This is a report of a joint undertaking between Siringo and myself. He asked me to try some cast bullets in the bolt gun. I agreed to do so, and in early June he sent me 24 bullets of three types with loading instructions. I completed the shooting in mid-June, and I'm finally getting the results posted. I've broken the story up into what I hope are bite-sized chunks.
Part 1: Loading
Siringo sent the following cast gas-checked lubed bullets, with load information:
- 300-grain Wide Flat Nose (WFN), 4 each, for 30.5 grains of Lil'Gun
- 335-grain Wide Flat Nose (WFN), 10 each, for 30.0 grains of Lil'Gun
- 405-grain Flat Nose (FN), 10 each, for 27.0 grains of Lil'Gun
To these I added a fourth type, my own Cast Performance gas-checked, lubed 300-grain Long Flat Nose (LFN) bullets. I purchased these last year when I read of the results that BD1 and Siringo were reporting on this forum, but I had not gotten around to trying them.
For the trials I used cases that had been fired 3-5 times previously, but were in good condition. (The bolt gun is pretty kind to cases after firing; it doesn't toss them into the dirt or bounce them onto concrete range pads!) I used the Hornady die set, starting with full-length sizing. Case lengths after sizing varied from 1.685 to 1.699 inches. Case mouths were expanded to 0.4765 inches with the expander die, which was about as small as possible without shaving lead from the bullets.
Primers were Winchester small rifle primers. I weighed out the individual charges of Lil'Gun powder to about +/- 0.04 grain, checking my balance with metric check weights (to 5 milligrams). Bullets were seated to the bottom edge of the crimp groove, and taper crimped to an outside case mouth diameter of 0.4758 to 0.4760 inches. Siringo advised against a side crimp to avoid another complicating variable.
For an initial trial, I loaded 5 of my 300-grain LFN bullets similarly, using the 30.5 grains of powder. As noted below, for a second trial, I increased this to 33.0 grains of powder for five cartridges.
Here's a photo showing the four different bullet types, and how they looked loaded.
(You probably already know this, but if you're running Windows and right-click on the image, you can select an option to open an attached image in a separate screen, without the scroll bars.)