Loads with new 6 cavity lee 316.185

[swabbie]

Cast my first boolits in my new Lee Loverin mold from the group buy.Matter of fact my first 6 cavity lLee mold ever.It was like cheating

Any reason I shouldn't use mid range 20-30 gr loads listed in the 30-06 section(from the Lyman Cast bullet handbook) in my 91/30 and No 4?

Want somethin with a lil more oomph than 16 gr of 2400,but don't need 42 grains killin me either

all advice..some abuse gratefully accepted

[MtGun44]

Start low, work up. The targets will tell you when you have it right and
wrong.

10gr Unique and 16gr 2400 are almost always great starting points. Let
the targets tell the story, and if heavier load cause the groups to open up,
try going to harder alloy or heat treat if you want to go faster, as a general rule.

Good luck, I just got mine and have not tried it yet. Please report your
results.

Bill

[Buckshot]

............MtGun44 pretty much nailed it. As you work up (depending upon where you started and what you started with) besides hardening the alloy, you can go to a slower powder, use a filler or a different filler, and also change lubes.



A few years back I did a speed and accuracy test with a full military 1898 Krag infantry rifle, and used the custom boolit 2nd and 3rd from the left. It was a custom design by Wally Bator maybe 7-8 years ago, and weighs a bit over 220grs. It drops at .316" and has very shallow lube grooves, of only about .298" OD. It didn't start out as a test . Boolits were slightly enhanced WW sized to .311" and lubed with Javalina, as that's all I used at the time.

While the 29" barrel of my Krag is in pretty good shape and has good well defined lands, it is not perfect. Without a bunch more bothersome details, accuracy began to fail before I felt it should. I could see no visible leading but at the muzzle the normal darkish lubed look had faded and on the tops and pressure side of the lands it was a dull silverish. Finishing the shooting the bore at the muzzle was an even dull grayish color all over. Accuracy was long gone.

Cleaning at home I didn't get any big flakes or hunks of lead, but I did get lots of silvery powder. I'd seen the same (but not this much) from this rifle before, and felt it due to a bit of roughening in the leade and beginning of the barrel.

The test part was when I decided to reload again with the same loads and boolits on hand, but this time to lube with a different lube. To make things more interesting I also fired up the pot and cast a quantity of the slugs from pure linotype. At some prvious time a board member had come into some commercial boolit casting stuff, and had sent me some hard green lube. I called it Booger Green Heat Lube (BGHL). I'd never tired it but figured this was it.

Never having needed a lube heater I didn't have one so used a propane torch. I had lube coming out of places I didn't even know a Lyman 450 HAD!. I got it figured out and lube sized some of the original softer slugs with BGHL. I then lube sized a batch of the lino slugs with both Javalina and the BGHL. All loaded over the same charges as before.

Both the softer lead/BGHL and the Lino/Javalina lubed slugs pretty much petered out at about the same place, but going much faster and more accurately then before. Those cast of lino and lubed with BGHL continued right on to the point where I felt a 30-40 Krag was doing all it needed to do with a 220+ gr slug, which was just a tad over it's design ballistics.

As it happened, that day of the test the results were so profound to me that I had just gotten done showing Ken, the range master the targets and explaining what I'd done. A few minutes later Jesse Smiley, the guy who owned Javalina Lube Co had shown up and was BSing with Ken. So Ken, ever the aggravating agitator called to me and said why don't I come over and show Jesse my lube experiment targets .

Javalina IS a good lube and I still use it for most of my lubing chores, but the NRA 50/50 formula's heyday of being the ne plus ultra boolit lube for any and ALL applications was over, so far as I was concerned.

..................Buckshot