I've been casting and coating the Lee 340gr .457 boolit, then lubing it and sizing it down to .452 to shoot from my Taurus Raging Judge Magnum 454 Casull. It works fine, but it's a lot of work. I recently bought a Lee 255 .452 SWC mold, cast em, coated em, lubed em, and sized em to .452. Slightly less work, but still a bit. Problem I got is this:
As you can see, those three boolits went through very sideways at 25 feet. Some made perfect circles, but about half did this.
Here's the odd part, there's no appreciable leading in the bore. Some light streaks, but I expected that these were not engaging the rifling and I'd be scrubbing lead for hours. There's also some sparkly debris in there, which I must assume is the HiTek coating. A couple passes with a brush and the bore was looking pretty good.
What I'd like to do now is size the next batch to .454 and try them out, however my Redding die set will not allow this. It's supposed to load 454 and 45C, but even at .452 I'm having a bit of a struggle to get the case and boolit into the sizing die. I've tried at .454, and boolits were getting destroyed.
I'm stumped, any ideas?