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Old 03-27-2020, 04:32 PM
BMur BMur is offline
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Default Hollow Base Wad cutters

I shoot the 41 Long Colt often using the grossly undersized .386 hollow based bullet by Lyman, Ideal, Rapine, and Western, in my .405 Groove diameter Colt Thunderer with 6” barrel.

The theory I believe can be dated back to the old Minnie ball. It works well! Skirt expansion on discharge to fill the gap and accuracy is very good. Even better with black powder in some cases.

The Hollow Base 148 grain .357/.358 Wadcutter works extremely well in the .360/.361 Groove diameter Smith and Wesson bore. Using both Black powder and light Smokeless loads.

Very hard to find a mold for the HB 38 Wadcutter and when found they are expensive.

The cost of that mold seems ridiculous to me so I use a 4 cavity gang mold and drill them out to match the Rapine design. By using my drill press the 4 cavity mold holds them rock steady and the results are excellent. Very productive and very accurate!

You have to be careful though. You want to “match” the cavity design, don’t over drill or you can get bullet separation upon discharge. Which is never a good thing to leave a chunk of lead in the bore for the next round! That is the risk you take with hollow based bullets in revolvers! Only standard loads!

See photo: I tried a Hollow based bullet in my 45 Auto rimmed Smith & Wesson 1917 Revolver. ( Great shooter) but after about 25 rounds and impressive accuracy? The gun jammed. What fooled me was the gun still recoiled with discharge so I had no idea there was Bullet separation! I had to punch this chunk of lead out of the bore. It was stuck right inside the forcing cone.
Very lucky for me that it stuck out enough to jam the cylinder from rotating or I would have put another round into this slug! My load was 4.1 grains of bullseye which translates to about 820-850 FPS. I’m thinking that’s too hot for the hollow base design. So just an FYI. Keep the loads down around 700FPS with hollow base bullets! A lot of these hollow base Bullets were designed before Smokeless powder Was invented.

Murph
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Last edited by BMur; 03-27-2020 at 04:56 PM.
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