Making bullets for the 35 Remington

[earlmck]

This year in our "Buffalo Shooters" monthly shoot I thought I'd try out my Marlin 336A in 35 Remington for the "big levergun" match. I hadn't got very far along with loading up some try-out loads when I hit the bottom of my bullet supply. Nothing to do but fire up the old Lyman pot and pour a bunch of those 200 grain Lees that are a close copy of the old RCBS 35 Remington bullet. Here's a shot of my set-up

359200a.jpg

Today I wanted to produce both regular lube-sized bullets and a batch of powder-coated. The bucket in lower right is the water bucket for "water-dropping" the bullets I'll conventionally lube. Those to be powder coated I'll pile up on the cloth for air cooling.

359200b.jpg

That 6-cavity Lee is really nice to use (after finally breaking in) and makes a pile of bullets in a short time. The Lyman pot I keep filled with my primary "hard" alloy which is approximately "wheelweights + 2.5% tin". I say approximately because after 50 years of using wheelweights for everything I am officially all out of wheelweight metal and am having to alloy up starting out with some "range scrap" containing a bit of antimony and a smaller bit of tin to which I add some foundry metal and some extra tin, trying for about 94/3/3.

Here we are with the powder coated bullets (shake 'n bake) placed on the mats ready to go into the toaster oven for their bake (I give 'em 20 minutes at the max temp my little oven will produce which is a bit over 450 degrees)

359200c.jpg

And after a fair bit of time in front of the old Star lube-sizer, two batches of bullets

359200d.jpg

And a close-up of the nice little fellows: kinda' nice looking don't you think?

359200e.jpg

I didn't remember doing it but my reloading notes show that I had some very promising groups with the powder-coated bullet pushed out of a Remington 141 pump gun. So I thought I should have some of both bullets to try in the Marlin. They need to be stepping along pretty briskly to get to the 500 yard buffalo without running out of sight elevation with my receiver sight.

[Bill in Oregon]

Watching very closely, maestro.

[piller]

Looking forward to you posting the results.

[Rockrat]

Try applying some lube to a few powder coated bullets and trying that out. I did in a 35 whelen I once had and was suprised that it did indeed shrink the groups down a bit.

[ollogger]

Looks like alot of fun when you get them stuffed in a case!!
I need to cast a bunch but the weather for casting out side has not been good
64 today but windy Wyoming is doing her thing today



Brad

[Oldncrusty]

Good info. Thanks!

[earlmck]

Well this didn't happen very fast but I finally got some range time with loads from that bullet-making event.
Here's a pic of the rifle I'll use in the Levergun Buffalo Shoot in a couple of weeks

Marlin35Rem0144.jpg

And the loads I was trying out (these are several different levels using 5744 and the pc (powder coated) bullets
I shot over the chronograph, Accurate's 5744 powder/CCI 250/ Lee bullets about 202 grains

35Rem210Leepc0152.jpg

21.2 grains = 1685 +/- 15 fps 5"/100 yds
22.1 grains = 1686 +/- 13 fps 6"/100 yds
23.0 grains = 1760 +/- 20 fps 3"/100 yds
23.9 grains = 1857 +/- 27 fps 5"/100 yds
25.3 grains = 1833 +/- 30 fps 6"/100 yds

The mediocre shooting results is just what I have to put up with as these over-experienced eyes have made it real tough to test loads using iron sights anymore.
I'll assume that 23.0 load was the best and load a bunch up for to do some shooting. Seems like a good velocity level for cast bullet.

And those are not typos where 21.2 and 22.1 grains shot the same velocity and 25.3 grains gave a bit less than 23.9 grains. That's what the chrony showed and when I pulled some bullets the loads sure do check out. I have had previous times where the next step up in powder didn't gain much velocity but I never before saw a large step like going up over 5% actually giving less velocity. I can't explain it: I just reports it.

holes in targets:

35tgtC.jpg

35tgtB.jpg

35tgtA.jpg

[Griff]

I've got a couple of guns I need to do that for! I'm glad someone is getting their stuff done!

[Drawdown]

Love the rifle, wish I'd gotten into cast!

[piller]

Looks like fun.

[earlmck]

You probably think Earl must have a very sophisticated formula for coming up with this "ladder" of loads with all those decimal pointed loads. Well there may be a bunch of decimal points in the powder grains, but there were only nice big fat even numbers on the Redding powder measure I used to throw the charges. I started with an even "22" setting (which weighed out 21.2 grains) and then just went up 1 1/2 (which is almost a grain) with each subsequent load except for the last load where I went up 2 1/2 to where I thought I'd get about 2000 fps and got my head-scratcher of more powder giving a lower velocity.

[Bill in Oregon]

Earl, wishing you luck at that COSSA range buffalo shoot! Hope the weather is kind. We are in the spring wind season down here in the NM desert, and most serious rifle work is virtually impossible.

[6pt-sika]

When I was eaten up with the lever cast thing I cast three bullets for 35 cals be it 35 REM or 356 WIN . All has check designs the RCBS 35-200 and the RD 359-180 and 359-190 . Killed deer with all three bullets .