About a year ago an old friend down in Utah sold me a mint, in the wooden presentation box model 27 S&W. At the same time he told me he life long buddy had a mint, all original M1 Carbine he would sell me at a very good price along with some ammo. I had wanted one for a long time so I jumped on it just to have & for the grand kids to use on our Jackrabbit hunts.
The gun hadn't been fired in over 50 years & at some point he had sent it back to Inland & had them factory mount a scope on it. He gave me over 500 rounds of ammo along with 7 mags & a military canvas carrying case also.
I fired 8 rounds through the gun last year just to see if it would cycle & it ran great. Now, this last week I decided I would work up a cast load for it & take it on a bunny hunt yesterday since I was going to a high school game in that area anyway.
I've had a #311410 mould for years that weighs about 130 grs & is a plain base RN & has worked well in several Ruger Blackhawks so that was my choice. I prepped a bunch of brass & powder coated some bullets sized to .310" & ran to the range.
The little 3/4" scope is only a 2 3/4 power so I decided to zero for 50 yds out the window of the truck (cold) I wasn't very steady with the first 5 shots but they went into about 2", a bit high & a bit left but I couldn't get the scope to adjust in any direction.
I turned the box upside down & fired 3 more rounds after turning my truck a bit so I could get more steady. That worked, I had 3 shots in about 1" at 50 yds with a plain base powder coated cast bullet using 11 grs of 2400.
So I went home & loaded up 65 "bunny busters" & grabbed my 8 shot Blackhawk 327 & me & a buddy headed out yesterday to meet 2 of his brothers for some heavy duty Jackrabbit busting.
One little trick that I do with this RN style bullet when I'm sizing the powder coated bullets is, I use a different top punch so that it puts a little bit of a flat point on the bullet making it much better when shooting ground squirrels or rock chucks. It really makes a difference, you can see in the last photo a couple of the flat nose bullets with a round nose bullet in between.
The rabbits were really wild, we probably killed a little over 30 but I'm sure we seen well over 100, perhaps 150 but they were running hard on sight & you had about a 3 second window to get off a shot, it was crazy.
The 3 guys with me were shooting AR's with the 22 conversion's & 2 of them were shooting the lead Remington ammo & it was terrible, some of those Jacks ere taking 4-5-6 hits to stop. My 327 magnum shooting 118 gr HP's was blowing them up big time, yippee!!
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Dick