The rifle is a remington #2 rolling block that John Taylor relined to .32 S&W long. Nice gun with 26" barrel and a nice crisp trigger. We put a Marbles tang sight on it and John made the front sight taller. The Marbles sight did not fit the tang well so he altered the sight.
Took it out to shoot some groups at 25 yards and to chronograph some loads. The factory 98 grain round nose cowboy loads from Aguila shot fairly good groups, one to one and a half inches, and produced an average of 833 fps. The handloads were made up using AA#5 abd #7 powders and 100 grain cast swc boolits from Badman that were lubed and sizzed to .313". 3.0 grains of AA#5 just about mimicked the Aguila load with 860 fps. Moving up in 0.2 grain increments I found the max #5 load, 3.8 grains produced 1001 fps - still subsonic.
Moving to AA#7 all loads, from 5.0 to 5.8 grains went supersonic. with the highest being 1327 fps. I want to stay subsonic with this rifle because of my tinnitis but if I want more power it is availaable. Surprisingly, the 5.6 grain load produced 1282 fps with an extreme spread of only 13 fps.
My next goal is to try my own boolits. I have a Lee mould that produces the same boolit as the Badman. I have loaded up some from straight COWW's. Lubed with Lee Liquid Alox unsized. Also with the recent talk around here about boolits cast from junk alloy like COWW's I have ordered some 40:1 alloy from Rotometals and will try that. But I have separated the COWW boolits so they are all within one grain of each other. Maybe the new alloy will help, mebbe not.
Just checking in,
Jim