I went target shooting last weekend and tried out something new while I was there. I've got a '93 Mauser sporter that's converted to 7.62x39 (.308 bore) Just to try it out I loaded up 50 rounds with RCBS 32-98-SWC pistol bullets. I powder coated the boolits with Smoke's signal blue and sized them to .312". I used 6.0 grains of Unique and large pistol primers. When I tried them out I ran into a slight problem: the stubby boolit with the flat meplat wouldn't allow the cartridge to feed from the magazine. It would catch on the edge of the chamber, and trying to help it into the chamber would cause the case to get ahead of the extractor. With a control round feed that's not such a good thing. I found out that to chamber the rounds I'd have to remove the bolt, place the cartridge on the bolt face, then re-insert the bolt and cartridge back into the action. This made the rifle a single shot, but it wasn't as tedious as it sounds, and in my opinion it was better than trying to force the extractor over the case rim.
I was shooting at targets 50 yards away and the diminutive little boolits were making me smile with every shot. The sound of the boolits striking the cardboard backing on the target stands was louder than the report of the rifle. There was no recoil at all. The groups were hitting about 3" high and printing onto 2" groups.(the rifle had been sighted in at 100 yards using RCBS 30-165-Sil boolits at around 1750 fps) There were some rocks on the ground downrange about the size of softballs. Hits on these rocks sent them skiddering off like they'd been kicked by a donkey. I have no idea what the velocity was, (a wild guess at 1200 fps), but I took a shot at a dusty hillside at 200 yards out to see how much the boolit dropped and was able to hear the tiny crack that told me the little boolit was going supersonic. Shooting these rounds was so much fun that I decided I'm going to load up some more and take them along on some ground squirrel hunts this Spring. I've got better varmint rifles, but these should quietly put the zap on any squirrels that are within normal 22Lr range.