single cavity.

Planning to hollow point it and load it up over generous portions of WW 296.

I have gotten quite a few moulds off of fleabay! Mostly H&G ones that are out of manufacture. Paid a good price for some of them!

Glad you got what you wanted! Have fun and don't forget the pictures when you get some of those babies cast!

I'm a new caster. I actually got started about this time last year. Never figured I'd be this deep into it.

Crisco works pretty well as a flux when you are melting your own lead. The 358156 SC was my first mould. Make sure to heat the mould up to temperature before doing any casting. A cold mould makes for voids. Not a big deal as you just weigh them and any rejects merely go back in the pot.

__________________
James Redfield
LM #497

My all time favorite .30 bullet mould! When I was doing a lot of casting I used straight linotype, sized to 309 and they shot amazingly well out of every .30-06 and .308 I tried them in. Good choice.

"My all time favorite .30 bullet mould! When I was doing a lot of casting I used straight linotype, sized to 309 and they shot amazingly well out of every .30-06 and .308 I tried them in. Good choice."

Actually, 358156 is a 160 grain gas check bullet for .38 special and .357 magnum.



Bruce

Arrgh! Thanks Bruce. See what old age does for you! I was think of the great Lyman 311291, but I got it mixed up with the equally good 358156. By the way, don't size it to .309 but linotype does work great!

Strange! My .38 spl load manual shows the #358156 as a 155g SWC or more closely a truncated cone.
But then again, my Lyman 45th shows it as a 158g.

358156 is a 155 grain gas check bullet. It has 3 grooves and a cast diameter of .360.

__________________
James Redfield
LM #497

casting the 358156

Here is a link to a previous discussion about this mould.

FWIW there are a lot of old timers that used this almost exclusively for the 357mag. If memory serves me correctly, Skeeter was one of them. Also, there have been several variations of this mould, HP and I think one that didn't have a gas check.

I have had good success not using gas checks with bullets that are designed for them.

Hope that helps.

I can't imagine how much one of those hollowpointed and cast from fairly soft lead would do to a varmit if you hot rodded them up to 1400-1500 FPS. Inside out would be my guess!

This is a Ray Thompson designed AIRC. He liked his gas checks as much as Elmer Keith didn't. Run at 38 speeds I have found them unnecessary with this mold. Treat it well and enjoy it.

__________________
Front sight and squeeze

I'm one of those oldtimers. I did not even know it was offered with a gas check. I'm not sure it was back when I bought my Lyman mold- in the 60's!!
GREAT Bullet.

__________________
Regards,
Lee Jarrett

I've got one of these around somewhere, it was my first and only .357 bullet mold for many years. I shot them with and without gas checks and got great results either way. It's been many years since I heated up my casting furnace but I have been thinking about it lately. When I could by bulk packs of 500 cast bullets for 18 to 20 bucks it wasn't worth the effort to cast but now that they are $60+ for 500 its got me thinking about casting again, I Work for a car dealer so I have a good source of wheelweights!

Can't believe I let so much time pass before I actually tried the mold out. Cast some last weekend.

Only 3 ****** cellphone pics for now. Some checkless to try in light .38s, checked to try in some boomer .357s over WW296 and some of those .38s loaded up. Trying 3.5gr of bullseye since that load was highly recommended here in another thread.

Attached Images

	Photo-0062.jpg (41.7 KB, 122 views)
	Photo-0063.jpg (40.5 KB, 125 views)
	Photo-0064.jpg (44.2 KB, 117 views)

I have a 358156 in HP. The gas check weighs three grains, so this is added to the as-cast weight to bring it up to 158 (assuming your alloy is similar to what Lyman uses to figure this).

You end up with a nice looking bullet, but HP casting is awfully tedious. I picked up an HP attachment for my Forster trimmer some years back and find I very much prefer to use that for the odd times I need SWCHP's.

Although some may disagree, I find that the gas check is not necessary to prevent leading using this bullet at the lower pressure levels of most .38 Special loads; the .357 is a different story.

I have 2 of this mould, a hollow point which is single cavity and a solid point which is a 4 cavity. (Mebbe 6, but it has been a few years since I used it.) The Lyman single hollow point mould can be very tedious to use. I cast up a little over 1,200 of them for a project once and by the time I got them cast, gas checked and sized, I never wanted to look at a bullet mould again!

It is a great bullet. The gas check is really helpful for accuracy at high velocities, also keeping leading to a minimum and allowing a bit softer alloys for expansion with the hollow point.

If I wasn't going to use them for high velocity loads, I would use another mould with a plain base instead. The base of the bullet is the most important part of it for accuracy. They seemed to shoot straighter and cleaner for me than skipping the gas check on a gas check design. Whether the difference is enough to make one buy a different mould is a personal thing. My first .38/.357 SWC mould had a plain base. I enjoyed the added work and expense of not needing the gas checks.

That 358156 is a classic bullet design.

358156 by definition is a gas-checked bullet. No gas-check it is something else. Very similar is 357446 which is plain base and, unfortunately, no longer available.

__________________
Gunsmithing since 1961

Here is a custom Hollow Point design of the same bullet.

Jerry

__________________
.38/44 Outdoorsman Accumulator

Here are my chrono results today. Accuracy was only average but much of that might have been me.

Started out loaded checkless over 3.5gr Bullseye in .38 crimped in the upper groove out of my 4 inch M&P:
Avg: 761
Hi: 774
Lo: 747
ES: 27
SD: 10
6 shots: 774, 752, 773, 760, 760, 747

Same loading, but crimped in the lower groove out of the same gun:
Avg: 732
Hi: 758
Lo: 705
ES: 53
SD: 17
6 shots: 758, 723, 737, 741, 731, 705

Next up was with check over 14.5gr WW 296 in the magnum out of my 2.5 inch 66:
Avg: 974
Hi: 1005
Lo: 944
ES: 61
SD: 16
18 shots: 960, 975, 989, 987, 956, 958, 984, 955, 944, 991, 972, 970, 1005, 983, 985, 990, 971, 964

Last over the chrono was 6 of the long seated .38s out of the 66:
Avg: 653
Hi: 677
Lo: 636
ES: 41
SD: 15
6 shots: 677, 665, 643, 644, 636, 657

Going to have one more casting session with it before sending it off for hollowpoint. Plan to load those in .38s crimped in the lower groove and bump the charge up to 3.8gr of Bullseye. I've been wanting to get into steel challenge and use my 66 but they won't allow magnums. I think these will be the ticket. The long seating will keep the chambers cleaner.

Also going to bump the charge in the magnums up to the next chamber in the Lee Auto Disk which should yield 15.6 grains. If that's too hot I'm going to either double-disk to hit 15 or permanently modify one of my many disks (I have 5 complete sets).