35 Whelen reduced plinking load with pistol boolits

[bcr]

I haven't been on the forum much in the last few years but I tested this load out a few weeks ago and was very happy with it. I'll share it here since I wasn't able to find much on shooting .357 pistol boolits in the .35 Whelen. I found a lot on reduced loads but mostly with full sized boolits.

I loaded a 170 gr. MP 358165 RF with a gas check and PC'd over 12.0 gr. Unique. This resulted in 1442 fps with std dev 17 fps and a 1" group at 50 yards, about 4" low in my Ruger Hawkeye. No recoil whatsoever, fun round for the wives and kids.

[TurnipEaterDown]

Many years ago I used a 158 JHP (357 mag bullet) over 24 gr XMP5744 in the 35 Whelen Imp. (Rifle in my avatar pic.) Gave me 3.5 - 4" 100 yd groups (can't remember if 5 or 10 shot - I used to shoot 10 shot off hand groups).
Pistol bullets do shoot fine in the 35 Whelen. Good on you what you found.

I also more recently used the Accurate 205B GC in this 35 -- 20 gr A 2400: Bench rested - 2.5" (15 shots of 15), 2.5 (14/15), 2.5 (13/15), 1.875 (10/15), 1.4375 (8/15), 0.9375 (best 5 of 15) -- 5" low of a full power 250 SP load.
The reticle in the optic I use covers more than 3.5" at 100 yd, so I found this pretty good.
(There are tricks to use a coarse optic reticle on a fine target...)