (not lapped or prepped) and any microburrs were going to get a chance to show their butts off first thing.

[Oldfeller]

I mentioned cleaning up the bore of my new gun as the required proof shots left the bore in a very messy condition.

What I quickly discovered was there was residue in the bore, in the approximate center of the barrel. It wasn't leading, and it had some copper adhering to it, but it appeared to be a lump of hard residue left down inside one groove, looks like residue from the nitriding processes.

I used to be QC Engineer over the Fayetteville Black and Decker plant that had Heat Treat Dept in it, so I am familiar with the nitriding molten salt baths, both the molten salt and follow up acid and alkali baths and then the hot liquid based black oxide bath systems that B&D used as follow up processes to molten salt bath nitriding.

This bore with a lump of centrally located foreign material in one groove is consistent with what can fairly easily happen in a nitriding or a black oxide process, the salt remnants left in the barrel tend to be in the middle of the item and adhere to whichever position was down when the parts were first racked horizontally (salt baths are generally done vertically if at all possible for drainage of the molten salt, but black oxide baths are generally done willy nilly due to packing considerations).

Both processes will leave residues in gun bores, both residues can cause leading if not taken care of. Both processes leave hard salts as their residue, both types of residue adhere to steel very well as they are chemically one with the left over hard oxide layers on the outside of the steel that you call "black oxiding" or "nitriding".

Most of the rough bores you hear about are really this sort of stuff left over from the processing of the barrels post rifling in the nitriding/black oxiding baths, and many times it gets confused with "rust lumps" which it can resemble (and it can fairly easily become that in humid climates because nitriding and black oxide salts are both very hydroscopic and a lump of such left over on an internal steel barrel groove is trouble waiting to happen)

Anything that can strip this stuff away, be it physical or chemical is going to remove some of the desired black coating from the bore, leaving you exposed to rusting over time, so be aware your war with devil rust is just beginning, with ol' debb'l rust getting a head start in the first skirmish.

(more later)


THIS IS ME EDITING IN SOME INFORMATION FOUND SEVERAL DAYS LATER ABOUT THE LUMP While firelapping the bore I discovered a mild burr had been thrown up by the gas block hole drilling process. During nitriding, this burr had held on to some salt bath residues making the mystery lump I discovered while hand cleaning the bore.

First 3 bore lapping shots broke up the lump gradually and the next 3 were enough to smooth out the original drilling burr which was actually pretty thin. 3 more lappers and I called it quits, leaving some minor rifling land top roughnesses with just their peaks lapped flat.

Why did I stop short of "lapping perfection"? I was curious as to whether a powder coated lead boolit shootin' gun could run powder coat fouling free on a diet of powder coat bullets with a bore that would get copper fouled for certain and possibly get some leading deposited in it if shooting sized and greased plain lead slugs.

If it doesn't work out, I have more lap bullets already charged and waiting to go.

[Oldfeller]

OK, it is 3:00 in the afternoon and I spent most of today trying to ship an upper back a big 15 miles away to Bear Creek Arsenal in Sanford NC.

Bear Creek Arsenal dealt fairly with me and had a very good customer service attitude, but their business model is definitely breaking down on the UPS side of things.

UPS has a skidillion little stores now claiming to be UPS Stores, but they are not, they are franchises that operate under local management.

That local management can decide (and many liberal minded branch owners have apparently agreed to this mindset) that they 1) lack the knowledge to know if it is a barrel, an upper barrel assembly or if it is really a gun 2) and that being all "unqualified" they now can refuse to handle ANY GUN PART AT ALL.

:veryconfu

All gun stuff is now referred to the regional UPS HUB which is many miles away from most all of us civilians, or you can pay a gun store to handle it under the existing BATF completed gun rules, your choice.

And the liberal person standing on the other side of the counter is quite smug while telling you this after they had called the manufacturer that issued the shipping label to have them to call you on the phone to tell you that you HAVE to immediately come back to the local UPS Store to pick up this "toxic package" that you dropped off on them.

:veryconfu

Where it gets bad next is that the regional UPS HUB has cut their regional hub hours down to half days because of all the new little UPS stores they put up all over ....... but their web presence still says they are open all day instead of reduced hours (extended lunch until 4:00 type hours).

[megasupermagnum]

OK, it is 3:00 in the afternoon and I spent most of today trying to ship an upper back a big 15 miles away to Bear Creek Arsenal in Sanford NC.

Bear Creek Arsenal dealt fairly with me and had a very good customer service attitude, but their business model is definitely breaking down on the UPS side of things.

UPS has a skidillion little stores now claiming to be UPS Stores, but they are not, they are franchises that operate under local management.

That local management can decide (and many liberal minded branch owners have apparently agreed to this mindset) that they 1) lack the knowledge to know if it is a barrel, an upper barrel assembly or if it is really a gun 2) and that being all "unqualified" they now can refuse to handle ANY GUN PART AT ALL.

:veryconfu

All gun stuff is now referred to the regional UPS HUB which is many miles away from most all of us civilians, or you can pay a gun store to handle it under the existing BATF completed gun rules, your choice.

And the liberal person standing on the other side of the counter is quite smug while telling you this after they had called the manufacturer that issued the shipping label to have them to call you on the phone to tell you that you HAVE to immediately come back to the local UPS Store to pick up this "toxic package" that you dropped off on them.

:veryconfu

Where it gets bad next is that the regional UPS HUB has cut their regional hub hours down to half days because of all the new little UPS stores they put up all over ....... but their web presence still says they are open all day instead of reduced hours (extended lunch until 4:00 type hours).

I remember the one time I tried to ship some ammo. What a nightmare. Same story, only "UPS stores", no real UPS hub for 40-50 miles. Nobody would take it. What I ended up doing was scheduling a pickup. It took a number of tries as they NEVER show up when you schedule. One time I scheduled a pickup for the next morning, and the guy showed up at my door 10 minutes later. I don't own a printer, so I did not have the shipping label or anything ready. Then they didn't even show up the next day. After a few days of yellow "I missed you" notes, things eventually worked out.

That said, you have no obligation to disclose what is inside a box if it's not considered dangerous. Ammo is, and has a heap of requirements. You don't have to say boo about an AR upper, or even a complete rifle. I shipped a few handguns, through Fedex, but the principle is the same. Hand them the box, and go about your business. If you are trying to send it in a box with lots of pictures, wrap it up. Nothing has to be on it besides the shipping label.

[tomme boy]

Set it up to have UPS stop at your house and pick it up. That is all that is needed to get it picked up.

[tomme boy]

Or don't tell the people at the store what is in the package. None of their business.

[Oldfeller]

Well, I told the nice lady I could fix the barrel, but she said it would cancel my warranty. I certainly am tired of messing with them, so, I went and began fixing it and am not sending it back to them to screw around with.

Now, let's see if Lee can send me my full length sizer before somebody named Beto comes a knocking to get my AR gun.

Do you suppose Beto would accept that this isn't an evil :evil: AR but is instead a mild mannered 10 round primitive season hunting gun as properly ordained by Indiana, Ohio and others using an approved primitive season straight walled cartridge? Stress the words ordained, approved and primitive --- point out that the military quit using straight walled cartridges well over 100 years ago and let the regulators in Ohio tell him why straight wall "old style stuff" is so much safer for their citizens to use ........ especially if you only shoot them poky slow lead boolits in it.

:-D

[Oldfeller]

248788

New full length sizing die is in from LEE and as you can see from the picture it takes the oversized "straight wall with head area bulge form" left over from the long .355" pin insertion and puts it back into a proper tapered 350 Legend format.

It also makes the fully formed case longer, now these are at 1.668"-1.669" which is just 32 thousandths below the trim length spec minimum. This is good news as I feared I would be having to use a 5.56 blank as my starting source in order to get a full length piece of finished brass.

Fire these 32 thousandths short cases a few times in a grabby snatchy AR-15 action and the brass will need trimming back to spec due to case stretch. This is plenty good enough for me using mild cast loadings as the case taper will stop the brass from being driven into the chamber by the firing pin strike.


Details of the head zone are as follows:

If you go to the SAMMI chamber drawing for your support data, you will find the case head dimension is taken .200" in from the start of the chamber -- this is to allow for a loading zone radius at the chamber mouth which for ease of feeding which is a very good thing.

If you look at the formed cases (complete with tiny micro scratch marks which will tumble out in case cleaning fairly easily) you see numbers start at the solid head web section at .3735" which move out from the solid web to .3910" at the start of the formed micro scratches.

The case wall section in this area is .025-.030 thick and is only "unsupported" over a .010" linear zone of air distance, this is the zone that will get fire formed by case pressure. This area can only move out in a tapered range of .0005" to .005" before it takes on the full "rebated head" case form. Once again, this possible fireforming movement is only 17% of the wall thickness at that area, so as far as fireforming goes it is pretty much completely supported and fairly safe.

I made up enough cases to do the fire lapping operations on the barrel, which is what I am going to be busy doing right now.

More later ......

[cwlongshot]

248794Trim length recommendations are 1.710.

Altho I have seen many factory well short and even longer.

I have good luck with 1.700. Your shorter cases will work if your extractor is tight.

[Oldfeller]

248799

Sorry about the poor quality of the picture -- my phone doesn't like close ups of shiny objects very much it appears.

Rod on the left is used to tap seat the lap round in the chamber, the rod on the right has a somewhat used firing pin form cut into it and the tape is to hold the round centralized to the primer so I can get a clean hit on the primer.

I guess I wasn't very clear, the cases I have made are a slip/will barely rotate fit into the SAMMI spec. chamber (of which I have one). The 350 Legend case is TAPERED .010" for ease of extraction and upon the fall of the firing pin the firing pin strike from the lower cannot move the case forward the entire full trim spec distance before the case taper from my full length sizer stops all movement.

NOTE PLEASE: Normally, the bullet diameter must not exceed the .357" SAMMI spec bullet size or the over-expanded, out of round, irregular and flared case mouth really doesn't want to fit in the case mouth area.

Charged lap rounds ARE strongly over-sized and they do have this issue strongly and I would have to tap seat the lap rounds into the case mouth area with a separate tap rod (.3725" aluminum stock) to get them to go in completely as they do not wanna go right now.

My guardian angel started telling me TO NOT DO THIS ...... so instead I took the lap rolling plates and flipped them over and used the smooth side to roll the assembled "lap charged bullet installed in the case mouth" round until it finally showed an assembled diameter that could allow the brass to spring away from the lap bullet in my stock 350 Legend chamber using the SAMMI spec numbers from the drawing.

248838

The "open up during firing" clearance numbers will not be large, .001 to .0025 of case expansion clearance is about all I can get using rolling the assembled round on the backside of the lapping plates. But hey, clearance is clearance ..... and I also have me a brand new fix it trick for when a straight wall case round comes up a wee little bit fat or a wee bit bent and doesn't want to chamber correctly. :grin:

I have another rod made from the same stock that has a firing pin form cut into the end of it, and a firm rap with a 32 oz brass hammer sets the primer off nicely (the 32 ounce brass mini sledge has enough inertia & mass to keep the case in the chamber during ignition). My smallest 0.3cc LEE dipper holds enough WC820 powder to drive the lap bullet down the barrel and into my catch rag bundle. I use a sheet of toilet paper folded over once and rolled up to keep the powder up near the primer, then I put a completed lap round in place in the chamber and smack the firing pin rod to set it off.

SO TO RECAP THIS AFTERNOON'S EFFORTS: Strong second thoughts happened to me about tap seating a lapper into a throat under interference conditions -- seems like a clear recipe for a pressure spike event to me using good ol' 20-20 foresight.

Then I will clean the bore and the chamber free of grit and trash after each lapper and do it all over again. Batches of 10 lappers are made up at a time, it will take a while to do 25 of them.

Tomorrow's progress -- Wednesday

What isn't known to me is "Will powder coating the slugs then curing the coating and then sizing them give a good basis for a grit charged lap slug?"

The answer is yes, properly cured Easton Ford Light Blue powder coat is functionally harder than simple air dropped WW lead and requires more rolling action to embed the grit to a given controlled diameter dimension.

The lap slugs retain round form better, they cut steel better because each little grit is supported better. Friction apart from the grit cutting action (the lead dragging on the steel) is greatly reduced, so the slugs will go faster for the .03cc volume of powder you are used to using.

Likely fewer lap slugs will be required as the grit over powder coated base lap slugs you use will do more cutting per lap that is sent down the bore.

Next, you are wanting to just lap enough to be "good to go with Powder Coated bullets" a use situation that does not naturally tend to produce residue buildups anyway. What you are working towards is "smooth enough not to build up heavy bullet coating fouling residue lumps" ---- this is akin to the smoothness you need to shoot greased lead slugs with a small difference in degree. Leading with bare greased bullets will occur if you have high spots that are removed but the valley between the high spots is too open and too large (the lead accumulates in the valley and makes a drag spot). Powder coating is slightly different, the valley fills up with mushed mess of cured coating that has gone back to powder form and the bullet jest coasts over this interrupted surface very much like runners on a snow sled do in wintertime.

Yes, it sounds like powder coating residue goes into the irregularities of the land tops and forms a usable surface. Is this shooting a powder coating fouled bore? Yep, just like we get to a "steady state" inside a lead and grease seasoned barrel and WE DON"T NEED TO CLEAN IT ALL THE TIME on purpose, the same thoughts may well apply to powder coated bullets.

It really all comes back to how much lapping you want to do to a brand new barrel. You want the leading and trailing edge of the rifling to be smoothed, you want the groove surfaces to be trued up and you want the irregularities in the tops of the rifling lands to be smoothed up some and all the rough peaks to be removed.

Minor rifling land top "valley irregularities" that would be bad for picking up copper if shooting jacketed bullets may well be acceptable to a Powder Coated cast lead boolit shooting barrel.

I am suggesting that somewhat less fire lapping may be required on powder coated use compared to dealing with bare lead with grease in the grooves or with jacketed --- you may get to keep relatively more of your rifling life rather than fire lapping it all away at the very beginning of things.

To test this theory, I have stopped lapping at about half of what I had to do for lead slugs and we will see if PC coated soft air dropped cast WW metal will powder coat foul badly or not at this slightly imperfect level of land top smoothness.

If I am wrong, we can always go back to lapping some more.

[Oldfeller]

248940

POST FIRING BRASS CONDITION

Well, I know the sample size is very small, but did the theories work out OK? Did the full length sized cases load into the chamber OK and did they change much after firing a mild cast boolit pressure type load?

Answers as follows along with a standard Your Mileage May Vary disclaimer ..... I told you all the little steps I took --- but already I see some folks cutting way way down on the case neck expansion steps. And let's face it, that last long custom built .355 expansion plug was very carefully hand tuned specifically by me to suit my gun's chamber and it only left me about 0.100" linear distance of super strong web that wasn't directly manipulated in die steel to conform to my gun's chamber.

First, nothing cracked nor split nor vented gas using a low pressure load.

Two primers backed up, the most moving .012" to .015" which says there was that much slop in the initial case taper to chamber taper lock up.

The .100" long out in the air (hanging out over the chamber mouth radius) unsupported web area left over from my forming operations showed no affect at all from a low pressure load. Like the ramp area of a Glock .40 or a Colt .45 acp, this web area over the chamber lead in radius zone is something you need to watch out for as you go along. Higher pressure loadings will eventually show movement of some sort in this area, but for now low pressure cast loadings seem to be OK.

Second, the case mouths only expanded temporarily to let go of the bullet. They require only very mild resizing after a low pressure firing. As is, they will accept the insertion of a new bevel based bullet "as is" and will grip it well enough to hold it in location for some sort of post assembly crimp operation. Three (3) thoughts come to mind for that taper crimping/post sizing operation.

#1) a LEE Factory Crimp die is available for about $18 right now as LEE thinks you may need it for the Legend

#2) use a 9mm resizing die to crimp very gently on the assembled round as the case body taper section puts a fine very slow taper crimp on the reformed cases if you use it very carefully, gently and very sparingly. And yes, you can taper crimp the case right into the powder coating layer with very moderate pressure on your press lever ...... going too far is the danger here as the case mouth is used as the headspace stop datum for the folks who are shooting normal 350 Legend brass.

#3 simply use the 350 Legend full length sizer die. You will only get the assembled round about half way into it before you have very slowly taper crimped your case mouth into your coated lead bullet and re-straighten and put back on taper center anything that got deflected any at all during the bullet seating.

There was enough gas pressure generated in this very moderate load to straighten up the case walls to exactly match the taper of my 350 legend chamber. The cases are dirty and have mild chamber scratches on them now (my gun was firelapped so my chamber wall has a crop of micro-scratches in it that are leaving tiny witness marks on the brass).

So now I can currently see on the cases what had chamber wall contact or not --- I may diamond polish the chamber wall out later on if the micro scratches in the nitride coating don't self correct with some more extended use. Right now the micro scratches serve to give me some good "instant of firing retention" as the soft brass imprints a tiny bit on the scratch marks.

OK, the gun moves along now to initial load development as there is a lack of Milsurp powder reloading data out there. So some ladder series using some common mil-surp powders seems to be indicated.

Also note that I think I am going to experiment towards not resizing the brass between firings at all, since I can tumble them in walnut media for a few hours to clean and descratch the cases and then I can decap them in any universal decapping die (stick a straight decapping pin in any larger diameter caliber LEE die) then bell the case mouth with a LEE 9mm powder thru expander charging die while putting powder into the case.

This "no resizing" experiment may fail at some point, but I am somewhat curious -- remember that the case taper hitting the chamber taper is what is actually stopping the case from moving forward during the primer strike on these too short reformed cases (and remember, I did mention that this action results in primer protrusion going on at the .012" to .015" level on the "as formed" first firings?)

I think less to no resizing is better given the short nature of the cases ....... the tighter the fit of the case into the chamber the better it will work out for headspacing.

:smile:

[lar45]

Looks great Oldfeller.
Do you have Quickload? I came up with a powder profile for WC820 that seemed to be fairly close for handgun and rifle loads.
I started with a#9 and ajusted it to fit my chronograph results, then saved it as Surplus WC820.pro . Afterwards, it would just come up in the list of powders.
http://www.lsstuff.com/temp/wc820.jpg

[bikerbeans]

Oldfellar,

FWIW, using the lee FC die to crimp the case mouth of federal 350L brass to 0.376" holds a 170g jacketed bullet in place just fine. My rifle is a RARR and loads are pushing upper end pressure limits.

I am not resizing the brass but found I need to slightly bell the fired case mouth to start the 0.3575" bullet. I didn't open up the throat on this gun, large throat courtesy of Ruger.

BB

[cwlongshot]

Hello BB,

Hope your doing well and hope that means that the Legend is working well for ya!

My RARR will chamber a 357, BUT with resistance. A lil more than I am really comfortable with. So I size the bullets to .356.

Im loading some more tonight for shooting Sunday afternoon.

CW

[Oldfeller]

OK Lar, you are our "go to guy" for load development reality checks on milsurp powders.

I will tell you what my gut says, and you can tell me if I am dyspeptic or not.

My gut likes WC820 for the lighter bullets (124 to 158 grains) up to primer pressure sign, but I expect they will lose accuracy before reaching maximum fps.

My gut likes BL-C2 with heavier powder charges of the slower powder for the heavier bullets, and I may run out realistic accuracy before hitting the highest speeds WC820 can give to the lighter slugs.

In all cases, my gut says we lose accuracy before reaching all the speed we can get, so that puts a thumb on the scale in favor of the heavier bullet using relatively more of the slower BL-C2 powder (and that gas check shank really doesn't hurt things either). I am sorta kinda thinking I can mebbe get the heavier gas checked slug up to the "accurate speed" ranges of the lighter slugs with somewhat similar group sizes.


======================================


I mentioned some reloading press toggle abuse --- my LEE Classic cast iron with powdered steel linkages can withstand some abuse and Lord knows reforming hundreds of cases dishes some press abuse out for sure ---- but it is my old post surgical shoulder and my open heart surgery scarring that really doesn't like those higher handle pressures very much.

I just placed aluminum bar stock and wooden ball orders on Ebay to make me a 30" lever arm to actuate the Classic cast iron press on these higher force applications.

Getting old boys, getting old ...... :coffeecom


EXPERIMENTS FOR FRIDAY

OK, LEE makes a full length sizer die that can crunch brass to use the .391" using the chamber drawing spec dimension up at the rim of the unsupported web area. These cases load fine and after firing seem to be pretty much unchanged up at the top of the rim of the unsupported web area.

Curiosity is always with us --- how big of a rim top at the unsupported web area will the gun force load? Got a lot of closing "slam" available in an AR-15 action, so what could it handle instead of a SAMMI spec .391" at the rim of the unsupported web area?

Well, I can reluctantly slam shut on a .394" rim top which gets turned into a .3935" rim top in the process. Very Very Sticky, needs a firm bounce of a cleaning rod to rotate the bolt to open the action, this is something that should not to be done on purpose.

.393" slams shut fairly easily, does not change any dimensionally, but still needs the cleaning rod to rotate the bolt to open it. The brass is under tension as loaded, but not enough to change it dimensionally.

.392" shuts and rotates and opens/unloads normally about half the time on a bare case, does not always require a cleaning rod.

.391" unloads about half the time. Issues often involve the bullet fit in the throat and rifling, not the case fit. What this says is have a cleaning rod or knock out rod in the car at all times ......

Now I realize I am picking out some fine gnats that may only apply to this one gun and chamber, but still if you go around forming cases for a high pressure autoloading gun you need to know where the edges of things are.

:-P

Also, I know I am head spacing off the taper, so the relatively closer I get to "dead on" the better support I will get for good primer strikes ---- but I still would like to be able to load and unload the rounds freely.

Issue I now see is that once I put a lead slug on the front of the brass that actually will require all available "loading force" as the bullet does some very mild engraving, so I need all the slam force I can have available to me without losing some of it by getting the case itself involved in any low level friction activities. Case rim size goes back to .391" again (sorry Lee Classic Press, you'll just have to deal with the stress levels)

Free extraction of any form of engaged lead slug is always problematical (and always has been). This may translate into having to push the slugs deeper into the case and thus minimizing the bullet engagement, or else always carrying a steel rod with me to the range to encourage sticky rounds to let go once slammed into place.

Considering the lead slugs are acting as a door stop, I am no longer very concerned about light primer strikes.

[bikerbeans]

CW,

I am doing better. Taking the 350L to a early season deer hunt in 3 weeks. The RARR is very accurate considering I have to shoot left handed (right shoulder OOC from a surgical procedure).

Oldfeller,

My apologies for the thread drift, keep up the good work.

BB

[Oldfeller]

BB,

Not to worry, I view a thread as a congenial conversation between the participants and personal conversations veer off on tangents all the time.

My gun is put together, barrel fire lapped and ready to shoot something so I am forging forward on my first set of loads using my 3 bullet styles. I have a brass catcher on the way since I hate picking up scattered brass and I certainly don't want to leave any lying in the grass somewhere as it takes too durn much effort to make the things.

So far Lil'gun seems to be the optimum speed of powder for jacketed slugs, with W820 coming in somewhat faster (akin to AA#9) and BLC-2 being slower and perhaps more gentle acting to cast and coated slugs like the sort I will be shooting.

Still, I am laboriously processing all my brass, it takes a bit as my shoulder is still running sore and I do a little bit of it a day ......

[tomme boy]

Oldfeller. Keep a close eye for pressure signs. The LilGun goes to peak and over pressure very fast and with very little charge increase.

And don't leave it in your powder hopper. It will melt into the plastic in as little as overnight. Ask me how I know!!!!

I pulled some factory Federal 180gr apart and it looks like 5744. It was HIGHLY compressed. You could turn it upside down and tap it and the powder would not come out. You had to use something small to get it out. It had 26 gr of powder. I took some of it and 5744 and looked at it under a small microscope and it is exactly the same shape, length, color. It even has the same small hole in the center of the kernel.

[Oldfeller]

Tomme boy,

You are talking about taking apart some factory jacketed loads, all of which would be using powders that are far far too abrupt and "peaky high pressure" to work out well for good accurate lead bullet shooting.

Since you are talking about compressed loads, you won't be able to shoot that much milsurp WC820 (#59 to #62 on the burn rate chart) to fill the Legend case behind even very light bullets. It will have to be a partial case full, and very carefully measured at that. This would be possible, but likely not that easy to control with varying bullet weights.

WC820 aka AA#9 gets some bad words from the 357 Maximum crowd as being too peaky and yields a slow fps bullet --- i.e. not worth doing in the Legend. I am going to drop all my thoughts on using WC820 at this point in time and concentrate on the "use BLC-2" path first instead.

249027

BLC-2 however is ranked at #105 to #106 on your powder speed charts and milsurp BLC-2 IS slow enough for a slow boosting mostly full case load behind even a heavy cast bullet. But it may still be able to get up to pressures that exceed the strength of the unhardened air dropped WW alloy you are using under your plastic jacket and as such it may not be the most accurate round unless the powder load volume (and the speed) are reduced from 100% load density.

If BLC-2 is too much (too abrupt or too fps fast) I would normally drop back to WC872, which should certainly be slow enough to do the job. But WC872 picks up a whole crop of other issues and isn't optimal for these following reasons.

Getting WC872 to light up and burn clean and make enough pressure to operate the action without filling it with partially burned powder granules would be the challenge..... WC872 generally requires the use of a bumper charge of fast powder to get it to ignite fast and burn clean in straight wall cartridges of any length (and the 350 Legend is a right long straight'un after all).

All these issues with milsurp WC872 preclude it from serious consideration.

Your milsurp powder needs to be pretty completely burned by a foot down the bore, this is another consideration I need to pay attention to.

[tomme boy]

5744 works well at reduced levels. I use it in several 30 cals right now. And it is stable compared to h110 that everyone is using.

5744 and 1680 are known powders that work well in the 357max loaded for TC encores so it should be fine at these levels also.

Lilgun is to unstable for this. When you go from round primers to blown out primers in a .5gr increase that is not a good powder.

[Oldfeller]

249058

Finished 350 Legend gun, sling and brass catcher all mounted.

Upper .............. $269
Lower .............. $150 includes $20 trigger spring kit and handle stop screw
Scope ............... $79
Shipping ........... $60
New Molds ....... $55
750 ea Brass .... $38
Sizing stuff ........ $30
Transfer fee ...... $25
Brass Catcher ... $20
Sling .................. $5

Total ................. $731


All of this goes to show it is all of the minutia, the little stuff that adds up on ya ......

[Oldfeller]

Well now, I took some time off from the project to do some other things, but now I am back working at the loads and bullet positions.

First load, simple and safe, is 20 grains of BLC-2 which is a 80% density loading behind the largest bullet. Energy level should be enough to work the action, but not enough to endanger the unsupported web area up by the case. 20 grains is a sub-power listing for .223 but this is no sin at this stage of things ---- who wants 51,000 psi using a when proving out a gun and a load? I don't think lead slugs love those very high pressures anyway so mild is good on that aspect as well.

One thing I have learned is that a knockout rod will HAVE TO GO on every range trip --- if you use the coated lead bullet as any form of door stop or try to engrave the nose any at all the extractor hook will always skip out on an attempt to unload the bullet.

With .032" worth of "short case syndrome" I also question if the hook is ever being set correctly upon loading the bullet into the chamber. I have looked at a lot of used brass now and filed a lot of rough irregularities on the case head ........ and MANY of the case heads show signs of hook damage on just the back edge of the head groove, like the brass had slammed back into the hook upon firing and then the hook rode up and over and dropped into the groove.

I suspect that short cases will do some version of this, even with using the bullet as a door stop.

Things that work well --- using the full length body sizer as a very slow angle crimp die works VERY WELL. Couldn't ask for a better slow taper crimp and if you feel any resistance at all on the crimp stroke you immediately know something got bent or got grossly moved during previous operations. Then you can stop and check it out and fix it if possible.

Seated bullets are pushing a mild bulge on down the case as they are seated, and the taper crimp action can bury as much of the case mouth into the powder coat as you desire (which currently isn't very much as I am mocking a full trim length 1.710" set up even though the case have .032" to grow to get to trim length at the moment. I think the bullets are pretty much immobile once seated and slow taper crimped.

Using the nose form as a door stop in the forcing cone is a touchy thing. First, a seated bullet isn't EVER coming out of the chamber unless forced out by a tapping knockout rod. So far I got ONE just (1) loaded case to unload using just the extraction hook and the "T" handle, all the rest stuck fairly firmly. Slamming the round into the chamber and rotating the bolt hasn't been a problem once the correct OAL has been developed, BUT I question if "headspacing off the bullet" really works out as theorized with slop in the system. The same movement clearance that allows full and easy bolt rotation also could allow the hook to be up on the top of the rim when all the moving stops.

So, that's where I am right now, time to walk out in the woods shoot a few and see what's what.

[Valornor]

I see no reason for this cartridge. It's only valid claim is it can be used in an AR style rifle. Otherwise it is a .35 Remington Ballistic Clone but on the low side. Its only other virtue is being strait walled so it can be used in Strait Wall Ammo States where you'd be better off hunting with a 12 or 20 ga shotgun like a Savage 212 or 220 or a TC Encore..

This is a classic example of the phrase that jack O'Connor coined in 1962. "New cartridges are like new jokes!"

I just can't get behind this one.

And No Larry you are not wrong about forming the cases. Only thing they have in common is the rim dia.

Randy

I suspect the target market for this cartridge is in the states that restrict hunting to straight wall cartridges only. Given the popularity of the AR platform it isn’t surprising to see all sorts of new cartridges designed to specifically work in an AR.

If we look back historically after WW2 when there was a glut of milsurp rifles on the market there were all sorts of cartridges that were introduced that made use of the existing rifles. It’s just history repeating itself. Only time will tell which cartridges live on, and which’s one are truly a fad.

Personally I enjoy new calibers and the effort that goes into working up the loads, and have enjoyed reading the OP’s results!


Check out my website www.theballisticassistant.com

[Oldfeller]

The 5/8" diameter aluminum rod stock came in yesterday for my larger LEE Classic cast iron single station press extra long lever arms.

I figured out why the 30" long rod stock segments were so cheap, the extruded aluminum was somewhat ugly and it was beat up a bit appearance-wise. No problem, into the lathe chuck with most of the 30" length sticking out the back of the spindle head, applied a full sheet of open coat 120 grit sandpaper to the spinning stock and my two 30" pieces of 5/8" rod stock were in tip top ship shape appearance-wise in no time at all.

Yesterday, I also decided that I was jest being lazy and was procrastinating on finishing off the fire lapping of the 355 bore. Yes, trial firing of the blue bullets is done, it did pick up a little blue powder dusting due to the rough land tops but yes, I could have lived with it just fine as it was "relatively minor" and not what I would think of as a real fouling issue at all.

Still, while I was wrapping things up I sent 4 more laps down the barrel and it is now what I would consider "greased lead safe" which is 2 steps past "powder coat safe" and one step past "jacketed safe".

The gun and the bore are done now, 4x12 magnification 1" scope is mounted, trigger job is done and first 50 rounds are loaded with the 3 types of lead bullets using two load levels of BLC-2 powder which will give a milder boost pressure to the lead slugs compared to WC820.

Then I cleaned up my lathe. This, as we all know, signals "project is complete" to all gun type and machinist type people.

:smile:

[Lloyd Smale]

didn't read the whole thread but where did you get 750 pieces of brass for 38 bucks????
249058

Finished 350 Legend gun, sling and brass catcher all mounted.

Upper .............. $269
Lower .............. $150 includes $20 trigger spring kit and handle stop screw
Scope ............... $79
Shipping ........... $60
New Molds ....... $55
750 ea Brass .... $38
Sizing stuff ........ $30
Transfer fee ...... $25
Brass Catcher ... $20
Sling .................. $5

Total ................. $731


All of this goes to show it is all of the minutia, the little stuff that adds up on ya ......

[Oldfeller]

Hey Lloyd, how is it going?

Actually, I bought 2,500 pieces of mouth damaged 5.56 brass from Everglades Ammo a while back on a 20% off sale for less than a nickel a piece (4.73 cents seems to ring a bell, but it was a while ago).

Everglades sells mouth damaged 5.56 and the 5.56 blanks for the same price, the scrap metal price for brass.

Catch it on their fairly rare site wide 20% off sale if you can, discounted 20% off scrap price is pretty good if you can catch it on the 2 days they offer it. You will need to sign up for their e-mail based Everglades newsletter as that is the only way to know if a sale is going on in time to catch it.

Another way is to catch some sort of sale off of somebody who has just bought a pallet container load of 5.56 brass from Gov. Auction and is selling some of it off cheap to raise some bucks.

[Oldfeller]

It is the middle of October, the weather is shifting to full Fall mode, the tomato plants are all losing their leaves. Behind them they are leaving a bunch of naked green tomatoes that are ripening up in waves now.

I have made up my first gasps at "walk in the woods" loads, and have observed the gas driven AR-15 action's functioning and the barrel residues.

Since them range trips just to chonograph stuff costs too much money for me to be doing, them chrony workups are going to be kinda rare too. I will save up some of the stuff to shoot for data collection later on a range trip where I am carrying the Chrony and I will post it well after the loads are made up.

What can I say at this stage? BLC-2 is looking good, you can get a moderate, relatively lower pressure cast boolit loadings that will work the action correctly with a heavier bullet, and you can ramp up into the neighborhood of a heavier compressed load if you feel any need to do so. You can even get to see some mild pressure signs if you go high up on the loads.

Your cast boolet compatibility is pretty good with BLC-2, but mind you that the lighter loads will leave some light fluffy pepper sized trash in your barrel and in your gas system. NOTE: YOU GOT YOU A "TRASH IN BARREL" WARNING HERE


Now let's talk about WC820, that ~ AA#9 ~ equivalent powder


WARNING: WC820 is potentially dangerous in the 350 Legend ......

HOWEVER, the use of WC820 (AA#9 equivalent) is fraught with some serious "pressure based concerns" in the long deep 350 Legend case with the largest of those concerns being the ready ability to do an accidental double charge and have it easily fit and hide inside the shaded zone deep inside the long dark 350 Legend case space.

:shock: ...... that's really bad, boys and girls ......

On the plus side for WC820 (AA#9), you CAN work up to some real pressure signs (if you believe in using jacketed bullets that is). There are some use cases where you don't have a lot of space left to put powder, those are the really suitable uses I have for WC820.

HOWEVER, reformed cases made up from 5.56 brass that do have that have that little 0.10" inch long stub of "original form" up by the case head, these do not care much for very hot WC820 loads that will flatten your primer some --- the predicted fire forming of the thick web zone that we have all heard about DOES IMMEDIATELY TAKE PLACE in those "primer flattening" WC820 (AA#9) loads.

This level of fire forming is DANGEROUS if done violently, all at once.

:shock: ...... that pregnant guppy look is really really bad, boys and girls ......

Let's talk about the very careful moderate use of WC820 in factory built once fired cases. Yep, you can use it, in carefully measured and metered charges in a factory case ---- but if you are a high roller who has lots of money and lots of factory cases you can find better powders to use that will actually readily give you the higher fps speeds that you are seeking without the risks that come with using WC820.

Once again, Graff's is selling Winchester 350 Legend range brass for $17 per hundred and it is a much better deal for normal reloaders instead of forming their cases from Milsurp 5.56 or from Milsurp 5.56 blanks ---- both for safety reasons and for labor based cost reasons (making brass from 5.56 is a whole lot of work and mucho scrap happens while you are doing it).

If you were going to personally choose to do this "form the cases" trip just for the experience of doing it remember to buy you some really cheap once fired blank 5.56 Military brass from Everglades and start your reforming trip using blank 5.56 Military cases -- this way you will get you some consistent full length trimmed brass at the end of things ......

:-P

[cwlongshot]

Thanks for the tip on Graffs... 10$ ship was nice but 40$ minimum a surprise...

400 cases headed my way as of this am!

CW

[tomme boy]

You will have to swage the primer pockets CW

[cwlongshot]

Not a problem... But why?

CW

[tomme boy]

They are crimped in.

[cwlongshot]

350 Legends?

Huh..

CW

[bikerbeans]

CW,

Let me know what headstamps are on that fired 350L brass from Grafs.

BB

[tomme boy]

The ones I ordered were all Win. The FMJ ones are crimped. Not sure about the others. I just bought 3 more boxes of factory loaded FMJ's last week and they are all crimped as well.

[cwlongshot]

CW,

Let me know what headstamps are on that fired 350L brass from Grafs.

BB
Will do!!

Tommy, I have only bought Win FMJ factory so far. I did shoot a few but stopped when i saw some pressure signs and started measuring cases. They where all over the place for lengths!!!

Any how, none if these I bought, had crimped primers.

I’ll look close when the brass fired arrives. I just haven’t seen crimped primers in the legend. But its a non issue really as my Dillion 600 is quite adapt at handling primer Pockets! ;)

CW

[Oldfeller]

Somebody mebbe reminded Winchester that all that AR-15 mechanism uses requires primer crimping for full mil-spec reliability.

Or more likely, Winchester ran the Legends on a 5.56/.223 line that was already set up to crimp primers and simply didn't change the set up.

Or else somebody had complained about some primers falling out in the box (Winchester, what the heck are you doing now ?????)

You get to take your pick ......

[bikerbeans]

FWIW, the federal 350L brass I have hand loaded is not crimped. This brass also has the correct dimensions. I don't know if the federal brass is available as a reloading component.

BB

[tomme boy]

Federal I have I had to throw away. Case heads expanded too much and had blown primers also. No Thanks!!!

[bikerbeans]

Blown primers = reloader problem, not a brass problem.

BB

[Oldfeller]

BB's point is valid, you could segregate the Federal and use it for some milder cast boolit loadings.

New progress as of Saturday --- the triple aught buckshot mold came in from Amazon and it was machined very very nicely on all the stacked cavities. I degreased/deoiled it with brake parts cleaner and then heated it on the top of the stove with the mold halves open to let it air out good and let it heat cure in a bit.

Then I Q-tipped the cavities using the same hexagonal boron nitride powder they sell as bullet lubricant/barrel conditioner.

Made up a pot of 20% tin 80% WW alloy, ran the temp on the bottom pour LEE pot up all the way, heated the mold up on the stove eye to medium high heat and then went to pouring.

First shots were nozzle inserted into bevel full pressure force pours, I got some flashing and 100% cavity fill, quickly noticed the lead was taking forever to solidify so I cut the heat back down to my normal running settings and started using a pour stream from the nozzle as I normally do. Force pours are not needed.

Still got 100% fill on all casts, so I proceeded to make a lot of buckshot. Started adding WW ingot to the pot exclusively, slowly began to see some partial fills on the bottom cavity and realized I found me a functional limit at the lower "good for 20% tin alloy stuff" temperature.

Cranked the heat back up and the partial fill issues disappeared, but I had to use the "tap a moist rag" trick occasionally to get the mold temp back down from showing "excessive heating" conditions. Noticed I was getting all frosty in line with the other cavities and that my bullets weren't as round as they used to be, just some more symptoms of excessive heat.

I had enough strings of 3 to proceed to powder coating, where I discovered that laying the strings on their side after applying the powder made a sizable flat spot out of the sag and run of the powder coating. Flat spots were mostly taken out by sizing, but a few remained mildly flatted on the rifling engagement zone to the point they could leak pressure.

First day learning was accomplished, first batch of strings was imperfect but I think they would be serviceable if I powder tumbled them again in Ford Light Blue and intentionally laid them on the curing tray so the old flat isn't on the bottom again.

So I did that. It worked.

One coat of powder really isn't enough on a string of 3 anyway as any imperfections on the equator of the shot would give leading a starting spot when the string was fired.

Shot size was .356" to .357" as cast "hot as hell" with .358"-.359" on first powder coat and .361"-.362" on the second powder coat. Post sizing was .3565" just like all the normal bullets were, and string breakage during sizing was less than 15%. Not bad, really.

I also noted that the mold is closing better after some use, it will cast slightly smaller in diameter when measured perpendicular to the parting line (not so perfectly round pellets) after the face knurling wears in a bit.

This very minor error gets lost in the powder coating, so no correction is needed at this time.

While sizing the single shot, I found myself using the largest flat spot on the sphere to balance the bullet on the ram -- this resulted in a nice round evenly sized equator zone and provided me a way to use the slightly flatted shot strings I have very effectively.

If they are a string of 3 with large flats at the equator, just cut off the most ugly end shot and size it again using the largest flat spot as a balancing point on the ram. Now you can use that single resized shot (nice even equator zone) as the first shot in the loading, this shot is sitting down on the powder with two uglier flatted shot sitting on top of it.

When fired, the round bottom shot with the nice equator zone will provide the gas seal for the two uglier shot stacked on top of it.

[tomme boy]

Blown primers = reloader problem, not a brass problem.

BB

Factory loaded, not me

[bikerbeans]

You may have chamber dimensions or headspace problems causing the trouble with federal brass and primers. In my RARR 350L I can reload the federal brass without resizing. All of the factory loads I have fired show no signs of overpressuure.

BB

[tomme boy]

None of the Winchester factory loads shot out of my gun have a problem. None of my reloads have a problem. Federal brass is known to be JUNK.

[tomme boy]

From what I am told is Federal is not doing a second strike of the head to harden the brass like everyone else does. And this makes the heads soft. It is ok for a lower PSI cartridge but not for loads in the 45k+ area. It is the bean counter getting the line to run faster by not doing an extra step.

[bikerbeans]

Please provide documentation regarding federal brass being junk.

BB

[Oldfeller]

:grin:

You guys are doing that tit-for-tat argument thing again.

You can both agree that some Federal brass isn't up to doing full bore maximum loads due to potential "weak headedness" so may I offer you a solution to the issue?

Save up all the Federal brass you get and send it all to me for proper disposal.

This is the same offer I made to the folks who couldn't get over mil surp IMR 7383 being so durn peaky and "dangerous" in heavy loadings.

Being somewhat peaky and dangerous and "weak headed" myself, I just naturally seem to know how to utilize such dangerous stuff .......

249756
Now you too can see all the awesome potential that I saw in this oddball cartridge .....

Powder for this load is gonna be BLC-2 and it is a mildly compressed load under the string of 3 using the same powder charge I developed for the big 35 Remington bullet.

I think I see way too much available room inside the 350 Legend case for trying to use WC820 --- it would lead the "weak headed" among us into dire temptation as you could do a real full power jacketed bullet loading with that much powder room when using the faster WC820 powder.

...... we gots to watch out fer the somewhat peaky and dangerous and "weak headed" among us.

And, simply think of those 3 lead balls as "inert filler" that you are using just so you can keep your powder charge down tight by the primer flame for getting some better ignition of some slower ball powders like BLC-2 .......

[Oldfeller]

Each time I use my new style LEE 2 hole molds with the dual steel alignment pins, I like them better and better and better.

Literally, all I had to do to get ready to cast me some more 200 grain gas check 358 rifle bullets out of the C358-200-RF mold was to dust the alignment pin holes and the sprue plate and the cavities with a Q-tip load of Hexagonal Boron Nitride powder -- this means an easy start up with very free release until the higher mold heat easy release takes effect.

[bikerbeans]

Oldfeller,

I see Accurate has a mold in the catalog for the 350L. 180g with GC and an oglive similar to the factory jacketed bullets.

I sure wish my PC boolits turned out as nice as yours.

BB

[Oldfeller]

Eastwood Ford Light Blue powder coat in a small Frankford Arsenal vibratory bowl --- yep, it's the bee's knees -- never leave home without it.

(does look good, doesn't it)

[tomme boy]

Your welcome on the 180lg mold. We designed it around the chamber drawings and case drawings. The diameter can be changed to a smaller O.D. for whatever your gun measures.

[Oldfeller]

Been getting some requests for a heavy subsonic load for the Legend for those who love silencers and potting pigs at night using infra-red scopes.

Got me no silencer personally, I don't personally need a subsonic load for any reason ---- but such is possible using tech I have already shown to folks.

249846 This configuration cannot load enough powder to get the AR action
to cycle and there are a ton of loading issues in making up the rounds.

The front locomotive in the Big Blue Train is a 125 grain LEE 2R 9mm pistol slug that the mold is currently available everywhere for $24-$30. This hangs out in front of the case giving the round "out of the magazine and into the chamber" lead-in guidance that the little round ball really lacks the ability to do very well by itself.

With 3 balls as shown it could only be a sub-sonic, cut the ball count down to 2 and it could be a fairly respectable heavy rifle loading.

Weight of lead is 335 grains for the four projectile load (as shown) and 265 grains for a two ball load with the Luger style bullet in front.

These extremely heavy load weights may require slow powders like WC872 for a slow start if you were trying for "as fast as possible supersonic" but seeing how much lead is involved the WC872 will likely have lots & lots of time to burn completely.

For subsonic you can do what the shotgunners do, simply use some fast pistol powders like Blue Dot but only use a little tiny amount of them.

Upon loading the balls, you will get a chain of bulges in the case that would require insertion part way into the full length sizing die just to iron the bulges out. This is no sin because you need to stick the finished round into the full length sizing die anyway to slow taper crimp the case mouth into the first bullet.

The lead alloy is air dropped wheel weight alloy and firing such loads will likely immediately "slug the chain of pellets up" upon firing to whatever the chamber wall and the expanded case will allow ---- the forcing cone comes next and reduces it all back down to .355" anyway.

Think revolvers and the cylinder throat slugging action and you will realize we do this sort of stuff all the time anyway in our pistols.

The untouched bullet in the front always caps the fizz anyway, so it isn't like any pressure will be lost and the entire blue train will still exit the station in an organized fashion.

;)

[cwlongshot]

249853

Brass arrived today

It appears to be all Winchester I don't think its crimped.

[Oldfeller]

Yep,

This is the address to the Graf and Sons stuff that I recommend normal people to buy and use.

https://www.grafs.com/retail/catalog/product/productId/81023

$17.00 per hundred is affordable and the brass is apparently pretty consistent at Winchester head stamps, mixed crimped and non-crimped at the moment.

It will change over to mixed headstamps and mixed staked primers pretty soon as it is range brass, so I'd buy some $17.00 per hundred now if you are of a mind to do so.

This is such good advice I think I'll take it, myself, right now.

:-P

[Texas by God]

I’m looking forward to a range report of this Abby Normal ammo you are loading. You’ve certainly put the work in on it- Rock on, FrankenSteen!

[Oldfeller]

Next, we may have to lap the throat in our AR to lengthen it just a smidge.

Lapping a throat isn't something you do casually, as the steel never grows back and any error you make is yours to keep forever.

Consider simply letting standard throat wear erode your throat naturally over time, as that will happen anyway.

Firelapping changes throat diameters and lengths fairly drastically, so if you ever do any firelapping you need to do a tap slug afterwards to see exactly what changed during the lapping process.

Having said this, making a throat lap involves the use of a lathe because you need to make a very precise lap form (size and length) in end of your aluminum lapping rod and you have to make a support sleeve that mates to your action to hold your lap rod precisely on the center of bore as you feed it forward oh so very very gently as it spins.

Using a drill to power the lap rod may be required to get the job done before you die of old age. But the drill makes the risk level go up as you can remove material faster (and screw up faster too).

At the back of the action where the installed support sleeve lives, you mark a start spot on the lap rod where it initially seats in the throat and you mark an end spot on the rod where you will stop lapping. These marks are not very far apart, now are they? Since you are just removing the rifling itself and just a tiny amount of bore material, the lapping job will move forward at a reasonable pace using 50 micron diamond paste to do the cutting.

You need a "ongoing progress monitor" that is readily visible or some sort of stop shoulder hitting the end of the chamber or you run the risk of lapping too too far (eek !!) :cry:

Why do I need to do this? I am using longer than normal bullets or bullets with a nose form that is non-standard to the 350 Legend general design from Winchester. I also want as much room for powder behind the triple aught buckshot string so I have to run the Luger types forward as much as the magazine will allow.

I am told that a Ruger already comes with a longer .357" diameter throat, so I suggest that a tap slug be made by anybody that thinks they have a "running out of throat" issue because you need to KNOW what you really have before changing anything.

[tomme boy]

249853

Brass arrived today

It appears to be all Winchester I don't think its crimped.

Look over each piece. Over half of mine were crimped. It has the ring and the pocket is sharp from the crimp.

[Oldfeller]

Today we adjust the throat for both size and length by diamond paste lapping. This is rough diamond compound (50 micron size) in a heavy grease base and you can see I have my guide bushing in place on the back side of the action and the lap is charged and I am about half done with the lap job.

Rather than mess with a chain of bullets wearing out I cut the desired form into the end of the hard tough T-6 aluminum alloy rod that you see in the picture. This is a relatively durable lapping system and so far the lap is only worn .0005" at the end and I am about half done.

249864

You can see the forward assist on the action in the picture to give you a spacial location of the bushing and yes, despite my own advice I am running a variable speed corded drill to make the lap rotate and using my thumbs to bump it up and down. I have both a stop mark and a stop shoulder on the lap rod to keep me from going too far into the barrel.

Goal is to have the throat taper to start to accept .357" jacketed bullets but have the narrower end of the taper go down to about .3565" which is what my sizer currently throws. This also allows a bit of wear growth in my powder coat sizer die, which is gonna happen whether I want it to or not.

It also splits the difference on any future full weight .358" rifle bullets after they go through my .3565" sizer and come out somewhere nearer to .357" due to spring back of the jackets.

Let's see how close I can come to the desired span of throat size and depth ...... :razz:

[lar45]

Looking great Oldfeller. Have you shot any of the buckshot loads yet? I'm very interested in how they group.

[Oldfeller]

No, not yet Lar --- part of the reason for the throat lap job was to be able to run the front bullet in the Big Blue Train as far out of the case as the magazine would allow, making more room inside the case for MORE POWDER packed tight behind the caboose round ball.

249875
You can see how much longer the throat is now by the lap discoloration.

All the throat lapping is all done now, the nose goes down to .3565" and the root by the case mouth is .3575" so I call it a success as by and large I got exactly what I was trying to get number-wise.

If I wanted it bigger later on, I can lap plate roll embed some larger grit lapping compound in the lap tip, but I think I am happy with what I have right now as it spans my push through sizing die and any commercial bullets that are run through that die. My powder coated bullets will load without sticking, hopefully anyway.

First loads will be a Big Blue Train of 3 Triple Aught buckshot string with a 124 grain Luger in front of them leading the way out of the magazine and into the 350 Legend's enlarged throat, making up a whopping HEAVY 335 grains worth of a FOUR (4) bullet load that I will then see just how fast I can get it to going.

Accuracy, we shall see ......

I have 300 factory stock fully supported Winchester brass coming in from Graf's and I will use that brass to make up these loads as they are somewhat on the wilder side of things pressure-wise.

[Oldfeller]

OK, I put a couple together to check on powder capacity and lump removal, two important parts of the puzzle.

249893

There were lumps when I pushed the string of 3 round balls that deep into the case -- lumps that were .002" tall diameter-wise on the one that went deepest into the case. Pushing the finished round into the full length sizer die to crimp it takes care of the lumps while taper crimping the mouth into the powder coat (once again requiring practically no force on the press lever to do so).

Resulting lumps are less than .001" tall now and quickly doing the math that means the shot are compressed during crimp loading to right at (or a smidge just below) the standard print bullet diameter value of .355". This is in line with the final dimension they will finally take in the rifling, rifling which will displace some material that will once again join the inevitable bump up effects to make it all work out just fine.

Powder capacity is still quite low, I have room for 10-11 grains of either BLC-2 or WC820, with BLC-2 having a ton of time to burn completely and likely being a good bit more civilized about getting the train to rolling from a dead start than WC820 would be.

As said, these will be sub-sonic loads due to the limitations of powder capacity. They will likely be tough on the 5.56 reformed cases back at that unsupported web area, so if I fire them they will likely be a worst case test for the web area.

=============================================

New learning from loading and unloading the rounds that are capped with the lightly heel gripped Luger bullets several times over a couple of days now.

Powder coated bullets left under tension from powder compression and from case mouth compression that only grips part of the heel will move over time. The powder coat compresses and the grip tension gets relieved.

Once the case mouth compression is relieved, the bullets can tip and pull themselves right out of the case during slam loading and subsequent unloadings.

This is a development stopper, but it is one that Uncle Sam had bumped into and he built a thing called "bullet sealant" to stop it from screwing up his M1 carbine rounds and M14 rifle rounds. Same trick was used on Garand 30-06 rounds to keep the bullets where they belong in that particular autoloader too.

Civilians used to use a drop of clear fingernail polish to do the same thing, but I am fresh out until I can go to Walmart and buy me some more. My old bottle dried up over the years since I last used it.

:oops: Does finger nail polish even stick to powder coating material?

Answer is yes it does. Clear fingernail polish will act as an acceptable bullet sealant if the case mouth is parked partially over the edge of the crimp groove giving the clear stuff a protruding edge to grab some crimp and some "glue effect" upon both the bullet and the brass.

Looks good after the fingernail polish dries good. Appears solid to finger pressure, will now subject it to loading/unloading tests using the AR-15 action.

[Oldfeller]

It is Saturday afternoon and today we learned that the Ford Light Blue powder coating has extended curing requirements in order to be relatively size stable under compression forces from the case mouth.

It must be cured for over a half hour at at least 250 degrees F or else the coating isn't as strong and as stable as it need to be for a slow taper bullet case mouth crush seating job.

Next , I learned that my air dropped WW alloy is too soft to withstand large bullet seating forces without settling down and growing some in diameter.

Last learning is that I am simply having to crush things too hard and seating them too deep and I am basically causing myself issues because my net charge (powder and bullets together) is simply slightly too large for the case.

Winchester factory brass should have some extra CC's of case volume due to their construction and they will be here in a few days for me to try them out.

More later.

[cwlongshot]

BEFORE swage: 249952


After swage: 249953

Tommy,

I just wanted to say, You where spot on with the warning about primer crimp on there cases!! Thanks man!

Loaded up some RL7 & my 290 RD bullets cast in air cooled WW. W/alu GC. Shooting this afternoon. Tested to 26g @ 1650 fps no pressures. These loads are 26.5,27&27.5g

CW

[Oldfeller]

249959
24" and 30" long lever arms, 5/8" high tensile aluminum rod stock

Well, the 2" diameter wooden balls trickled in from China, so I have completed the two longer "higher force levels available" lever arms for my very strongest single station cast iron press.

Us creaky old men have to cheat jest a little bit, don't cha know it?

:grin:

[rockrat]

Just ordered some brass from Grafs!!!

[Oldfeller]

Errant thought for the day .......

My slow taper crimp trick using the full length sizing die has the ability to correct finished rounds at the case neck/bullet junction and even correct them up towards the head area (removing the bulges from the multi-ball loads).

Folks keep saying you can't put .358 Remington bullets into the Legend case without over-expanding that case neck junction to the point it won't load into the chamber.

I say "So what? You got a full length 350 Legend sizing die don't cha?" You can make whatever "minor releasing clearance" you need for that oversized finished round at will, dialing it in by the tenth of thousandths by turning in your full length sizing die in a little bit more from your standard slow taper crimp position.

Fair warning: You do reduce your bullet diameter where the case covers it down to close to .357" or thereabouts by doing this, but the bullet leaves the case mouth and immediately goes to .355" at the start of the rifling so your gun really doesn't care.

Remember to use some sizing case lube and to wipe your cases off good afterwards. Have some clear fingernail polish on hand, as you may find assembled rounds rotating the bullets on you sometimes as all fits were made smooth and "slip fitted" in a taper seated fashion by the compression seating trick.

Or, you can pre-size your jacketed lead slugs in your cast boolit sizing equipment ahead of time and do it that way. If your throat diameter is a stock .357" diameter and still at a print length you will have to seat the resized bullet more deeply into the case to get it all to work out even after resizing your heavy .358" jacketed rifle bullets to .357" diameter or less. This deep seating of the longer than stock bullet in a stock throat issue cuts down on your powder capacity accordingly.

But a trick is a trick is a trick --- you use them as needed.

Remember the lap rod trick, you could have a Legend throat that accepts .358" bullets at close to full length naturally if you wanted to go do that. Your magazine length becomes your limiter then ......

[Oldfeller]

Got my 300 pieces of Winchester range brass in from Graf & Sons today. It is a mess on the case length all right. I got .024" short to .027" beyond optimum trim length. This is more wildness that I have ever seen in a factory once fired case.

Taking the over length brass back down to optimum 1.70 trim length took some time as taking that much stock off was quite tedious.

Over 85% of my brass is primer crimped. Roughly 20% shows signs of excess pressure (most of these were the over length cases, btw). Chicken or the egg, which condition came first ????

I am going to tumble the cut cases for a couple of hours to de-burr the mouths good tomorrow AM then begin experiments to see if loading and unloading improve with a stock format bulge-less factory brass.

:-)

[bikerbeans]

Are going to pitch the short brass?

BB

[Oldfeller]

Heavens no, it is still perfectly usable in a standard "single boolit" Cast Boolit load. As will be all that weak headed Federal stuff you guys like to go and on about.

Funny that, my made from 5.56 Nato brass is .032" short of optimum trim length but I find that .032" short falls inside the tail end of the very broad Winchester natural trim length distribution (statistically speaking).

I think a portion of all the extreme high pressure signs seen in 350 Legend so far come from the grossly over length brass from the other end of that distribution that was way way too long and way way over crimped (duh) causing very high start pressures because Winchester uses a faster powder to get to their maximum speeds.

I will pick a "safe" cast boolit load with BLC-2 powder with enough pressure to completely form the case up at the head area, and then simply use the brass as it grows, then toss it when the neck cracks (which will eventually happen, I am pretty sure).

[Oldfeller]

Now here is a puzzlement question for the crew ---- what would I do if I get light primer strikes on the short brass because they can migrate forward in the chamber?

[smilie=1:

[Oldfeller]

Next mild puzzlement question .......

What the heck are these gizmos?

250047

[cwlongshot]

Now here is a puzzlement question for the crew ---- what would I do if I get light primer strikes on the short brass because they can migrate forward in the chamber?

[smilie=1:

Kinda saw that coming...

As for Gizmos... dead link. No pic says to call admin.

CW

[Oldfeller]

Deleted and ran the pic through all over again, says it went through and I can see it just fine, but we all know they are working on the board as we speak ......

Heck, it said it was good the first time around, too. Looked great to me, too.

We all know that looking at the brass we just got in from Graf's that firing pin force and depth of strike is a variable item (just by looking at the primer strikes). Some primers got struck VERY hard and very deep.

I would choose to have mine to strike a bit deeper, that's all.

250048
Here is that pic again just to see if it stays around better now.

[cwlongshot]

Case trimmers. The case length IS all Over the map!! I wont shoot factpry anylonger. But i still buy the FMJ.

I pull the bullets weigh the powder and set aside. Trim the brass to length and reload with a bit below average charge weight 21.5g IIRC was last amount. Then I size down a 140FTX bullet to 356 and seay just above cannalure and taper Crimp. When shooting these, I enjoy sub MOA accuracy and 2350 fps. I have posted a few pics of my ammo right outta a new sealed box you can see lengths differences naked eye.

CW

[Oldfeller]

Aha! You are correct, the top two black ones are Anthony Holub's shoulder based neck trimmers, using a custom installed by me sharp four flute HHS end mill to do the cutting and being driven by a 3/8" variable speed drill they will slay huge sets of .223 and .308 Nato brass in a rapid fashion.

The only requirement for maximum trimming accuracy is to operate Holub's trimmer only on freshly full length sized cases that have the shoulder accurately relocated to the correct dimension.

Note please: the .308 trimmer can do 6.5x55, .270, 7x57, 30-06, 8mm, 35 Whelen, and any other member of that case/shoulder family just dandy. Holub's stuff indexes off the neck taper as a pure thing, it doesn't care about neck size at all.

I have gotten spoiled by these things as I could process a case in less time than it takes you to read this sentence.

But Holub makes nothing for the Legend and the Legend has no shoulder to base the thing upon anyway.

The Legend has the case headstamp area as the primary datum, and the secondary datum for the whole thing is the case mouth that you are trimming.

You correctly guessed the big raw looking aluminum body does the Legend case in a Holub fashion (quickly and well) but how is that possible in just a few seconds?

That is your puzzlement to take a shot at.

[Oldfeller]

250079

Start your thoughts here --- a keyless chuck that grips the Legend case and spins it for mouth chamfering activities.

The cases datum off the headstamp surface inside the chuck body just like the print calls for.

250080

Using the front face of the chuck as the transfer datum, you can now build the trimmer body swinging a milling cutter a la Holub's system.

Chuck it and trim it, just about that fast.

This brings up Winchester and their rather severe issues with case length ---- they too are either using some form of transfer datum to do this job or else they are trimming "raw" without referencing anything as a controlling datum system.

Errors possible in my system are a bad chuck up in the drill (cuts the case way short) or allowing the cutter to glaze the brass and not finish cutting completely (answer here is to measure each case to make sure cutting was really finished).

When I do my part, my trim variation is on the tune of a few thousandths, but losing focus on what you are doing can mean not cutting the case all the way --- which happens more often than any other error.

I only had two short chuck ups and maybe 5-10 that needed to be cut more because they weren't done yet. This is a far far lower failure rate than the 25% rate Winchester is dealing with right now.

[cwlongshot]

250077

Factory FMJ same box... Remember these headspace off the case mouth.

CW

[Oldfeller]

That my friends is an over-pressure round waiting to be fired. Winchester should be ashamed.

[cwlongshot]

And thats exactly what has happened to too many! That long case gets up into the throat and cannot properly release the bullet. I have measured some almost 1.730.

Winchester SHOULD BE ashamed.

CW

[Oldfeller]

As you did the final prep (mouth chamfer, priming, etc.) did you notice the over-expanded cases up near the head?

They have a sizing line that extends a bit upwards and a hint of an expansion bulge form instead of the smooth Legend case taper.

Hit them with a digital caliper that is zeroed on a normal looking case and you will see +.0015" - +.0025" post sizing variation on these over-expanded cases.

I am considering ordering a "custom" LEE push through bullet sizer at .388" to do "bulge busting duty" on those pieces of range brass that had gotten over-expanded due to Winchester not keeping track of case length and charge weights the way they ought to be doing.

Just spot lube the bad area on a bulged case and push the case through the die, leaving the topmost area with a short flat .388" straight zone where the abuse bulge used to be. I find .388" to be pretty much the natural size up by the start of the extractor groove, so bulge busting the abused cases back down to this size seems to make sense to me.

Smaller than .388" would be compressing the body of the head itself, which would be a no-no in anybody's book. Bringing the head end of things back to .388" would tend to tighten up a sloppy over-expanded primer hole somewhat, but not 100% by any means.

If the sizer needed to grow a bit, I think that will happen naturally over a few hundred bulge bustings as the LEE push through sizer is just hardened steel and it is not immortal by anybody's guess.

But starting at .388" is small enough to give you some latitude as to the final size that you finally run with ..... and to leave some over-crush for managing the spring back effects, which will happen in the real world too.

[tomme boy]

It is not only Win that the brass is too long. I measured some Federal today that were 1.7185" Going through all of my brass right now to even them all up. Or as close to 1.70" as I can trim.

I am having a hard time getting them to stay put in my RCBS trimmer. They keep wanting to fly up out of the shell plate.

[Oldfeller]

I got confirmation back from LEE that they accepted the design for the .388" diameter sizer, specifying that the thing be built to "snug on a .388" pin gage" and not using pushed through lead slugs for anything in the sizing of the thing.

With LEE it is better to specify in detail, as if you make them guess, well, they will guess for you. :shock:

It also clarifies things a bit when they do it wrong, as you have not only the dimensions, but an approved test method called out on your original order.

I watched a lot of first time honchos go slack on providing fine drawing details, get bit, get told the situation was partially their own fault for not specifying it clearly and get shafted (or the purchasing members got shafted).

My own honcho jobs from years past involved me fixing thing with lap rods, size rolled lap bullets and generally making up the difference between LEE's real process capability, their tool breakage, their past habits and what was on the drawings.

This is one of the reasons I kinda like the four or five Legend bullets I have put forward so far ----- they only "exist" after going through the .3565" push through sizer die and they and the gun are quite happy with the lengths and diameters that result over their entire bullet length.

(and you thought that lengthened throat that just barely covers my longest bullet was just a wimsy, didn't you?)

250166

Right baggie contains a 200 grain gas checked 35 Remington pig and bear bullet over 20 grains of BLC-2 as my "heavy moderate speed cast lead" slug.

Left baggie contains 210 grains (3 round balls) of buckshot on a string. This is my supersonic buckshot load and it weighs about the same and uses the same powder charge as the heavy 200 grain slug on the line above this one.

The loose ones in the foreground are four balls (280 grains) over 10 grains of BLC-2 in a compressed sub-sonic load.

All of these rounds will load freely and unload about 90% of the time freely, so that is improved loading and extracting performance compared to the previous attempts.

My theory is that the bulge buster LEE is building for me will fix the remainder of my "sticky loads" issues.

;-)

[Oldfeller]

This morning I made 25 of the same 200 grain rifle load, but using bullets with no gas check, just the powder coating. This is for testing the current theories from Fortune Cookie 45 and Elvis Ammo (and others) about not needing gas checks any more.

Yep, two of the YouTube mavens now claim that gas checks are not needed with powder coated bullets, but I suspect their opinion was built mostly doing revolver work on 44 magnums and sub-sonic AR bullets. The Legend is a little more rifle than that, and the distances involved can be a lot further.

Plus, I need to go to the 200 yard range anyway to get a gut feel for how much drop you are actually really dealing with with a large cast bullet and a moderate load at those extended distances.

This is generally educational, I did it once with a 30-30 and a 192 grain cast boolit and found at 250 yards it dropped 26" after zeroing it at 100 yards.

200 yards is about all I would try with the Legend unless I was slinging one of those long nosed high BC copper coated things, and I suspect I could only pick up 50 or 100 more yards using them. Knowing the drop and having a means of scoping it is quite important here, as you HAVE to allow for it .....

I got better guns for those longer distance beanfield shots, really.

I also intend to "pattern" some multi-ball loads to see how far out they are usable and useful. Buckshot at 80 yards from a shotgun spreads too much and slows down too much and that scenario makes up the recommended maximum range for a shotgun buckshot load --- 80 yards.

Speeds for non-magnum buckshot start out right at the 1,100 fps range and become subsonic very close in, so my subsonic 4 ball load is actually playing in the same ball park, but I hope because the train starts out in a rifled barrel they stick to the flight path a lot better.

However, my 3 ball load uses a full rifle charge of powder, and I suspect it moves right along at Davy Crockett black powder long gun speeds or maybe even a smidge better. This one gets tested at 25 yards and 50 yards and if it is tight enough it mebbe can go to the 100 yard range so we can see how much it drops and spreads.

[P Flados]

FYI, I have had good luck with full power PC coated "checkless" bullets.

Lee 150 & 170 in 30 cal (30 Herrett and 30-30) and Lee 200 in 35 cal (357 maximum).

[cwlongshot]

I have been shooting 450bushmaster plain base 457191 bullets to nearly 2k for almsost two years now. ZERO bore fouling.

IMHO PC coatings isnt a replacement for GC. But if pressures are low It is a damn site better than plain lead.

CW

[bikerbeans]

FWIW, I have a fully rifled 410 slug gun (JES conversion) and have shot four (4) 0.410" roundball loads. Accuracy was no better than multiball loads from a smoothbore 410. I hope your 35 cal experiment has better results.

BB

[Oldfeller]

What do you do ......

...... when a good rifle range goes bad? The elder brother, who was quite reasonable and easy to deal with is very sick (cancer) and the younger brother is an officious arsehole with some 'liberal seeming" rule loving tendencies?

I found over half the target placement spots had been removed since my last trip, all the remaining target mounting pipes were right up against the berms and they suddenly expect you to move repeatedly according to the distance you want to shoot.

Lastly, the younger wants to know exactly what you are shooting for ammo. And no, you can't shoot that here, we are not licensed for shotguns.

I left, after getting my money back.



================================================



It is funny, I have a local indoor range that has no problem with what I plan to shoot. Issue using them is 30 yards is as far as they have got, distance-wise.

Investigating things a wee bit further, two out of 4 local rifle ranges have been refused a license to operate in the last year, and apparently these new restrictive new rules are being forced on everybody.

Times, they are a changing .......

[lar45]

I'm sure you told him that it's not a smooth bore...
If you lived closer, central Arkansas, I'd say swing by my place and shoot. The wife built me a 75 yd range in the front yard. The closest public range is an hours drive.

Back home one time I was swinging by the range to check the zero on my '06 on my way to go Elk hunting and I forgot to bring a target, so I looked through the stack of backers to see if any had a clear spot and the club president just happened to be there and threatened to kick me out of the club. I had been a paying member for over 10 years. He even wrote a letter to the editor of rifle magazine complaining about degenerate shooters...

[Oldfeller]

Lar,

Part of the issue is that us originals are really quite old now, and old folks really do get tend to get shat upon fairly frequently by various circumstances and persons as they tend to not be treated as "worthy" any longer.

Do the folks inhabiting this place even know this it the fourth (or since it was sold again it is perhaps the fifth) iteration of the list? The first 3 were called Shooters and we were a merry crew indeed, were we not? We invented and refined much of what these folks consider "knowledge".

We were somewhat innovative and rebellious, like younger people used to be. I don't really see that so much any more, innovative and rebellious younger people, I see conformists of a new stripe who abandon their own ideas quickly in the face of mild criticism.

But then again, hey, what do I know?

[tomme boy]

What state are you in?

[lar45]

I agree that there is some of the, if it's not in the book then don't do it crowd around, bbut it's not totally gone. I think that when it's presented in a clear fashion with the thought process behind it, then there is more acceptance of the project in mind.
If I didn't just get a Ruger AR in 450 Bushmaster, then I might be tempted in jump in and get a 350 upper to play with. Man I sure wish that Winchester would have gone with a .357 or .358 barrel instead. But with a properly sized throat, you can shoot oversized bullet and boolits without too many problems. Remember the NRA test of shooting 8mm bullets in a 30-06 that just the neck and throat were opened up? They actually measured less pressure with the 150gn 8mm bullet than with a 150gn 30cal bullet, using the exact same powder, brass and rifle. That one was definitely not in the book of acceptable stuff to do, but they did it anyway and everybody got to benefit from the knowledge gained.

I'm currently shooting the Speer .458" 350's with CFE BLK at 1800fps-ish. I got a Lee .451" push through sizer, lubed the bullets with Imperial and stuffed them through. They pop out the other side at .452". I'm getting around 1.5" groups with them and shot a smallish hog with it, went through both shoulders and the spine and exited. I'd love to see what the bullet looked like afterwards.
I've got the MP 45 Ruger mold and I'm going to cast and powder coat some and give them a try next.

I wish they would have let you shoot at that rifle range, I'm interested in seeing how the strings of buckshot behave.
Keep us posted.

Glenn.

[mehavey]

club president just happened to be there and threatened to kick me out of the clubout of curiosity, why?

BREAK, BREAK....

"The 350 Legend also uses the same .346” bore and .355” groove dimensions as 357 Mag and 357 Max. Therefore, bullets exit the muzzle at approximately .355” when fired from any of those three cartridges"Notwithstanding internet lore to the contrary, the (at least my) Legend shoots .358-sized cast extremely well.

[lar45]

Because I did not bring my own targets and wanted to see if there was still some life in one of the ones left on the backers. He was convinced that I had snuck onto the range and did not belong there. I showed him my membership card and he said that they did not issue those( I had gotten the same type of card with the gate combo on the back for over 10 years) and asked where I got it. I told him from Larry at the Gun Barn. He replied that he would have to talk to Larry about being more selective about who he sold memberships to. I was polite, calm and courteous. I was just in a hurry as I was late getting out of town and just wanted to double check the zero on my rifle before my Son and I went Elk hunting.

Sorry, thread drift...

[Oldfeller]

What state are you in?

North Carolina

[Oldfeller]

Got to the range today. Back is sore, but in a good way. Right hand is sore, but my right hand is victorious again, kinda.

I shot 10 yard standard pistol target with a .40 S&W cartridge using 170 grain FBI loads at 25 yards --- when heck, I couldn't even see where the shots were landing on the man sized target.

Yep, my eyes have gotten that bad. Really, really bad.

When I walked up I was pleased to see I had made an 8" group at 25 yards and every hit was inside the fatal FBI zone.

And yes, I am aware that if you pot somebody from 25 yards that is grounds for some enthusiastic liberal DA to charge you with something ranging from manslaughter to 2nd degree murder since you could have let him run away as it is common knowledge that pistols can't hit you or anything else at 25 and 50 yards ...... (wrong)



=============================================



In my Range Diary I noted the 25 yard and 50 yard dispersion pattern of the 000 buckshot triple ball load. 4 inches at 25 yards and 8-10 inches at 50 yards with an overall drop of 6" between the two distances.

HOWEVER, my notes also say that the load is considered FAILED because the ball form will not reliably load the assembled round into the chamber, the OAL of the ball based round is way way way too short and the loaded round tilts and jams on the way into the chamber, and the action pressure & gas volume half way down the barrel is very very low (it won't cycle the bolt carrier back to lock the action) and yet the initial firing pressure even using the slower BLC-2 powder is still too high judging from the severe primer flattening that was seen on the fired rounds. I conclude that the 210 grain weight of the blue bullet train is too too much, simply too too much for an AR type action as it does not leave any free room for the initial powder expansion, lacks gas volume, has low fps and really won't work the AR action very well.

Somebody who has a bolt action Legend could still use the things, I guess.

I think I am upsetting the soft nose of the air dropped soft slugs when stuffing the case full of powder and bullet. My 200 grain blue pills are running too fat on the nose about 20% of the time and all of them need some form of post assembly nose sizing such that they will load better.

On top of this, removed jams show hard hits on the locking lug ramp area that left significant marring on the bullet nose and this stopped the action from rotating and locking properly when the marred area got into the throat. I need to thin up the powder coating some and seat the bullet deeper, or else open the throat up a little more in the barrel. I also sense I am chasing my tail here again as the bullet damage that takes place when the nose hits the ramp area over the splines is a sporadic, random damage item ...... this sounds like a classic tail chase thing to me, really.

BLC-2 speed WC846 powder was simply too slow of a powder for the Legend, it burned incompletely and left lots of ash mummies in the barrel. Varying the bullet weight and charge weight didn't help the mummies much and the ash mummies still remained in the barrel and down inside the carrier --- the WC846 stuff is just plain too slow for the 350 Legend.

Best powder seen out of my powder closet was AA#9 speed WC820, it burned clean and left a minimal ash residue in the barrel. 158 grain pistol bullets and 200 grain rifle bullet loads actually liked the same range of charge weight (a 1.3cc dipper full at ~ approx. 20 grains ~) which is a moderate primer pressure load with 158 grain bullet weights and a mild primer flattening load at 200 grain rifle bullet weights. In both cases, the AR's action was smooth and there were no jam ups.

Best accuracy load seen was 1.3cc (20 grains) of AA#9 speed WC820 behind a 200 grain bullet, multiple 1" to 1.5" 3 shot groups at 50 yards were done during sight in. The wide meplat 158 gain bullet was also fairly good at 2.5" groups using the same 1.3cc (20 grain) loads.

Going hotter with 1.6cc (24 grains) of AA#9 speed WC820 behind a 200 grain bullet yielded a very flattened primer and lower accuracy levels and a harsh abrupt action and some bullet nose deforming jam ups where the slamming action was simply too abrupt and caught the bullet up hard against the feed zone over the locking splines.

Bullet damage in loading the soft powder coated lead bullets from magazine over the splines and into the chamber seems to be a thing with the Legend ..... :roll:

I made a lot of other load powder types and pressure levels that didn't do near as well as the AA#9 speed WC820 loads, all of which experiments will now get pulled down and the components recycled.

Let's repeat the double charge warning ---- use of a low volume fast burning powder that can fit two charges down inside the long deep DARK 350 Legend case is inherently dangerous.

[Oldfeller]

Got an E-Mail notice tonight from LEE that they had shipped my .388" bulge buster push through die. That was like a month early, so I am happy.

Recovered most of my early development loads, scrapping the bullets but saving the cases and the powder.

Did a detail clean of the AR-Legend, tuned the firing pin motion in the bolt carrier, it now protrudes .005" more than it did before.

(small steps here, too much here can cause multi-fire problems you know)

Gun is still breaking in, black oxide isn't even worn through on the carrier slide bearing portions yet.

Experimented with using the open base end of a 30 Carbine case sizing die as a Legend assembled round bullet nose sizer -- close but a little bit too small to do this particular job.

[P Flados]

Oldfeller,

When I was working up boolit loads for my 357AR, I had a lot of of problems with nose damage and jams. The Lee 200 was one of the worst for getting beat up. The worst cases for the Lee 200s would have the top of the meplat hit the back of the barrel just above the chamber. Better but not good was when the meplat was getting into the opening, but then the edge of the chamber would gouge the boolit just behind the meplat.

The biggest improvement to the gun would be a more optimum feed profile on the barrel extension (the part with the locking lugs). Slowly let the bolt forward to feed a round from the magazine while carefully watching the nose. To minimize nose damage, it would be ideal for the nose of the round to be centered in the opening and just inside the chamber just as the back of the round is released from the magazine. If your rounds are being pushed too high or off to one side, dremel grinding on the feed ramps would help. Note that the "factory profile" is at best optimized for pointy 350L J-words or just as likely could be a profile for a 5.56 or 300 BO.

A bigger radius on the chamber entry can help, but only if things are pretty close to good before the radius is increased.

The other thing to look for is the nose hitting just below the start of the feed ramp as it is just edging out of the magazine.

For me, my rounds are not long enough and the round is in "free flight" from the time the round is release from the mag until the nose is inside the chamber. It did not work very well at first. I eventually adjusted the feed profile and changed boolits (see below) such that the profile is able to guide the nose of the round into the chamber with no damage.

The other item to consider is boolit shape. For my 357 AR, I ended up making a custom mold to drop a 180 from one cavity and a 200 from the other cavity with an "AR Friendly" smallish meplat with smooth ogive from the meplat back to the case neck. Pictures are at post 79 of:

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?312313-357AR-(Max-Rimless)-AR15

There is more discussion at the link below. Post 91 of the link has a picture of a target where I put 6 rounds in less than 4" at 200 yards from a load that was pushing my 200s at just over 2000 fps.

https://mdws.forumchitchat.com/post/357ar-357-max-for-the-modern-boolit-man-9735573?trail=100

I checked and my boolits should work in a 350L even with the longer case.

[Oldfeller]

Push through .388" bulge buster die showed up from LEE. As well as I could tell, they built it to what I asked for --- the sizing zone is snug to tight on a .388" pin gage.

I pushed through all my Graf's brass and laid aside all the ones that felt tight or took extra pressure to process. This tight stuff amounted to 20% of all the range brass I bought.

Looking at the sizing die marks on the cases, there sure are a lot of out of round chambers out there. There are also some chambers where the feeding ramp of the gun is showing up clearly on the fired cases.

Next new knowledge was the sheer amount of spring back that these malformed cases still have the ability to do. Die is .388", case nominal at that area of un-abused brass is .388", worst case over expansion is .3925. Worst case "ramp bulge" was .0045 which was expressed as out of round when measuring it.

Issue remaining is that the spring back inherent in the brass gives you back a lot of the error you started out with. Re-sizing the cases with the push through bulge buster simply reduces the amount of the remaining error down some --- removing only .0005" to .0015" of the original error (you never get rid of it totally).

What may work better is removing stock from the loading face of your full length sizer die and removing stock from the face of your shell holder. By doing so you are making a small base sizing die out of your stock 350 Legend full length die.

Doing this grinding material removal is a lot cheaper than ordering a custom push through sizer so make yourself a poor man's small base full length sizer die and save the money on the "mostly failed" push through bulge buster die idea.

[P Flados]

Oldfeller,

Did you see if your gun can easily chamber all of the ammo you have run through the 0.388 sizer? If it will chamber and extract them without extra effort, I would be tempted to load and fire a few to see how they work.

[Oldfeller]

I already broke down all the old rounds that didn't perform as well as the best two and recovered the components already.

The string of 3 triple aught buckshot rounds cannot be broken down (far too tight and the balls are pocket recessed in the taper sized brass too firmly for an impact puller to move them). Whenever I have the time and motivation at the range I will simply shoot them up one at a time until they are gone.

Or simply give them to somebody with a bolt action gun, which is more likely.

I can load and unload the "push through" Winchester standard cases fine, it is the homemade from 5.56 brass that isn't able to be totally recovered by push through sizing.

I was disappointed in the hardened brass spring back effects making the push through resizing far less effective than it might have been.

By "small basing" your full length 350 Legend resizing die you can repeatedly "taper crush" the bulge zones at the correct angle while simply processing your brass several times normally just doing the de-priming and normal finished sizing that you would normally do for any automatic rifle.

That is the theory, anyway. On the far end you will collapse the mouth a little extra (proportionally the same movement) but nothing that the powder through expander die won't correct for you automatically.

And yes, I will eventually do it and post just how much to take off the end of the standard full length sizer die. Just measuring it with a caliper says that the case taper is a simple cone ending in .388" so assuming you can project off the case drawings you can small base the Legend case with a reasonable shortening of the full length sizer die body and a very mild (and short) re-radiusing of the opening.

Bolt guns can likely eat these bulge forms and correct them naturally as they use relatively large loading crush pressures and have some large extraction forces available to them as well. Firing normal pressure cast rounds will spank the case bulges in the chamber steel, tending to remove the bulging over time and multiple re-loadings.

[Oldfeller]

Next puzzlement .....

We know the boy tweeked the back side of his firing pin hole in the bolt head to make it strike .005" deeper.

We know he has short light strike issues on his 5.56 reformed brass, because it is short in his chamber.

He can do a good bit more tuning with the firing pin in the bolt head, but he won't do that he tries what he has now. Slam fires are out there, somewhere, jest a waiting for him and he knows it ......

We know his reformed 5.56 brass is starting out at .030" short, give or take a bit. A firing or two would make it longer, possibly to within functional dimensions.

We know he likes to cheat and he loves a good trick (keeps a little black book of them, he does).

250887 This is more trouble than it is worth. Functionally replaced by firing pin extension tuning.

So what is this and what can it do as a useful trick ?????

[Oldfeller]

I think they need a hint.

A paper cutter with a stop can make a bunch of .040"-.060" wide bands right quick like. Drop them around the bullet and they slide down until the case neck stops them.

A little hair dryer heat and they snug up just dandy.

DON'T FORGET THE BANDS WILL SHRINK IN WIDTH WHEN YOU HAIR DRYER THEM ON THE BULLET.

They get slam squished some upon loading, but they will keep the bolt head & extractor properly engaged to the case head extractor groove just dandy.

And upon firing they will shrink some more and get caught up in the gas flow and exit the barrel. Or become one with the powder fouling, whichever. It is very rare to see one again.

250931 This is more trouble than it is worth. Functionally replaced by firing pin extension tuning.

[Oldfeller]

Using the paper cutter is just too cumbersome as it is too large a tool and the cut to size heat shrink bands are really quite small.

Here is a better tool that is based upon a pair of cheap scissors and a little tab of stiff backed velcro material that I had lying around handy.

251001

As you can see, the stop is sized to fit the job and adds no weight to a pair of sharp scissors.

251002 This is more trouble than it is worth. Functionally replaced by firing pin extension tuning.


This shows the width control which is equal to the scissors blade thickness. The raw band is cut to be .060" wide but it shrinks in width when you settle it in place and heat it with a common hair dryer.

Mine wind up between .030" and .040" wide after getting hit with the hair dryer and then they get loading scrunched to be a bit shorter as the material gets accordion jammed into the "short case" space in the chamber.

What happens after firing is anyone's guess, I haven't found one yet to say.

Using this tool and a common zip lock baggie you can quickly save a couple of thousand cut to width bands for future use. Hopefully they won't be needed for that long as your short 5.56 based brass will grow in length after you fire it a few times.

[Oldfeller]

Monday, revisited the bolt group again, this time going after maximum firing pin protrusion.

Got up to .055" firing pin protrusion before it started to get sticky on me at the end of firing pin travel, then spent over an hour with 8 micron diamond paste and some 220 and 400 grit wet or dry paper working the various shoulder areas to get the firing pin to be completely free moving again (and get the pin end of motion "stopping action" balanced between the large flat flange and the tiny firing pin nose taper and the larger taper in the middle of the pin's length).

Picked up another .005 of primer protrusion getting rid of the "sticky" so at .060" primer pin protrusion I am now in the short end of the ballpark of igniting my 5.56 reformed brass "as is".

My "failure to fire --- light strike issues" went way way way way down. What also happened was my estimation of primer flattening pressure signs got changed as well. All I really had before were a bunch of short, light strikes ---- not a bunch of "flattened primers" ---- so I am currently re-evaluating my load pressure ranges with newly fired cases.

Next, I took apart and cleaned the extractor hook spring and read up on issues associated with too strong and too weak of an extractor hook spring.

My extractor spring extended length exceeds .800" right now and the extractor motion of my stuff seems to tend to be the "too strong" side of things rather than too weak side, but I also am mindful of the recommendation to do nothing to it except keep it clean until the initial break in 500 rounds have been fired.

"Your extractor spring will settle in length" is a simple statement that requires a little bit of patience to check, but I can do that.

Extraction per se has not been an issue since I lengthened the chamber throat to allow the very lightly engraved bullets to be extracted by the bolt carrier handle.

My theory on the high extractor spring pressure is that I am simply fighting too hard to get the extractor up and over the case head to the point it really isn't happening until the case gets stopped hard, and as a result I am over-driving the case all the way to the bitter end of the chamber before the hook goes over the rim and seats.

Less extractor hook pressure would help here, I think. I would expect a proper spring tension would allow the hook to ride over and settle due to the large amounts of bullet mass / inertia and the mild interference of the case in the chamber taper.

[cwlongshot]

All this reads like allot of Rigmarole that simply factory cases would solve...

Also as it pertains to primers and pressure. More proof that primers alone are a very poor indicator of relative pressure.

CW

[mehavey]

If y'all want a handle on pressure in a cartridge such as this -- no data at all for cast projectiles -- I suggest QuickLoad and (very) sharp attention to chronograph results extrapolated back to effective burn rates ... and thence to implied pressures.

. . . which is what I'm dealing with now w/ an AR_Legend as I build up a data reference.

FWIW: Both the SAECO #352 (358-245gr FNGC) 2.235" and the LEE 358-200RF (FNFC) 2.165" are excellent, and at 0.358" function quite reliably using full-up cases of AA2015 and V-N120 respectively.

Now just playing between Lee push-through/thin ALOX coating vs conventional lubrisizer/50-50.
Spotless bores in both cases upon a single dry patch.

[Oldfeller]

All this reads like allot of Rigmarole that simply factory cases would solve...

Also as it pertains to primers and pressure. More proof that primers alone are a very poor indicator of relative pressure.

CW

He's right of course, that's why I recommend to everybody (and I bought some myself) once fired range brass cases from Graf's.

You can say with complete surety that you do not want to make 350 Legend cases using 5.56 brass, you have seen the mess it really is from start to finish.

Extend your criticism a bit, and aim it at the 350 Legend as a whole cartridge and rifle set up ......

All this reads like allot of Rigmarole that a factory 35 Remington would simply solve .....

Yes, the 350 Legend really is a bit of a kludge of a cartridge. I just ordered 4 each thirty round Magpul .223 magazines, magazines that are made of plastic so I can trim the front ribs out of them with a homemade plastic scraper so I can actually have me a large capacity magazine for the 350 Legend as none of such things are made yet by anybody at this point in time.

If you would simply read this thread from the beginning having a piece of paper and a pen at hand, you could write up a whole bevy of reasons the non-Winchester factory round 350 Legend is not something the casual reloader should ever attempt.

A casual reloader that gets in as deep as Mehavey or me is still doomed to still drown in all the "you can't buy that piece yet" issues that still remain.

The folks who actually carried through to completed fully functional 350 Legend auto-loading guns that are shooting powder coated lead bullets are really quite rare.

However, for someone who likes to think, invent and to overcome obstacles can have a lot more fun with a gun like this than any normal gun .......

[smilie=b:

....... ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ....... boy I'm having so much fun I can't hardly stand it .......


================================================


Mehavey, what upper/barrel/chamber are you using? The stock Legend SAMMI chamber simply won't accept a .358" bullet into the throat any at all, not a smidge of it, I had to lengthen my chamber's throat just to load a intentionally reduced to .3565" during push through sizing powder coated LEE 200 grain slug.

[cwlongshot]

I made two mage for mine before I had a gun! ::)

Tip for ya, pick up a couple Foam or cardboard nail files. They work perfectly for smoothing out the insides of the mag so the follower rides smoothly! I also finished with a abruptly nose up profile. I was worried, But its proven to work to the last shot. I still occasionally have a misfeed on last bullet in magazine. Unsure why. Does not seem to matter if I load 9/8/6/3... but If I load one it feeds off the mag perfectly. Ooh well is not going to war, Im fine with that!

Ooh 4227 and a powder coated 190 Ranch dog bullet shoots about 1” @ 50 and nice round 2” @ 100 in my gun. At a 1750 fps velocity.

CW

[mehavey]

Oldfeller: The upper is a www.Durkintactical.com, and as you (and a lot of us) found out, the SAAMI Legend chamber has very little/very tight freebore:
In fact, somewhere between 80-90 thou long max and 0.357" at that (if SAAMI is to be believed).
https://i.postimg.cc/rsnWp1Vj/350-Legend-Chamber.jpg

But while the Durkin barely gives me that 80-100"-thou in length, it apparently does give me 0.358" in throat diameter.
https://i.postimg.cc/kMkG9MdK/350-Legend-SAECO-352.jpg
NOTE: I've tried sizing down to .357 in the trials, but it likes .358 better.
But woe betide that any straight shank get too far out from the mouth.
(Hornady bullets of any type are bad that way.)

[Oldfeller]

To get more reliable feeding I extended my bullet throat more and lapped my throat to .3575"(case mouth) - .3565" (end of throat). Here is the image of the original .3565" lap configuration.

251055 .3575" diameter lap

I have recently charged the lap with some larger grit that I lapping plate rolled down to a nice round .358" measured diameter and am waiting for some sort of trip decision point to happen to decide whether I am going to use it or not.

Advantage to opening the throat to .358" size is that I can load some jacketed .358" bullets way on out in the magazine and I can still crush seat the mouth taper zone containing the bullet shank using the full length sizer die to maintain the neck diameter zone over the fatter bullet to maintain chamber loading and bullet release clearance.

Downside will be a loss in accuracy with jacketed vs powder coated lead ......

It will feed better, that I can be fairly confident of that ..... [smilie=1:


251057

Here is a fresh pic of the larger grit charged lap. When you caliper it, you get .358" to .3585" but we know the larger grit will break down in use and it will lap smaller at the tip end than it measures now.

[tomme boy]

Good luck on the mags. C-Products said high caps will be out this Nov. at some point. I will wait till then. The Pmags are a pain in the rear end to make reliable. Everyone has trouble with them. All you have to do is get a 300 blk mag then lower the front rib a little. The 300 mags already have the rib taken out.

[Oldfeller]

I think they are promising a 20 rounder and I wanted a 30 round capacity. Also, I wanted to pay $9.75 for the mags, not $35 .....

[cwlongshot]

I did ten rounders, cause its real hard to remove that rib from such a long mag. The ten rounders are easier that way and Ill never have needs or wants for more. As stated its never going “to war”. A couple tens will be more than enough, to ward off the fiercest hog charge ill see. ;)

CW

[Oldfeller]

I just ordered 4 each thirty round Magpul .223 magazines, magazines that are made of plastic so I can trim the front ribs out of them with a homemade plastic scraper so I can actually have me a large 30 round capacity magazine for the 350 Legend as any of such things are not made yet by anybody at this point in time.

Tommie, I don't willingly buy Pmags brand for anything, I think I got bit by them once long ago during my Glock days.

I was actually unaware that Magpul and Pmag were made by the same folks now-a-days, but sure enough, Magpul Co. makes the Pmag brand in a whole bunch of different AR-15 capacities, versions and rib structures and plastic types stretching back over lo these many many years.

Magpul also makes a Magpul brand magazine which is supposedly different, better stuff ......

Magpul magazines are supposedly "good to go" for AR-15 uses and they go on sale for cheap all the time.

I hope what actually comes in the mail next week says Magpul on it and not Pmag. But generally, I am not that lucky.

And heck, if it was easy it wouldn't be for a 350 Legend, now would it?

Think of an old wood based shave plane, now make it thin enough to go through the two end openings in a magazine with the floor plate and guts all removed. Shave off a couple of thou of plastic off the rib per stroke so it will be nice and easy to do.

:cool:

[tomme boy]

Still not going to work right. The follower tilts and the round nose dives. That rib stops it from tilting. Plus I will give you a hint on helping. The spring is not strong enough. You will need to shim the spring pack. It is another reason no one has figured these out yet. The mag needs high spring pressure to help it not tilt and to feed correctly.

[cwlongshot]

Yea I agree. Mine has plenty of “nose up” actually Appears TOO MUCH!! But the last round feeding is all spring!!! ;)

CW

[Oldfeller]

Sounds like I need to try to leave a small portion of the front rib still in place to engage the follower and help control the nose up/down tilt illnesses.

I also bet the overall spring force was never intended to handle the sheer mass & weight of our large lead bullets in a 30 count magazine. Low spring force will mess up a lot of things ......

[hicard]

I am still looking for a load for the RCBS or Lee 200 gr bullet using Lil'gun powder. Looks like 20-21 grs but has anyone tried it yet?

[P Flados]

For my 357AR max, I get good feeding from a 20 round Pmag with the side ribs completely removed and the front rib "thinned" up just a little so that my custom small meplat boolits can not grab up front (the meplat was just wider than the original flat on either side of the front rib).

[P Flados]

Before the 350L came out, I worked on coming up with a more AR friendly NLG boolit for my 357AR max.

Smaller meplat, decent ogive were objectives. After making myself a 180 / 200 gr mold from a blank Lee 2 cavity, I also made a Loner mold.

This was discussed over at https://mdws.forumchitchat.com/post/357ar-357-max-for-the-modern-boolit-man-9735573?&trail=75

I have confirmed that the mold is still available "for loan".

I think it should work as far as OAL in an AR mag even with the longer case length of a 350L. The full diameter portion drops are 0.359 up near the ogive and 0.360 near the base due to a small amout of tapper. The size was for the 357AR max which was made with 0.358 barrels. With this size and a 0.356 or so finished size for 350L, it would probably be best to size before and after the PC coating step.

As a warning, this is Lee mold. It was not closing good (occasional case of alignment pins not even hitting the holes) so I made some adjustments. It is better now, but not perfect. When I ran the test batch over the scale, a small fraction of were a grain or more heavy indicating the heavy boolits were cast with the mold not fully closed. This should get better with use, but be sure to lube the alignment pins more often than typical for now.

I also made up a "base first" ram for push through sizing with a companion nose profile for the mold. A few years ago, I was unhappy with a portion of my plain base boolits having some extrusion around the bases. I swapped over to "base first" and the bases looked much better, but it was hard to keep the nose centered on the ram. With my lathe, I now have "custom" rams that make base first easy, keep everything centered and smooth out the nose just a little.

If you want it, post a "I will take it" and send me a PM. I will forward applicable info to the current holder.

The primary "payment" for using the loaner will be to use it, give the boolits an honest check out for accuracy, feeding, etc., and report the results.

Take some photos of the mold when you get it and if you eventually need to ship it to another tester. Just keep them for now. If you damage the mold, take some photos, fess up and ask what to do next.

If there is interest from more than one shooter we will work out how long the first tester keeps it.

The as cast 205s and some run through a 0.358" sizer look like:

251260

The as cast 182s and some run through a 0.358" sizer look like:

251261

And yes they drop out of the cavities with no tapping required.

[Oldfeller]

I will take it, and thanks for the chance to do the evaluation.

[Oldfeller]

Hicard,

I sympathize with the general lack of load data, but at this stage of things I will only be working with cast boolits and bulk surplus powders. Right now I am weeding through the milsurp powders that will actually work, trying to determine some generic load levels that are getting closer to realistic/good in the Legend.

While fixing the "other ills" associated with a gas driven autoloading action ....... of which there are more than just one or two to work out on this gun.

So far I have made up 5.56 based brass, lapped my barrel, re-throated my gun for longer protruding bullets and totally tuned my firing pin protrusion to a maximum out of bolt face 0.060" deep firing pin stroke motion.

My gun is not really stock any more.

Next, if you are looking for some "no knowledge required -- cookbook safe" load information you are in the wrong place. Please go to the very front of this thread on page one and read the whole thing in order.

There is some good information here, but it does not come in a cookbook format.

Some of the other guys do use commercial packaged powders but I am not aware of any of them loving Lil'gun as their favorite powder. Read the whole thread because this is Lil'gun thing is explained in some detail.

[cwlongshot]

251428

[mehavey]

1. 60-thou pin protrusion may make you vulnerable to pieced primers. I'll be interested in what you find when the hammer falls.

2. Lil'Gun is absolutely superb in this family of cartridge design. But if you've not got a pressure transducer/chronograph and/or deeply familiar with Quickload/expert extrapolation from baseline published data (and a chronograph), I'd stay away from it as it spikes rather nastily/does not go into over-pressure gracefully.

3. What bulk powders are you looking at ?

[tomme boy]

Mehavey, the reasons you posted about the LIL gun powder are the exact reasons I don't like it. To me that means it is the wrong powder for this cartridge. Which is why whatever powder Winchester is using would be nice if we could get it. Or knew what it is.

I have been having good luck with slower powders. You can have reasonable speeds and a port pressure that is high enough to cycle the action. I have a adjustable gas block on mine and have no worries if the port pressure is too high using the slower powders. I can just shut it off. And besides. You want a slower initial engraving with a cast bullet so it does not strip or skid in the throat before the gas check has entered the throat and has time to engrave also.

Cw is also working with slower powders. But he has a bolt gun. He does not have to worry about the action cycling.

[mehavey]

One of the problems with the LEGEND and Cast bullets is that there's no data -- not even to start.
The other problem is -- of course -- that you're alloy/pressure limited.
That's where QuickLoad and a good chronograph come in.

FWIW,
- I'm running fairly heavy: 245gr SAECO using Lyman#2 at full magazine length (2.26") Post #155 (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?387647-350-Legend-and-Cast-Boolits&p=4761307&viewfull=1#post4761307)
- Barrel's carbine length (16"/15"-rifled)
- I've found 34-35ksi is "not unreasonable" with gas-checked/medium-bore bullets/#2
- I tell QL that I want 34ksi/90%+ burn/'Pretty-Full' case (87%+) to Max achievable compression (111%)/Get rid of "Strange" Powders.

Leaves me these options:

https://i.postimg.cc/GmvjyN6F/350-Legend-SAECO-352.jpg
CAUTION: The above data post includes load data generated by calculation in QuickLOAD software based on a particular powder lot, the assumption the primer is as mild as possible, and assumptions about component, chamber and gun geometry that may not correspond well to what you have. Such data should be approached by working up from published starting loads. USE THIS DATA AT YOUR OWN RISK. Neither the writer, Cast Boolits, nor the staff of CB, nor QuickLOAD's author nor its distributor assume any liability for any damage or injury resulting from use of this information or information derived from it.

Back off 5% to establish/adjust actual burn-rate (implied) from actual chronograph/velocities --> resultant (implied) pressures and we're off to the rocket science experiments

[Oldfeller]

Mehavey,

I am running test load series of WC 820 (AA#9 speeds) and WC 846 (BLC-2 speeds). Some source reference load data does exist on CASTPICS from the 35 Remington, but the "extrapolation stretch" is a bit much so IMHO some build and try ladder series really has to take place.

Complicating this is the various issues with the gun and the homemade brass and the modified magazines, plus it is getting too cold to enjoy protracted sessions at the range shooting all of it up.

All my "largest loads" loading data was compromised by the fact my "pressure signs" were taken from short, light strikes on the primer, so I am in essence shooting up all the old stuff and starting over now that I have some reach to my firing pin stroke.

Cold weather plays games with the ball powders, we all know that. It is cold at the range now.

Complicate this by my use of an aftermarket trigger kit with a lower pressure hammer spring, I wasn't getting much of a primer hit out of it, really.

This is one of the reasons I don't currently fear getting pierced primers, my firing pin moves very freely in the bolt carrier assembly and it just isn't hammer driven to the degree that could cause a lot of pierced primers.

If I get some, I will change the firing pin tip form to be a blunt curve --- not going for shorter so much as I am going for a "rounded and BLUNT" tip form.

[Oldfeller]

P Flados

Once again, thank you for sending the loaner mold --- it arrived today in a USPS flat rate flat mailer.

251602

.... and I do mean a FLAT USPS flat rate mailer. The box will never be the same again I am afraid.

I felt considerable drag and grittiness from the sprue plate motion, so I took it off after recording what was there before pulling the plate.

What I found were pretty severe scratches from slag coming from the WW metal, which had stuck to the steel sprue plate and had gouged into the aluminum in normal use.

251604

Note please that the reddish stuff is not rust, it is some form of mold lubricant caked on the top of the mold.

I found that the sprue plate had self-tightened itself beyond all reason, being a partial cause of the slag damage all by itself. Raised galling of the aluminum was present by the sprue plate screw boss rotational area, this galling was removed while cleaning up the plus material from the heavy scratches.

I attempted to remove all the slag and the worst of the raised scratch damage to both mold face and sprue plate. Taking away the ugly raised "plus material" helped the sprue plate motion, but to totally remove the scratches would shorten the mold by several thousands and would be beyond what a well mannered guest would attempt.

But I did clean off the caked on lubricant from the aluminum and the steel and I did rub burnish Hexagonal Boron Nitride into the surfaces to keep future crap from sticking as easily to the mold and sprue plate.

Condition of the mold is "well used" but serviceable.

Last pics show the mold "as ready to cast" if I get P Flados's OK to proceed with using it.

251612

251614

[P Flados]

I am glad to hear of the timely arrival.

Sounds like you did what needed to be done, thanks.

I am not real worried about the scratched up surface. Some of my older molds still do pretty good with similar wear.

Cast away and see how they work.

[bikerbeans]

You fellas are having way too much fun playin' around with the 350L.

BB

[chaos]

I took a hog cleanly about an hour ago. Starline brass, Lyman Keith slug 358429???? I believe. Cant remember as I have a ton casted up...and havent poured a bullet in about 6 years. Javelina lube. DRT, with the exception of a few kicks.

Front rib removed from 10 round magpul mag. Slug sized .356.

Will be the only rifle kill this year unless a deer walks out as I am a handgun hunter and set this little rig up for my wife.


It seems you have gone through a mile of trouble to reinvent the wheel here. Good luck in your endeavors.

Not sure how to post pics anymore

[chaos]

And I just checked my mag
It reads "P mag 10" and "Magpul.com" on the side.

I guess I just dont understand all this. The manufacturers said from the get go that 5.56 brass would not work. Its too short. You will end up drawing it out too thin to make it work. I didnt read all this drivel, but I'd imagine a mile of split cases

[johnly]

Here's some data I've collected. I'm dropping to 22 gr. of Lil'Gun as 23 is a bit too warm for my liking.
The WC680 loads show some promise and I'm going to try higher charges on the next trip to the range.

190 RCBS Silhouette .357 23.0 Lil'Gun CCI 400 Starline 2245 fps
190 RCBS Silhouette .357 23.0 WC680 CCI 400 Starline 1801 fps
190 RCBS Silhouette .357 24.0 WC680 CCI 400 Starline 1848 fps
190 RCBS Silhouette .357 25.0 WC680 CCI 400 Starline 1910 fps

[Oldfeller]

251727

OK, bullets cast and first sized (before coating).

I used my stock LEE pusher as your nose pusher is too large in the body to enter into my .3565" sizing die "restriction zone".

Still worked OK. There is a tiny, evenly distributed swaging line on the bottom outer edge of the bullet, one that I think will be swallowed up in the coating thickness.

[mehavey]

190 RCBS Silhouette .357 23.0 Lil'Gun CCI 400 Starline 2245 fpsOOC: what length barrel ?

[smkummer]

The fact that this cartridge works in a unmodified AR lower is the big selling point. Period. After that is 35 rem. performance. Meets straight wall restrictions. It’s not a magnum so ammo could be produced reasonably which still many do not reload. Helps promote the AR platform as a common gun with big game hunting potential. Some like a new cartridge for what ever reason and they should feel welcome. I won’t buy one because my waffle top Marlin 35 Remington is too sweet to get replaced.

[bikerbeans]

251727

OK, bullets cast and first sized (before coating).

I used my stock LEE pusher as your nose pusher is too large in the body to enter into my .3565" sizing die "restriction zone".

Still worked OK. There is a tiny, evenly distributed swaging line on the bottom outer edge of the bullet, one that I think will be swallowed UP in the coating thickness.

Nice looking boolits! How do I put my name on the list to rent that mold?

BB

[P Flados]

Nice looking boolits! How do I put my name on the list to rent that mold?

BB

Lets give the current holder some time to play. If it works great for him and he wants to keep it, he can make a contribution to the effort, keep the mold and I can make another one (incorporating any applicable lessons learned).

If he decides he has had enough fun with it, your "I want it" puts you next in line.

The "Rent" is only to give it an honest try, report results and be willing to ship it to the next user if applicable.

[P Flados]

I used my stock LEE pusher as your nose pusher is too large in the body to enter into my .3565" sizing die "restriction zone".



When the punch was made, the smallest expected final OD was 0.358".

Another nose punch would be pretty easy to fab up. However, with the size before and after coating, it may not be needed. A standard punch is probably ok as long as you do not get material extruding down around the end of the punch on the final sizing step.

If you had a way of chucking and spinning the existing punch, you could probably file it down enough to make it work. Have you put a mike on it to see how much material would need to be removed?

11:56 pm Update: Another nose punch was easy to fab up. Will work in a 0.3550" sizer.

[Oldfeller]

251837

This rig can take a .360-.363" raw dry lead bullet down to .3565" in a single fairly easy on the shoulder really long arcing power stroke.

...... makes the old girl shudder and groan a bit taking it all dry like that ......

Which is why I made the long arm up in the first place, the original arm was too short and it was beating me to death doing sizing operations on cases and bullets.

8-)

This is also why you might consider a smaller .356" to .357" pre-powder coating "as cast" size.

After powder coating, the old .357AR boys can shoot it as powder coated at circa .358 with no sizing needed --- and the 350 Legend boys can fairly easily size it with one sizing operation done post powder coating to .356" or .357" to suit their throats.

But nobody will need a jack the giant killer press arm going forward.

.... except mebbe me, I'm crip in both shoulders and have heart surgery scarring that chimes in on any heavy press operations.

[Oldfeller]

Next Errant Thoughts ......


There is enough room in the new LEE double cavity molds to actually run 4 cavities into the block, issue is you would need a custom aluminum sprue plate to do that.

You can easily do 3 cavities using the stock LEE stamped steel sprue plate by intentionally moving the cavities off of sprue hole center such that the two outer cavities offset to outside of the mold block (one in each direction) such that the sprue hole itself barely falls inside the cavity hole on the outer two. This makes room in the middle for the 3rd cavity.

The Lee Sprue plate isn't hardened steel (very well annealed, actually) and the sprue plate can be drilled and chamfered by use of standard HSS bits and countersinks.

Take these last thoughts and twist them a little bit harder, and for a smaller caliber bullet you COULD manage to finagle four of them into a stock LEE sprue plate and block set.

:razz:


...... and if you put your evil AR face mask on, you could make up a custom aluminum sprue plate that could put 4 cavities of up to 45 caliber size into the stock LEE block set.

:twisted:

This is "evil twisted face" because you would have to use the wet rag trick all the time while casting with it at full rate since it would run smokey hot all the time .....

Next, you can park an ice cube off to the side of your folded wet rag to use to chill the sprue plate itself by touching the tab to the ice cube. Run off from this keeps the larger rag wet longer, so that is a good thing too.



Final twisted thought for today ......

Your butt first pusher could incorporate a relatively short and small hollow point protrusion that could force the tip of the bullet nose into a more BC friendly flight form and would still permit expansion to initiate more quickly --- you got literally tons of force available to you when you first start doing a butt first resizing operation as the base is the most solid part of the bullet. So, swage that bullet tip intentionally as you size it.

This trick best applies to single operation butt first sizing of the cast bullets post-coated, which is kinda predicated off the body diameter shift to .356"-.357".

The "shiny zone" on your nose is your swaging zone where you can make these sorts of minor changes for free during a butt first sizing operation using a standard press.




Have I paid my rent yet?

[bikerbeans]

Lets give the current holder some time to play. If it works great for him and he wants to keep it, he can make a contribution to the effort, keep the mold and I can make another one (incorporating any applicable lessons learned).

If he decides he has had enough fun with it, your "I want it" puts you next in line.

The "Rent" is only to give it an honest try, report results and be willing to ship it to the next user if applicable.

Thank you. I am not in a hurry, it would be after spring turkey season before it would be warm enough for me to have extended range sessions.

BB

[P Flados]

As far as any future 350L custom mold efforts, getting a mold to drop at 0.3560 to 0.3565 is probably ideal. I tend to want the target size to be a little big in case someone wants to try an alloy that drops a little smaller than what I use.

One of the biggest questions for a given user is what deciding on the ideal meplat size and how sharp are the meplat edges. For hunting, bigger and sharper is better. When is comes to AR-15 feeding and minimizing jams and nose damage, smaller and more rounded seem to be better.

Smaller / rounded is also better for BC which not only affects retained velocity but helps reduce wind drift at longer ranges. Many people thinking about 350L maximum effective range greatly underestimate how much wind drift will affect field accuracy.

Loner #1 meplat is on the small side and more rounded. If it feeds great with minimal damage, a user can start adjusting small batches by hand to see how much bigger / sharper he can go without causing problems.

I contemplated doing a 3 cavity for some 30 cal stuff, but never did it and I am not likely to try it any time soon.

For any new custom 350L molds I make up, it is a lot easier for me to cut two different sizes. Say 160 and 180 or 180 and 200. I can try to get two identical cavities but it is a lot of extra effort and I am not sure how good the results will be. Right now, the reamer that I used for the first Loner mold, has been modified to have a bigger / sharper meplat. I can grind it back to smaller and more rounded, but I do not want to regrind the reamer more than required.

[Oldfeller]

I have a full set of 44 magnum bullets sitting in butter tubs that I have no gun to support now, so I will take them into the pot and turn them into 357AR bullets in some quantity.

Like you, I will likely not need anything different beyond that, I do not think.

Go ahead and collect Bikerbeans addy and forward it to me b y PM as permission to ship. I will likely be done with my trial inside a week as I will likely have run out of recycled 44 mag bullets by then.

If I experiment any with hollow pointing I will take some aluminum and make up a male member that goes inside the exposed ID of the LEE push through die, insert a powder coated bullet from the bottom (support it with a locked toggle action) and smack the top of the aluminum male member with a mallet to insta-swage the hollow point into the bullet on nearly perfect center.

A second trip bottom pushed completely through the sizer will remove any "upset effects" in the bullet body from getting swacked by a mallet.

:twisted: ....... isn't easily stopped by minor circumstances, you know.


Errant thought on trying to make two cavities match up perfectly weight-wise---- simply don't bother trying to do that.

Do the dot trick that you already do except do it post machining with a simple single lightly struck very small fine chisel line mark on the die nose tip (oriented 90 degrees to the parting line) so the cavities can be sorted easily after they are cast.

A small very lightly struck linear chisel mark 90 degrees to the mold parting line means no noticeable drag effect on releasing the cast bullets from the mold halves .....

I bet the weight variation between the cavities gets swallowed up by the normal casting variation due to mold closure (added in with the natural powder coating weight variation) ...... i.e. it may not a deal killer anyway.

But if it is, simply keeping like with like will take care of it, easy peasy.

[bikerbeans]

Thanks guys. I have a bolt gun so I will only need to cast a couple hundred boolits. I should be ready to ship the mold out within a week of receiving it.

BB

[P Flados]

Thanks guys. I have a bolt gun so I will only need to cast a couple hundred boolits. I should be ready to ship the mold out within a week of receiving it.

BB

We may want to consider just sending you some boolits at this point.

[bikerbeans]

We may want to consider just sending you some boolits at this point.

That would be fine. I can size and PC them. I can send the caster some lead alloy in exchange.

BB

[Oldfeller]

I have melted up all my ice cream and potato salad tubs full of 44 magnum bullets.

Now my lead is all reformed and resting easy, once sized already in the form of 180 grain and 205 grain 357AR bullets thanks to the generosity of P Flados.

My wife drove over to the family homestead in Raleigh, NC to help her sisters cook Thanksgiving two days ago and I only had a 7x9 garage door to paint as my entire honey do list. So, instead I had me a plumb wonderful casting marathon very carefully interspersed with letting some paint dry between coats and sizing up a bunch of bullets, very carefully done such that my back is actually in pretty good shape for going to Thanksgiving.

8-)

Errant Thought -- shipping lead back and forth is quite heavy and can be quite expensive, while the mold only ships once for the same range of price as a flatpack mailer.

P Flados, what do you say? I have the mold all cleaned up, over-boxed & properly in bubble wrapped and am ready to pop an address on the box and let it fly to the next user. Heck, I even straightened out the LEE box so it looks like a box again.

252047 ........... ya think I got enough boolits?

The white powder in all the gouge marks and under the sprue plate & pivot pin and dusted in the cavities is Hexagonal Boron Nitride, a heat proof dry lube that is sold to gun guys as a bullet and barrel conditioner. And as Mold Release (commercially). Women know it as a component (about 10% by volume) of Johnson's Baby Powder, and it is used in all their their cosmetics to make it feel soft to their touch.

The mold is in the box ready to pre-heat and cast -- just leave the dusting of powder in the cavities and go to casting with an easy drop free release.

The nose first pusher pin is trapped in the rubber band that is holding the cavities shut so they won't get beat up in shipping from vibration over the miles.

[P Flados]

I shipped the mold in a medium flat rate box for about $12 or so.

The advantage of shipping boolits is that it actually cost me less. 400 boolits in the small flat rate box was less than $8 at the same time.

I am not sure what mold postage will be on a user supplied box.

I am good with whatever, I just want us to collectively spend more on actual goods (lead, blank molds, etc) and as little as possible on shipping.

I do not want to "make money" with any of this. I also want anybody else involved to contribute something of value to the collective testing effort. I still have a stash of "as cast" boolits from the loner mold sitting around. They can not be purchased, but I can contribute them to the testing effort. The tester may want to contribute to the effort by supplying a blank mold (shipped to me), buying lead (shipped to the boolit supplier) or mailing lead from a personal stash.

If someone does want me to make a custom mold, a purchase of two blank molds (sent to me) or an equivalent $ value of lead seems reasonable. This would cover my effort for the mold & nose punch along with shipping cost.

Oldfeller, you need to do some shooting before you let go of the mold. If your gun loves the 200s and hates the 180s, having the mold would allow for the needed "conversion". If desired, it should run fine in single cavity mode.

On another note, my memory is fading. I can not remember how I made the loner punch. Some of my recent nose punches have been two parts lightly press fit together. If so, it can be separated and the OD adjusted while spinning the punch in a drill.

[Oldfeller]

I checked in my Prepaid Mailer pile, and sure enough I got a medium box, so I put the mold in that box instead.

My feeble math sez it is $12 to ship the mold on to the next guy, $8 to ship the bullets to Bikerbeans, $8 for him to ship the lead to you. $12 vs $16. We as a group save $4 in total shipping the mold.

I got approaching thousands of each kind of bullet, so I got plenty enough to try out very very thoroughly.

Did you start with bare blank blocks from LEE or did you buy a smaller bullet mold on sale or discounted from one of the bigger distributors?

Buying smaller sized bullet molds and reaming them out could save some money because LEE has a fairly big opinion of buying any molds (or blank molds) directly from them. Retail list price, as I remember.

Plus the distributor supplied ones come with a pilot hole already in place.

[smilie=1: ........ oh Amazon, I can hear you calling -- across the vales and over the briny storm tossed sea ......

[P Flados]

I know how to work with molds originally for smaller boolits, but disassembly can be a pain.

Titan sells the blanks for less than Lee, and they are good to work with. And do not forget to click on the Titan banner at the top of these pages when shopping. The forum gets a small kickback.

Right now, I have 2 untouched blanks. Anytime I order from Titan, I consider stocking up on items to save shipping.

[Oldfeller]

Do the Titan molds come with the cavity alignment pins and bushings set up already?

Reason I ask is the picture they show does not have any alignment pins and bushings at all.

Hopefully, it is just a bad graphic of an existing mold with the face all blanked out.

:mrgreen:

PM me an address so I can have Titan send you a care package as a thank you. Please do not start working on anything until we know what we are shooting for.

I am reminded of the early craze phase of Moly as a bullet lubricant ---- I built up a high BC cast 7mm mold that was moly tumbled for its lubrication function. It was shot over a oatmeal/moly buffer material at full rifle velocity and the accuracy of it simply sucked beyond belief. I made up some cast samples from pure tin (for lightness as the stock HBC slug weighed 195 grains) and sent Waksupi some to shoot. He says he found a few of them once the snow melted, they had bent into horseshoe curves in the air and NEVER ARRIVED AT THE TARGET BACKING BOARD.

I still have that mold, BTW, and the bolt I annealed to cut the push through sizer into. That was nearly 20 years ago I do believe. If I could find the box or sack with them in it, I have lots of mold parts and some single cavity blanks lying around.

I also have a number of old LEE molds in a box somewhere that folks had sent me over the years because they bought better molds for them to actually use and they had sent the old ones to me and said "build something useful out of it, I don't want it any more". Generally speaking, they had attempted some lapping mods that had gone wrong size-wise and what they sent was mostly bunged up junk, but it was usable for a larger bullet form.

When we started out, you had limited LEE offerings using the roll pin alignment method, Lyman molds and relatively few RCBS bullet molds.

I once challenged the list to send me a really bunged up LEE mold and I would do a sticky on how to fix it.

I bet I can still find that tread somewhere here on the list, it was Waksupi that sent me a much used hammer smacked totally crapped out 35 Whelen mold off a very very early group buy.

Yep, it is still here --- they had made it a sticky no less. I punched "wobbly goblin" into search and it popped right up.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?3172-Sticky-Lapping-301-Changing-LEE-feature-diameters

[P Flados]

The photo of the Lee blank is out of date. What you get is the current style.

Hold off on sending anything to me for now. I have no "needs" at the moment, and as I am recuperating from shoulder surgery, any new toys would probably tempt me to do something that I shouldn't.

[tomme boy]

P Flados, what has been the outcome with this mold in the 357AR? How has it been shooting for the others that have tried it?

[Oldfeller]

P Flados and Bikerbeans,

Mold will arrive Tuesday, 12/03/19 on USPS Tracking # 9505 5146 1253 9333 5597 55

[bikerbeans]

P Flados and Bikerbeans,

Mold will arrive Tuesday, 12/03/19 on USPS Tracking # 9505 5146 1253 9333 5597 55

Copy, thanks.

BB

[P Flados]

P Flados, what has been the outcome with this mold in the 357AR? How has it been shooting for the others that have tried it?

I was disappointed in that I got no feedback at all from two other potential sources.

From my gun, my version of these boolits feed great with negligible damage. The 180s generally shoot under 2" at 100 yards but seem to end up around 6" - 8" at 200 yards. I got under 2 moa at both 100 and 200 yards with my 200s.

252123
252124

[P Flados]

I also played around with a different nose punch to give me a slightly bigger (0.18") and flatter meplat version for the 200s. They also fed good with minimal damage and seemed to shoot just as good.

252126

[Oldfeller]

SOME MORE ERRANT IDEAS ARE LEAKING OUT AGAIN


252145

I had a few days with no wife around to provide distractions, so I had a few errant thoughts that seemed to move around towards reality a little bit. The one above has to do with certain ribs in certain cheap plastic PMAG magazines that don't need to stand so tall such that they cause trouble with stacking the wide body 350 Legend rounds in the mag side by side, but in contrast these same ribs do still need to be there (to a lesser amount obviously) to give the magazine follower something to follow.

Whatever the answer is, it will require something to be built to "make it so" as Picard used to say on Star Trek .....


=========================


252146 252147

Conversations with P Flados got this chain of thought started. We were talking about multi-cavity molds in LEE blocks, and I put forward that the LEE stamped steel sprue plate seems to be a real issue with pursuing some of the Evil AR :twisted: project ideas I was popping off about.

Then I got to thinking about the cheapest way to scratch both itches and I really really really started to miss access to a milling machine at work .....

Then I remembered I have a spare little cast iron drill press sitting in a box in the storage shed that could make up a "screw it to a piece of plywood" combined tool assembly that I could put up on my work table just like I do the various reloading presses now.

[P Flados]

In a P Mag, the guidance from the 357AR pioneers was to completely remove the side ribs and that you could take material off the front rib as needed.

My 20 rnd P mag has the side ribs 100% gone and I thinned the front rib. The follower does fine and the mag feed great.

[cwlongshot]

Yup completely remove them!

Not needed at all. Even top that holds down follower from nose up profile. Then disassemble and stretch spring a bit.


252169

252170

CW

[Oldfeller]

Well, I spent Saturday afternoon and part of Sunday morning moving my small drill press from the garage to the computer/reloading room and in cleaning it up some.

I have decided that I was a good bit stronger back in the day, and my small drill press is still plenty heavy to be moving it around now that I am older.

252212

And yes, this is my smaller drill press, the bigger one is a floor standing model that is out in the boxes in the storage shed.

[P Flados]

Well, I spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning moving my small drill press from the garage to the computer/reloading room and in cleaning it up some.

I have decided that I was a good bit stronger back in the day, and my small drill press is still plenty heavy to be moving it around now that I am older.

252212

And yes, this is my smaller drill press, the bigger one is a floor standing model.

FYI, the tooling in the picture plus a bench grinder and a propane torch is equivalent to the tooling I used to make the mold reamer and the custom boolit mold.

[Oldfeller]

Yeah, I did my 7mm HBC bullet way way back in a previous list generation, back when I had access to a lathe and a milling machine at work.

By adding a small two axis slide with a vise to the heavy drill press table I pick up the ability to do most easy forms of gunsmith work and I get enough capacity to make a clean shot a making up a wooden slider block with bearings for a shaft that mounts that little rotary file from Vermont American such that I can start sliding the block into the butt of the PMAG, engage the rotary file driven by a light drill and then push the block slowly through the magazine and take those ribs out completely (cleanly I hope).

I will have to build 3 blocks with a bearing equipped hole on the right side, again on the left side and then the last block in the center so I can process all the right hand ribs, left hand ribs and center ribs.

I know I can do the aluminum sprue plate, as that is just flat work. Once I get the pivot hole and stop feature squared away I can layout the center line off the parting line of a mold with a pencil mark and then space out the cavities to be 4 up at 9mm size. This gives about .100" between the cavities, which is enough for mechanical strength, but does not do very much for cavity to cavity cooling of that much molten lead.

It's funny, the smaller the bullet gets, the more cavities I can put into the block.

Doing four larger diameter cavities will mean casting the lead, then slapping the mold on a wet rag and making a cloud of steam for a 3 count, then cutting the sprue just as soon as the elongated sprue puddle chrysalises (goes grainy and becomes solid).

[P Flados]

For more than 2 in a standard Lee blank, you need to consider boolit length. You may need to watch out for getting too close to the alignment pins.

[Oldfeller]

Full length 9mm bullets are likely limited to 3 bullets with a very minimal wall thickness between them. You could get tricky and stick in a couple of smaller diameter shorter bullets that were located over the pins themselves, say a .224" bullet on each side over the alignment pins?

This may be pushing it a bit too far, I do believe ......

Better would be to get the distributor to order the same length but slightly deeper long rifle blanks from LEE. This is possible because the base extrusions are like 8 feet long and LEE cuts them off to length and puts the pins in themselves anyway.

[Oldfeller]

252276

Update for new X & Y axis vise. This is not a precision piece of machinery, but set up as snug and tight as I have it set up now it should be able to poke some cavity holes using a belt sanded (formed drill) bit. This is the idea, anyway.

This offers the user the chance to put his own dream configuration into a 9mm drill bit using a cordless drill and a belt sander, then hand grind the cutting relief into the nose form such that the nose will remove aluminum cleanly while drilling out the basic starting hole that is already made by a smaller bit.

Once you have a hole and you can make some starter castings, you then follow the techniques laid out here to put whatever sizing and tapering you want into your dream powder coated configuration bullet.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?3172-Sticky-Lapping-301-Changing-LEE-feature-diameters

Next, I hope this fancy vise can reliably hold an assembled mold of the older LEE style while some smaller holes get modified into something new. Ditto for assembled molds of the new style LEE dual cavity molds.

Another trick that needs proving out is using a piece of this stock to control the depth of cavity drilling such that you can have multiple cavities that could be close to "weight same" in the same mold block (within reason). The face of the chuck will stop on the ring making the cavity depth fairly repeatable --- much better than an easily nudged "un-precise" drill press stop can do, anyway.

252277

Don't want much, do I?

Once again, I remind all the lookie loos that this is an expert level thread, and this stuff is in no-ways as easy as it looks to actually go do it.

And I am seriously not volunteering to do it for you, just showing you a potential method that can get you there (I hope anyway) if you want to put forth the effort to go there on your own.

Right now this isn't proven out by any means, not any of it. It is a errant thought being followed up upon .......


252279 ............ still, it is looking like progress.

[P Flados]

I saw a mini lathe in a previous post. That plus a grinder and a torch is all you need to make a D Reamer. D Reamers are probably better at making nice cavities than anything you can make out of a drill bit (I have tried).

0.375" W2 drill rod is cheap. I got mine from Grainger.

Turn down a 3" - 4" piece of drill rod to the desired shape, grind off one side, heat orange hot, quench in water, temper in your powder coat oven and you have a D Reamer. Drill a small pilot hole in the blank mold and then ream out to get a finished custom mold cavity.

Here is a pic of the one I used to make the 357AR custom mold:

252278

[Oldfeller]

My approach was different, I took a standard form drill bit and freehand sanded it on a fine belt sander to the desired form, then all I had to do was relieve the back side of the new form's cutting edges so they presented a narrowed cutting edge to the aluminum. I did not try to achieve a true cutting edge with grinding but simply removed down to a 1/64 edge that was presented to the aluminum, then I hand stoned that edge like a pocket knife with a fine diamond file to deburr and edge relieve and refine it some.

It was fine eye coordination stuff, but actually did not take very long to do compared to starting up on a knife blade. Having to get the approximate drill bit size is dead easy for 9mm, but will be a good bit harder to do for other bullet sizes.

You can see my plan should be able to plunge a somewhat repeatable hole into a multi cavity mold rig, but like most plans you do not see all the complexity that will arise in trying to actually go do it.

I have always had to hand lap any of my attempts at mold making, so I start undersized by intention and lap upwards. I also plan to multi-coat the powder coating as needed to get "throat fit" for different guns in 30 caliber and in 8mm since such large ranges of throat size are common in these guns.

My bit material is cobalt steel, intending to have the cutting edge survive accidentally touching a LEE bushing insert if such should happen (and with my luck, it will).

252294

I trued the table to the spindle, accurate within the run out of the spindle of course. Best method to true the hardened jaws turned out to be lapping them with 50 micron diamond paste on a rolled steel mandrel. You have to use relatively light jaw pressure and some oil applied several times or the surface of the steel will tear up under the light clamping pressure of the jaws.

These cautions then double when tuning the main chuck jaws of my lathe, very very mild tightening force was needed or desired. In doing this kind of stuff you begin to see that run out changes from clamp up to clamp up, and if there is any dirt or machining fines involved in the chuck's motion you have to get it all out to see a result that will repeat itself.

[Oldfeller]

Upon seeing what Titan supplied, I contacted them to please get up with LEE and provide the same block that is used for the 300 Blackout long bullet and the 45/70 long bullets. These blocks are a good bit deeper, and stand much less of a chance of hitting the pins when sinking a string of cavities into them.

Titan took a whole day to get the new mold block set up in their system. Kudos to Titan for a very fast response.

Here is the new listing for the longer deeper mold block.

https://www.titanreloading.com/lee-precision-reloading-equipment/lee-molds/double-cavity-long-blank-bullet-mold



.......... back to the evil dreams ........ :twisted:

[Oldfeller]

252588 Modifying 30 round 5.56 PMAGs for the Legend
has binding issues with Legend brass due to the wider Legend head area.

Quick update on projects in motion ...... the milling vise is mounted and initially trued to the drill press output shaft and chuck. Chuck run outs have been reduced by half by lapping, but that is all I am likely going to get out of these jaw lapping efforts as I find my hardened steel shafts and cheap ball bearings that mount the chucks have some variability issues of their very own.

Sometimes I get .003-.005" readings, sometimes I get .001" readings, it changes reading to reading due to bearing shake ......

Still, since I am starting out .003" below desired cavity size, I think I can stand a little bit of run out while making the cavities. I think the misc. run outs in all the bits and pieces will tend to centralize once the bit is fully engaged in the aluminum block (using the side walls as a long bearing surface to contain all the various run out motions) ---- I like to think that this will happen anyway.

Now I move out to the garage to make up the first pass at the wooden block that will run down the inside length of the PMAG magazines holding the rib removing cutter shaft engaged to the work. This will be fun, I think.

Old style Jr. High woodshop vs post retirement gunsmithing ..... I am glad I lived in a time where they sent young boys to both wood shop and auto mechanics as requirements because both items were something a boy of my generation needed to know. I learned how to safely use a table saw, band saw, radial arm saw, disc sander, hand tools and how to make a knife, tune a car, use a timing light and set points correctly. All done in Jr. High, no less.

They also made me take a class in basic cooking, which I have also used a lot over the years. I make a mean egg sandwich that is simply to die for ......

Schools used to teach you how to be a minimally functioning adult in the 60's culture. This is so much more than what they teach today.

[Oldfeller]

And as is typical, the switch on my table saw is bad and needs to have a switch ordered.

A lull in the action ensues while the table saw switch ships to me and I can reflect a bit on where this is all going.

350 Legend vs its predecessor, 357AR. Both do the same job, both are limited range cartridges that will self limit to within roughly 250 yards (unless you have an accurate range finder and a rainbow trajectory program in your phone in which case you can shoot a longer way with a pointy bullet).

The Legend is frustrating because it could have been sooooo much better and have fewer complications if Winchester had just factory adopted the larger 358 bullet and throat. Design decisions made early on had to be modified twice (the case taper and length) and the jacketed bullet selection isn't all it could be. Folks find appropriate bullets and work on load development because there isn't much out there yet about the gun. Putting a blunt end meplat bullet into an autoloader has its own fun to provide as there is a long way between magazine lips and forcing cone, some of it is in the air and is not controlled by either end.

That's the main theme here, 350 Legend is a gun for the experimenters among us. In that aspect it is a good one, since it will amuse you for YEARS and you will still have stuff left to do.

I know of one recent experimenter who got hooked into the gun because he wanted to understand what the fuss was about. One gun and two barrels later, he is looking for better bullets and finding a lot of pistol designs and very few rifle designs.

350 Legend just plain leads you into places you did not plan to go ..... I never planned to get back into custom bullet molds ever again, been there and done that --- could find the tee shirts if I scrounged around enough looking.

But the Legend needs molds and bullets, so here I am again.

As such 350 Legend is a journey, not a commodity destination.

[bikerbeans]

NEXT! I am finished casting with P Flados's loaner mold and ready to ship it to the next user. Oldfellar lubed the mold before he shipped with it and after 100 cycles the boolits were still falling out of the cavities without encouragement. The mold is ready to cast as is so I left it alone.

Thanks Gentlemen.

[P Flados]

Hopefully, one of the two of you will be able to report on function soon.

Have either of you loaded any dummy rounds to check for nose damage during feeding?

[Oldfeller]

bikerbeans, I am glad you had a good casting experience. Hexagonal boron nitride (bullet and bore conditioner) makes a very good mold conditioner --- it is sold in industry for that exact purpose.

Yes, I am very slack at going to the range in the winter time. I don't like the cold and huddling down behind a rife at the range is about the coldest cold I have had since riding a motorcycle in the wintertime, something that I also no longer do.

But, I can give you some cycling from the magazine --- both bullets work as good or better than the LEE molds mentioned upstream, but let's be real, until they are being gas cycled with normal loads that is only an approximation. Encouraging, but not final.

More later when it gets warmer.

[colonelhogan44]

Hopefully, one of the two of you will be able to report on function soon.

Have either of you loaded any dummy rounds to check for nose damage during feeding?

I'm also getting ready to load your powder coated bullets I got in exchange for a blank Lee mold (Finally -- there's been a lot of "life" outside of rifles in the past year). I'll report back as well on all the flavors (160, 180, 200) that I have on hand.

[Oldfeller]

P Flados, please do not think that we do not appreciate your work and your generosity with your AR357 molds, we really do appreciate it.

I know first hand how recovering from shoulder surgery is a painfully slow and long recovery and I understand that hurting and feeling "damaged" from that particular surgery can affect your mood. I remember clearly. I have occasionally felt that some things that I had done to me were not totally to my advantage, and my shoulder surgery was one of those things that I felt that way about when it was going on.

Good news is that 1-2 years from now you will still be picking at the stitch debris still coming out of your skin and swearing that you will never do that again ---- but you will be shoulder able and shoulder mobile. 4-6 years from now the scars will all be fading and flat to the skin and your shoulder will resume looking and working like just a shoulder and you will get your muscle mass back to a degree. That sick looking divot where they pulled your rotator cuff back together will disappear and your shoulder will resume its normal shape.

And you will grow longer lever arms on your heavy duty reloading press, because you really do not want to aggravate your shoulders or create another need for another surgery ........ NEVER AGAIN is your motto now.

Yes, you will take great care of both your shoulders going forward, I think we damage them earlier in our lives by being innocent of the price we may have to pay for some of the careless things we do to ourselves when we are young.

Be of good cheer, my friend, both you and your work are appreciated. Your molds work excellently and your ideas proved out well.

[bikerbeans]

Hopefully, one of the two of you will be able to report on function soon.

Have either of you loaded any dummy rounds to check for nose damage during feeding?

I plan to powder coat/heat treat and size the boolits i cast this week. I have to make a range trip before I can load these boolits as all my 350L brass is loaded.

BB

[Oldfeller]

252772

Good news, new table saw switch became available and it was installed, the follower block was then cut and hand sanded to be a slip fit inside the magazine.

Now comes the harder part, placing the shaft and bearings inside the wooden block such that the rotating rasp cuts flush to the base of the rib .......



==========================================




WARNING: Winchester factory stock 350 Legend brass won't load, stack and feed right from the 30 round converted 5.56 PMAGs. The extra head width of the Winchester brass causes a slow building "binding action" that stops the rib trimmed 5.56 mag from loading more than 10 rounds reliably. There are also issues with bullet nose forms and the narrow nose form of the 5.56 PMAG.

Simply wait until aluminum construction 30 round mags come out specifically for 350 Legend and save yourself the aggravation.



===========================================



252830

Don't expect an experimental first pass piece of tooling to be pretty, generally speaking they never are. A tool for the right rib, another mirror image tool for the left rib and a much shorter, simpler tool to remove the center nose rib will be needed. All can be made from pieces of the same stretch of formed center wood that I have already made up, and they all use the same shaft and rotary file cutter interchangeably.

What this does do is prove out that I can use a drill powered rig up to machine/rasp/abrade (you pick the term you like) the glass filled polymer to be flush to the rectangular section of the magazine. What I learned is that the nose form of the magazine is sub-flush to the main rectangular section by several thousandths of an inch as molded -- plenty of room to accumulate a bunch of post machining plastic fuzz on the nose side that will require a sanding or scraping post operation to get rid of it.

Will the sanding/scraping post op be good enough to remove the original free standing rib in the first place? I don't think so, but we shall see. When you take into consideration that the base of the rib the entire rib is .200" wide at the base, sanding it all away would be difficult without damaging the magazine well surface some. Plus, the PMAG is made of some more mean plastic, really. Doing the entire job by sanding would be really tough to do.

I think machining it away relatively cleanly in a few minutes work followed up by some smoothing sanding/scraping is likely the best way to proceed. I am currently using a flat bastard file to remove the fuzz and flatten the top of the burr machined rib.

REFINEMENTS

This block is now labeled as "A" and I consider it a roughing block for the first rib removal. Use it to get most of the rib out of the way, trying to use the clearance tilt tricks to get all the rib completely removed only in the last 2-4 inches up at the lip end of the magazine. Goal can now be as simple as knocking off the mass of the rib so you can use a different configuration to do the final (fine) removal.

Then install and use "B" to take that rib out completely. "B" block is a lot easier to use and it cuts flush to slightly sub flush as its natural motion.

Now you need to finish cut the "A" rib. To do this change over to the "B" block installed backwards over the "A" rib and pushed up to the lip end of the magazine and install the shaft and then run the burr all the way up to the base end of the magazine. Use this configuration to accurately remove the entire "A" rib all the way down to the root in one pass.

252831

[Oldfeller]

In response to a PM'd question that came in this morning, I did not increase the size of my throat, it remains within some 5 tenths taper to the original .357" diameter. It is deeper, considerably, at .300" from case mouth to start of rifling. And as you can see from the tap bullet (seated flush to the end of the chamber/case mouth) the larger 200 grain projectiles cannot exit the case mouth before they start to get support from the forcing cone and the rifling.

252832 .............. yep, the bullet is P Flados's 205 grain Big 'un ................

Pistol bullets can exit the case, travel the throat and hit the cone, but the trip has no more than .0005" of running clearance on a bare lead slug. Since I shoot PC bullets which are up to a thou larger even after sizing, arguably the throat is engaged the whole way down and the shortest of the pistol bullets has no real chance to get cocked in the throat.

Did I notice a change in accuracy after throating? A very very slight change, if any. Gets lost in the powder coating effects. In other words functionally no change, really.

I sure noticed the MUCH INCREASED ability to unload a round from the chamber using the extractor, which is really why I did it.

Is powder coating better or worse than plain greased lead when considering accuracy alone? Me, I have bad eyes and I don't shoot well enough to challenge either one, really ---- so how can I even express a valid opinion on that question?

Powder coat has been totally clean so far, which I do appreciate. I can unload my rounds at will, too.

Plus I can do a little trick and press in a little hollow point into the bullet tip (right through the powder coating) without disrupting the tip any.

:twisted:

[bikerbeans]

The boolits from P Flados mold are powder coated and heat treated. Will size them shortly and hope to get to the range soon to generate brass so I can load them.

Oldfellar, where can I get the hexagonal boron nitride mold lube?

Thanks,

BB

[Oldfeller]

https://www.amazon.com/MICROLUBROL-HEXAGONAL-NITRIDE-Powder-micron/dp/B01N1R5LM0/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=hexagonal+boron+nitride&qid=1576201875&sr=8-4

Amazon, of course.

The stuff isn't rare, you can buy it from industrial supply houses, cosmetics supply houses, any of the gun shops and supplies that are relatively "larger", etc. etc. One ounce will coat thousands of bullets, treat dozens of rifles, prep dozens of boolet casting molds.

[P Flados]

BB, You mentioned boolits falling out of the mold.

Although the HBN probably helped, I can usually get my NLG molds to drop without using a mold tapper.

When I go back to one of my regular molds, I sometimes ponder groove removal.

[Oldfeller]

===========================================


WARNING: Winchester factory stock 350 Legend brass won't load, stack and feed right from the 30 round converted 5.56 PMAGs. The extra head width of the Winchester brass causes a slow building "binding action" that stops the rib trimmed 5.56 mag from loading more than 10 rounds reliably. There are also issues with bullet nose forms and the narrow nose form of the 5.56 PMAG.

Simply wait until aluminum construction 30 round mags come out specifically for 350 Legend and save yourself the aggravation.


===========================================


Today was a good day for finishing something.

A tooling stage finished, a set of 4 each PMAGs modified for the 350 Legend using the simple wood block tools, a new deeper mold sourced from LEE/Titan so we can do 4x multi-cavity rifle bullet cavities from a $20 LEE supplied blank (blanks by way of Titan Reloading),




253012

First, the wooden blocks and sleeve bearings and the long T-6 shaft to hold the rotary file that was used to remove the glass filled nylon ribs from the PMAGs. One of the tools shown (the last one made) worked 100% as desired and intended when it was used the very first time. The previous two tools had to be rebuilt/reworked a couple of times to get ever closer to right (and to learn how to do the trick right in the first place). I can attest it ain't as simple as it looks, really.




253010

These are the four partially loaded magazines using the LEE 200 grain rifle bullet. The LEE 200 has a meplat that is larger than the P Flados Big 'Un but the magazine as rib-cut will still feed it properly. A magazine full of these heavy slugs weighs A LOT and I expect to have me some spring force problems moving that mass up so the carrier can take the next round --- and in "simply keeping up with the gun" with the longer 30 round magazine size as shown.





253013

And now we roll over to the new larger and deeper "cut your own" mold blocks that come to us courtesy of Titan Reloading and LEE. Note the blocks themselves are larger and deeper so that you can cut yourself a 4 cavity mold (just barely) using the P Flados 205 grain Big 'un. LEE could improve this block set by moving the location pins closer to the bottom of the block --- the current location seems somewhat arbitrary and needs "optimization" to increase the available space above the pins. I would suggest 0.160" - 0.170" up from the bottom of the block set as an initial "improved" pin location (measured from the near edge of hole to bottom of block). This is the same dimension that is used on the shorter LEE blocks and is the same as the "to the sides" dimension as used in the current larger & deeper molds.

When you go to design this change into general use at LEE, remember the goal is to maximize the length of the bullet that can be cut 4-up into the die block (ie don't be stubborn about it, your customers want more space to play around with in the larger blank mold blocks).

And LEE, remember that you too may want to build yourselves a line of 4-up powder coat simple bullet forms to sell to people, so take our ideas and implement them in your line of 4-ups as you best see fit. But remember to listen to your customers, they really do know what they want.





253011


This is the smaller "cut your own" block that is sold by Titan. It is only useful for shorter pistol rounds when done 4 up. When shown against the P Flados 205 grain Big 'Un it is clear the blocks simply are not large enough to hold 4 each of the larger bullet, much less be deep enough to avoid having the cavities hitting the pins.

Remember, the new larger LEE/Titan blocks have some notable thermal advantages to show you when you are putting that much molten lead into a mold at one time --- you will still have to rag quench the mold at the end of each cast just to keep your casting speed up and all the extra mold thermal mass is going to be a very good thing to have when speed casting with a 4-up large rifle bullet mold.

[Oldfeller]

https://www.ammoland.com/2019/12/magpul-30-round-pmag-556mm-magazines/#axzz68CDk3jcH

Palmetto Arms and Ammoland.com are selling 5.56 PMAGs on sale for $7.99 each.

https://www.ammoland.com/2019/12/magpul-30-round-pmag-556mm-magazines/#axzz68CDk3jcH

I ordered 4 more PMAGs to rib cut while I still had the tooling on hand, figuring I could tune the tools one more time before sending them off to be "roving tools" and to get me a supply of rib cut 30 round mags built up that would be big enough to last me for a goodly while.

I can see where the plastic mouth lips have already begun to spring open and take on a bit of a set that lets the follower peek out some after the last round is gone, especially on that very first magazine that I used to develop everything as it had the most general wear and tear on it --- so me having 4 extra 30 rounders already rib cut and ready on hand is a good thing in my eyes.

Plus, if I wait until I can use the magazines in the gun a bit more and incorporate any use-related "tunes" I come up with into the mix THEN I can send out as good a set of tools as I can, tools that will work well until somebody messes them up in a however/whatever fashion.

Sad thing about that, the folks who will use these tools that have no tool building/using experience and despite me providing instructions to them they will still break the stuff by accident or by misuse.

And they will certainly mangle a magazine or two along the way .......

Yep, I learned that the hard way, right here on this list. So if you share your tooling or your molds, you have to write it off in your mind before you first put it in the mailer.

P Flados wondered why I was so careful about his mold and that I didn't go past a certain point in either using or maintaining the mold and why I shipped it so very very carefully -- I was exercising my "past bitter experience" that had nothing to do with him or his mold, but I was gonna be dammned if I was going to degrade or damage his stuff in any fashion trying to "fix it" or by careless shipping as had happened to my quite expensive custom-cut Mountain Mold that Dan had built for me once in the past.

[P Flados]

I definitely appreciated your handling of the mold and understood you concerns about taking chances.

You know, as a youngster I took to heart the Boy Scout attitude of leaving things better than you found them. It is sad that so many never learned this common courtesy that make life better for everyone.

[Oldfeller]

253125

Like any well dressed young lady, my dainty little 350 Legend requires proper accessories like 30 round magazines and a quick loading board.

Problem is that there certainly are not any quick loading boards for doing any Legend quick loading (fast stuffing) of any theoretical 30 round Legend magazines that, remember, don't even exist yet ........

So what the heck are these magazines stuffed full of ....... and what about that particular looking experimental quick loading board ?????

Well, both items are not yet fully cooked yet, even by my own admission. The LEE 200 grain rifle bullet has a fat nose and a wide meplat and when loaded at maximum bullet out of the case OAL the loading resistance of a full magazine goes up and up and up as the rounds go in, choking to a stop between 10 and 13 rounds with the big nosed LEE bullet OAL sticking out as far as can be done in the magazine.

My theory is that the fat noses stacked side by side gets into a slight bind with the magazine nose profile which builds up as the round count goes up .........

Verification comes from the Largo 152 grain 2R round nosed pistol bullet loaded out to the same OAL distance does not have the resistance build up issue at all ---- the rounds roll in slick as can be.

As a matter of fact, the exact same big LEE 200 grainer when loaded somewhat shorter in the case also has no issues quick loading out of the quick loader.

The P Flados Big 'un has no issue as well, having a slimmer nose profile and a smaller meplat.


==================================


:twisted:

Live and learn, I say. Live and learn. Now you know how I spent my afternoon, anyway.

[P Flados]

Yep.

The smallish meplat and the rounded edges of the meplat were big items for the "AR Optimization" effort. The profile is the same for both the 180 and the 200. The objectives included both getting into a chamber with minimum jams and dings and also included not binding at the front of a P Mag between the front rib and the side of the mag.

FYI, for my mag, I also thinned the front rib some just to make sure the front of the boolit would not get pinched. It can handle a little larger meplat than those from the loner mold.

[mehavey]

OOC... what load/powder are you running w/ the LEE 200 ?

[Oldfeller]

Yep.

The smallish meplat and the rounded edges of the meplat were big items for the "AR Optimization" effort. The profile is the same for both the 180 and the 200. The objectives included both getting into a chamber with minimum jams and dings and also included not binding at the front of a P Mag between the front rib and the side of the mag.

FYI, for my mag, I also thinned the front rib some just to make sure the front of the boolit would not get pinched. It can handle a little larger meplat than those from the loner mold.


My center rib tool simply rasps that rib off flush at the root ---- it simply isn't there to contribute any binding actions on the very fat nosed LEE 200 bullets.

I load the LEE wide meplat 154 grain pistol bullet out as far as it can go (it is a very short very much FATTER nosed bullet with a huge meplat) but because of the shortness of the thing it does not get into any form of nose binding going on while quick stuffing a line of them.


I had used my converted 5.56 brass to make up these pistol bullet rounds, which is why they seemed to work when the stock Winchester Legend brass would get indigestion after only 10 rounds pushed into the converted 30 round PMAG magazine. The "wider head width" issue with the stock Winchester Legend brass was simply not understood at this time.

[Oldfeller]

OOC... what load/powder are you running w/ the LEE 200 ?


I use WC820 (AA#9 equivalent) in a 1.3cc LEE dipper behind the pistol bullets, or else a 1.6cc LEE dipper of WC846 (BLC-2 equivalent) which is a "heavy bullet load" for the LEE 200.

Both loads are "backed down" moderate loads, neither has been pushed for maximum speed, which in a heavy for caliber cast bullet is not needed anyway. The stock meplat on the LEE 200 grainer is perfectly adequate to kill an elk or a bear, and pigs and deer have been easily dispatched with the various forms of 158 grain pistol bullets shot at 1,200 fps out of .357 magnums for decades now, so there is lots & lots of headroom there for the exact same pistol slugs that are now being shot at 1,500+ fps out of the Legend.

[P Flados]

In the 357AR, I did get speeds for H110 and 200s as follows:

20.7 1848.5
21.5 1941.8
21.6 1914.7
21.9 1953.8
23.1 1998.0

See below for 200 gr WC 680 results. The faster data points at the same (or slightly less) powder charges were with slightly shorter COL.

26.6 1902
27.0 1895
27.1 1904
27.1 1934
27.4 1948
27.4 2064

Note that the amount of free space or compression in the round made a big deal for pressure signs and resultant velocities with all boolits. Some of the loads above were just barely too hot as indicated by one or two pierced primers per 5 rounds.

[Oldfeller]

OK, the next four PMAGs came in, and I have them gutted and ready to trim. The blocks and the shaft and the pusher wooden rod are all ready to go .....

253233

Something for you to know right off the bat is that you HAVE to use the blocks in A-B-C order because the ribs are in the way if you do it any differently. B block requires the A rib to be gone, C block requires the two side ribs A&B to be gone.

You can't even get sliders to slide in if the ribs are in the way, duh ......

Things you must do for each cut ......

You must .......

GREASE the shaft, a fresh coat of light grease for each rib you are cutting.

Rotate the cutter with the drill before engaging it. Getting a cut started on a fresh rib is a little finicky and involves tilting the block some to get a starting clearance.

Stop the drill then use moderate to light force to advance the block with the stick.

Watch carefully at the end of the magazine to not cut past the end of the rib and ruin the mouth of your magazine.

STOP if things stop moving or act bindy, check your rotating shaft itself for binding against the end of the magazine and make sure you have cut a running clearance around the burr so you can advance it.

Black fuzz buildup is your most common cause of bindy slider action.

Do not peel off any clear tape, the tape is there to correctly aim the cutter and make sure it stays tight in the magazine. The A tool has the most tape on it as it was the experimental first child, so you can also expect it to take the most attention from you to use it.

You will advance the slider an inch or so, hit the drill, trim out an inch and a bit of rib then stop, retract the shaft and advance the entire slider, then rinse and repeat. The slider is stiff and it requires the use of the pusher stick going forwards or backwards in a new magazine. The plastic in the PMAGs gets warmer and also the sliders move more freely once more ribs get cut out of the way.

Tapping on the wooden stick with a hammer to get the slider to move isn't needed if you do it right. It generally is saying you've got something in a bind and need to figure it out before proceeding.

Black fuzz buildup is your most common cause of bindy slider action.

You can probe out with the cutter and the shaft quite a ways once you get good at it, and if you can see what you are doing you can manipulate the extended cutter shaft in the bearing clearances (and by tilting the slider inside the magazine clearance) to cut off to the sides (in both directions) and cause the rasp head to cut in deeper if that is what is needed.

Your odds of messing up that first magazine are increased by your learning curve, but if you are careful you can get the first rib trimmed to about flush without destroying anything.

Do only one type of rib at a time, as the use of the different tools is different and you can easily get confused and do some damage to something if you start trying to do "mix and match" cutting on different ribs using the wrong tool ......

Cut all your magazines with the A slider block (greasing the shaft between magazines) then switch over to the B slider block.

[Oldfeller]

Now let's talk about the ground up ribs which have become a mass of black fuzz sticking to the sides of the burr cut.

Easiest way I found to remove this and put a suitable finish on the two raised edges is a 10 inch flat bastard file --- the kind that is normally used to file steel. It is fine enough for a good finish and it is quick enough to get out of its own way. The sharp 90 degree edge at the end of the file will push and lift the long adhered mass of fuzz out of the burr cut and break it away, then a few strokes with the file held carefully flat to the side of the magazine will blend it all together good enough for "first approximation" cutting.

Properly used, the burr cuts a shallow curve into the magazine wall where the rib used to be, then the flat bastard file removes the fuzz and smooths and flattens the tops of the "U" shape slightly to give you a good friction free shell case bearing surface that is functionally flush to the magazine wall.

The sharp corners of the bastard file will leave scratches, so have a bit of care here.
Scratches done inadvertently by the flat bastard file are not fatal, the brass cases will roll right on over these scratch marks. During final wet/dry sanding you can blend these uglies if they offend you, I left mine mostly alone as they "did no functional evil" in my gun.

[Oldfeller]

The B slider block cuts deeper than the A block generally speaking, and generally gets it all out of the way on just one pass. Don't waggle it around or try to dig deeper with it intentionally, you WILL dig a lot deeper real fast. B slider moves right along and you have to watch it at the lip end of the magazine or you'll cut completely out of the magazine because you weren't watching what you were doing ........

The C slider block removes the entire center long rib in one pass so don't try to manipulate it to cut deeper, you WILL cut a lot deeper real fast. C slider moves right along and you have to watch it at the lip end of the magazine or you'll cut completely out of the magazine because you weren't watching what you were doing ........

You will have to use the narrow edge of the flat bastard file to do fuzz cleanup duty in the nose area, and you can create some deep scratches off the sharp corners unless you are mindful when using the edge of the file. Good news is the bullet nose doesn't go in that deep, so any scratches are purely cosmetic and do not affect magazine function at all.


ADVANCED USES

You must cut all 3 of the ribs away before trying the following tricks ......

If you find you need to cut the A rib deeper at the start/base area and the tool doesn't seem to want to cooperate, install the B slider arrse-backwards in the magazine well and have the shaft sticking out from between the loading lips of the magazine side then re-starting your re-cut from the mouth-lip end the magazine and run it to the base opening. Be careful as you go along, as doing this cuts deeper --- sometimes more than you really needed.



===========================================




WARNING: Winchester factory stock 350 Legend brass won't load, stack and feed right from the 30 round converted 5.56 PMAGs. The extra head width of the Winchester brass causes a slow building "binding action" that stops the rib trimmed 5.56 mag from loading more than 10 rounds reliably. There are also issues with bullet nose forms and the narrow nose form of the 5.56 PMAG.

Simply wait until aluminum construction 30 round mags come out specifically for 350 Legend and save yourself the aggravation.




TODAY IS DECEMBER 19TH ---- THE PMAG RIB CUTTING TOOLING IS AVAILABLE FOR LEND

This tooling uses the most common plastic 30 round 5.56 PMAG as raw material for the trimming conversion to 350 Legend magazines.

I have cut all 3 of the ribs out of 8 plastic PMAGs now, and the instructions up thread have been tuned until they offer a pretty much flaw free set of "how to" instructions.

Send me a PM requesting to use the tools. Understand that you must have a real mailing address that you are willing to share and you must have a good image here on the list to have my tooling lent to you. You get the tools delivered at no charge, but you agree to PM message their arrival to you and to again PM the departure of the tooling when it leaves you to go to the next person --- and to pay the $9.99 small box postage to send it on to the next user. (flat mailers are damage prone and we don't use them as shafts can get bent and blocks can get crushed and broken when shipped in flat mailers)

So, using the tooling costs to you are about $10 (and the risk of that first plastic PMAG to your learning curve). That is the cost of a new small hard mailer box at the post office.

This is "tuned and adjusted" wooden block (re-enforced w/ JB Weld) tooling, with solid brass sleeve bearings, a HSS steel cutter burr head and a T-6 aluminum shaft to connect to your 3/8" drill. The shaft requires being lubricated with grease and it is easy to use (and also equally easy to mis-use) so try to follow the instructions.





WARNING: Winchester factory stock 350 Legend brass won't load, stack and feed right from the 30 round converted 5.56 PMAGs. The extra head width of the Winchester brass causes a slow building "binding action" that stops the rib trimmed 5.56 mag from loading more than 10 rounds reliably. There are also issues with bullet nose forms and the narrow nose form of the 5.56 PMAG.

Simply wait until aluminum construction 30 round mags come out specifically for 350 Legend and save yourself the aggravation.

[cwlongshot]

Anyone tried IMR4198 in the Legend with cast?

Looking thru my log tonight I see somehow I have never tried it and quick look theu my Maxi loads I dont see it there either.

4198 is a good CB powder in other calibers. Hoping it is here with this “legend”

My bullet is a Saeco 354 its a 180 as cast sized .356.

253244
CW

[P Flados]

I remember seeing a few 4198 loads for the max. However, AA 1680 is the slowest powder commonly used in the max and 350L.

4198 is just slower than AA 1680.

AA 1680 loads are typically real close to 100% load density or they are compressed.

If 4198 is less dense than AA 1680 (my guess), normal compression may not be adequate to get the load up to the desired pressure range.

[cwlongshot]

Thats kinda why I am trying it. Max recommended is 20g and that dosent fill the case to bottom Of the bullet. There is slight air space. Knowing that most , best loads are 100% density I tried it in the Legend. I have found so far across the board max, maxi loads are fine in my Legend and have been safely increased. As we know the case holds more volume and its loaded to higher pressures.

Well Im gonna stop later today and send a few down range.

CW

[bikerbeans]

CW,

I tried both 4198 powders with 200g jacketed in the 357 max and the velocities were slow. I would expect the same in the 350L. IMO, both powders are too slow for the 350L or 357 max. As mentioned AA1680 is a good choice, and a safe choice too, either in the max or legend.

BB

[cwlongshot]

I love 16&0. Believe u me, tbere aint a load this boy aint fired.

Its not as good in the legend as it was in the maxi. Its OK... Not great conversly RL7 wasnt all
That in the Maxi but its been good in the legend. Its also a slow powder thats kinda what brought me to 4198

I dont want or need velocity. 14-1600 is plenty fro
My needs.

CW

[Oldfeller]

Gents,

I am getting ready to do a bit of mid-winter mold making. Since the steady on folks on this thread are pretty well known to me now I could see building two molds out for the Legend and putting one out to lend among ourselves.

The mold will be a 4 cavity cut on the larger LEE rifle mold block that Titan is now selling.

It could have 2 shorter cavities (located over the pins) and two longer cavities in the middle.

And by shorter cavities, that is everything up to the P Flados Big 'un in length. The two longer cavities could be anything up to a full sized High Ballistic Coefficient (pointy) subsonic. Such a long pointy bullet would be inherently unstable, relatively inaccurate over any longer distances and it would always want to swap ends inside the first 12 inches of meat penetration --- behaving similar to the 30 cal subsonic Blackout cast slug (except being MUCH MUCH bigger, of course).

Actually, it is even possible to cut a sampler mold with 4 different bullets in it (could be different calibers even).

Question for the group: What speed? What weight? What meplat size?

Bullets will all be a powder coat smooth form, so the gas check & grease lube guys need not apply.

[cwlongshot]

253303253304253305253306

Well it appears to be a viable choice at least in my gun. Data came from a Contender manual and 20g of 4198 under a RCBS 180 Cast Sillouette bullet garnered 1559 fps from a Super 14”

All things equal (I know they are not) I should see about 75 fps increase.

Fully prepped Winchester cases primed W/S&B SR primers and IMR 4198 Powder. As seen very light loadings. Deep FP indentations. These primers come out of the box with a fairly sharp shoulder and appear flattened before firing. They also appear slightly protruded but they are not. There was zero case head expansion and resizing probably wasnt even needed. ;).

Again Bullet was a Saeco 354 180g TC powder coated and sized .356. These bullets are about a 15BHN.

Accuracy with the 20 shows good promise. 21 not so much.
One bullet out of group could well have been all me. Conditions where 19degrees. I did bring one sand bag but had no butt bag. Distance was just 50Y Site was Leupold 2/7 and I did not gave my glasses. This optic is a “shotgun” so its reticule is bolder then normal duplex Leupold reticule. No excuses here just facts. All Shots felt fine.

CW

[colonelhogan44]

Gents,

I am getting ready to do a bit of mid-winter mold making. Since the steady on folks on this thread are pretty well known to me now I could see building two molds out for the Legend and putting one out to lend among ourselves.

The mold will be a 4 cavity cut on the larger LEE rifle mold block that Titan is now selling.

It could have 2 shorter cavities (located over the pins) and two longer cavities in the middle.

And by shorter cavities, that is everything up to the P Flados Big 'un in length. The two longer cavities could be anything up to a full sized High Ballistic Coefficient (pointy) subsonic. Such a long pointy bullet would be inherently unstable, relatively inaccurate over any longer distances and it would always want to swap ends inside the first 12 inches of meat penetration --- behaving similar to the 30 cal subsonic Blackout cast slug (except being MUCH MUCH bigger, of course).

Actually, it is even possible to cut a sampler mold with 4 different bullets in it (could be different calibers even).

Question for the group: What speed? What weight? What meplat size?

Bullets will all be a powder coat smooth form, so the gas check & grease lube guys need not apply.

I'd vote for one of the cavities being a round nose type subsonic bullet in the 300-350 grain range. From my understanding of ballistics, a spitzer profile bullet has essentially no ballistic advantage at subsonic velocities. So getting the bullet as short as possible for weight is better for stabilization and preserving case capacity.

The other long cavity could be a long pointy secant profile bullet in the 180 grain range with a boat tail for supersonic loading.

[Oldfeller]

I'd vote for one of the cavities being a round nose type subsonic bullet in the 300-350 grain range. From my understanding of ballistics, a spitzer profile bullet has essentially no ballistic advantage at subsonic velocities. So getting the bullet as short as possible for weight is better for stabilization and preserving case capacity.

The other long cavity could be a long pointy secant profile bullet in the 180 grain range with a boat tail for supersonic loading.


I guess that pre-supposes that your subsonic round nose is going to flatten or to upset in some fashion at those very low speeds --- maybe you can tell us more about what you mean so we can understand it a bit better.

The way the current subsonic Blackout works in 30 cal right now is to swap ends (low stability) making a huge swipe cavity while flying sideways in meat due to that minimal ballistic stability.

The Blackout boys LIKE their high BC numbers so they can keep more impact energy after longer and longer subsonic flying distances --- the fact the bullet always swaps ends when it hits meat is just icing on their cake.

Lastly, the construction method of the cavities limits the mold to more traditional flat based bullet shapes, like this one. We also know that the Legend has some magazine resistance build up issues with fat nosed bullets interfering with the magazine nose forms and the AR rifles themselves have some inherent auto-loading "failure to chamber on the way past the splines" type issues with fat bullet noses getting banged up and hanging up on the splines or jamming on the gouge material before seating all the way in the throat.

253323




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u60fH5nriqU

Here are the gel tests that I based this opinion upon.