I'm brand new here and this is my first post. I hope you'll find this interesting. I typed this out immediately after my conversation.
Anyhow...
Earlier this week, I called up Veral Smith of LBT (Lead Bullet Technology). I am trying to start bullet casting (and reloading in general) for a 44 Rem Mag Ruger Redhawk and wanted to seek his advice. I have everything for my 44 mag Redhawk, except a mold and some alloy. I don’t have anyone else I know to ask my questions to, and after reading Veral’s book (Jacketed Performance with Cast Bullets), I had some questions. It was 10:00am and he had to get up from sleeping. I didn’t want to bother him, but the nice lady I was talking to said it was fine and that it was late anyway and time for him to get up. At one time he joked that he needed to teach people like me how to fix their own problems because he wasn’t going to be around forever. And indeed, he is no spring chicken; he sounded a bit fragile and old and tired. Here are the highlights of what he said:
- He asked where I was from and after I told him, he said if we had any more animals to hunt in Colorado. I said that they do a good job here of herd management, but then I caveated that by saying that last year Colorado passed a wolf reintroduction bill. He got agitated and excited and said that’s because of all the communists out there (in Colorado). Then told how where he is (Idaho) they introduced wolves and it reduced the Elk herds by 90% and now the governor is saying to kill the wolves in any way the citizens can. He again blamed the problem in Idaho on a bunch of communists. :) I like how our elders don’t care about filters such as this and it made me smile.
- He said to use measuring slugs to measure the muzzle and chamber of the barrel and that I will see the difference (he said the chamber will likely be a little larger and it will taper down to a more narrow diameter at the muzzle). Also measure the cylinder heads. The idea is to make them fairly uniform so there is no canting of a bullet as it travels from the cylinder to the barrel lands, through the barrel. To do this, I should use a real soft lead bullet impregnated with his lapping compound (he said I could just use wheel weights and air cool them for the correct softness). Then measure with the slugs as I am lapping the barrel. It won’t take much. Then I will know the bullet diameter I want.
- For a 44 mag Ruger Redhawk, he said he doesn’t like to go below 240 gr, and liked 300 and 320 gr. But he recommended to me as the best, a 280 gr WFN with gas check and to load around 1200 fps, and to not go over 1450 fps. He explained that this bullet will kill a deer and elk in one step or two, it will have great accuracy, and it won’t beat you up while shooting. (He then told how years ago while he was reloading, he would lie in bed at night after a day of shooting and his whole body would be in pain and he would have to hang his feet off the bed [not sure why] and his point was that it just wasn’t worth it; why beat yourself up? Have fun shooting and there’s no need to go over 280 gr.) He said H110 (and W296, which is essentially the same thing) are good powders, and to limit the differences from lot to lot, I can combine my lots of powder together.
- I asked and he said he doesn’t offer molds with two different bullets and, if I understood him correctly, he explained this was because I would like one over the other and dislike one of the bullets. He also explained that I would have two different POI when shooting, etc and I would have to accommodate for this. I tried to explain that I wanted two bullets for two different purposes (Alaska Brown Bear protection, and everything else). He explained that the 280 gr bullet he recommended would be all I need for hunting Alaska Brown Bear (he assumed I wanted to hunt them, not just for self-protection). He said it would leave such a large hole that it would blead out right away [I’m not positive this is true] and I would never recover the bullet anyway [meaning it would go right through], unless it lodged in something like a shoulder joint.
- He didn’t directly tell me a BHN that I should try for, but he did tell me how to create a lead alloy (so perhaps he meant to recommend this as what I should go for?) He said that bullet alloys no longer have arsenic (safety concern?) in them, but that if I purchased a good bullet alloy from Rotometals then added lead shot (which has a high concentration of arsenic, that this would be the best way to add arsenic, and that I would end up with a great alloy that would have a great property of heat hardening [I don’t necessarily want this because I don’t want my bullet’s BHN to soften in storage over time]. He said lead wheel weights were hard to get now (I didn’t know this) because most are now steel. He also said I had to be extra careful I don’t get any with zinc (perhaps on the clip?) because that would poison my melting pot.
- The last thing we talked about was he was ruminating on Elmer Keith. We were talking about how if that bullet gets turned going from the cylinder to the barrel, NOTHING is going to straighten it out. There are X number of tons of pressure behind that bullet. And gas checks do not come off! He said that Elmer Keith felt that gas checks fell off. Then he said he admires Elmer’s life…. That Elmer was a hay bale wire guy (something like that) and yet made a huge impact on the public by selling the 44 magnum to the US public. He also said something about how he used to recommend US service members get a revolver as their side arm, and they’d get sent a custom revolver, and so through this he ended up being a salesman without even knowing it. But then he got to his point: “BUT, Elmer Keith did not know precision!” That elicited a big laugh from me.
It was a great chat with a bullet casting legend.
