Range day report

In this case some of it was purely "I haven't shot this in a while, I think it goes", that I'll leave out.  The real testing was some more .45-70 loads, some with black and some with smokeless.  All 100 yards.  Windy as bleep, so that may have affected things a bit.

Messing with black, this is the Lee 500-grain bullet over 67.0 grains 2f, compressed 2/10", pasteboard wad, and just enough crimp to keep the bullet from coming out.  Bullet cast from mongrel alloy

I'm pretty sure that high one was my fault.

Same load, but the bullet cast of 30-1 lead to tin

Group centered a bit higher, which is interesting.

Be it noted that using a blow tube between shots makes a big difference.  Also be it noted that having to dismount the tang sight after every group to wipe the bore is a pain, and why I'd never go to black as my sole propellant.

The real winner of the day(and the rest of these loads) was with smokeless.  Lyman makes a mold for a 330-grain hollowpoint, and this is it over 29.5 of Accurate 5744

Not so hot, even discounting the flyer to the left.  However,

Same bullet cast of pure lead, sized .452", then given a two-wrap onionskin patch and sized .459" over the same powder charge

Not a fluke; last time tried these two, got similar results; the rifle seems to prefer this bullet soft and paper-patched.  This hits an average of about 1525 feet per second; that should be able to take anything in this part of the country, including bear, with no problem.

Also tried the 500-grain bullet over 26.5 of A5744

I have no idea what happened to the 5th bullet; either I pulled it way the hell off somewhere, or it went through one of the other holes(there's one that looks slightly off).  Need to try this again.

I did have one interesting thing: on a load using the Lee 405 grain bullet I had a misfire.  Waited, gave it a second strike, same.  Pulled the bullet after got home, and no, I did not forget the powder charge, it's a dud primer.  It's a CCI large rifle primer, though, which is striking.  Of the thousands and thousands of American-made primers I've used over the years, I think I've had three that didn't properly go 'bang': one was a Federal LR that barely fired, and two CCI that didn't fire at all, and all of them were bought within the last year. 


That's the part of yesterday I'll report on.  Now, once the weather allows, I need to cast more bullets.