Wed is practice or just plain fun day at Wilton. We normally start at Charlie's Gun Shop for a good BS session and then head to the club for lunch. I brought my 541S Rem .22 to practice some offhand shooting, which has become very rusty. My shooting partner Steve was there with his brand new right knee (replaced on Jan 2nd). He's happy as a clam with no more knee pain. Of course at 87, it just means that his back pain is now more obvious to him.
Anyway, he's got his Meacham High Wall that he had Jimmy Hart rebarrel in .30-30 2 years ago. Steve has struggled to get the rifle to shoot. Only time he got it shooting well was when Craig, another top shooter, gave him a handful of bullets he'd cast (SAECO 315 out of an NOE mold). These are GC bullets. Steve loaded them up and he was shooting some amazing groups at extended yardages. So, Steve called Redding and ordered a brand new mold. That was the only time that the rifle shot well.
So today he's loaded up a bunch of round and I sat down to spot with him after I was done plinking offhand. He could not get a group. Hell, he could not get a bunch, let alone a group. He would drill the pig dead center at 300 yds and put the next one a foot over the pig. They he'd put one low. Wind was blowing left to right pretty good. But it was pretty steady and rarely did his windage move more than a few inches. Same on Turkeys, except the high and low shots were worse. His bullets looked a tad deformed. We have talked before about him using too much force with his lubrisizer. The nose of the 315 SAECO is a straight, truncated cone. The ends of Steves bullets were all slightly deformed so that the meplat was a different diameter on almost every bullet. So, we knew there was a problem there. He gave up since he was just buring up powder and primers and I told him I'd drop by his house on my way home.
When I got there I started looking at bullets that were not yet sized. They looked great. I'd be very happy with the bullets I saw. So, then I looked at the nose punch he was using. He was using the punch for his 314299 bullet which has an ogive surface for the nose. That deformation causing the varied meplat diameter was the punch swaging down the nose, each one a little differently. Okay, easy fix. Dug thru his punches and found one with a flat that was a tad larger than the meplat on the bullet. Put one thru the sizer, came out perfect. So, then it was time to put on a GC and see how much force was required to size a bullet. Grabbed a GC and no-go. Not even close. Put the digital calipers on the GC base of the bullet and it measures about 0.294-0.295 inch. Measure the ID of a GC, it's in the 0.278-0.280 inch range. Hmmm. Think I found your problem, Steve. So, I ask him for a his bullet puller to pull one of the bullets he did not shoot today. As I'm setting it up, he says, "The checks normally stick in the case.". Okay, I can that happening maybe occasionally, but not regularly. They should be crimped on the base of the bullet. I pull the bullet and sure enough GC stays in the case. I look at the bullet and the GC was on maybe 1/64" at most. Houston, I think we have a problem.
His mold is dropping bullets with a huge GC section. The rest of the bullet measures fine, maybe a thou or two bigger than what you'd expect for a .30 cal, but certainly not 0.010-0.015 too big. My guess is all he bullets were like this. He's been squashing the GCs or barely getting them on the bullet and Heaven knows what the GC does when the round is fired. So, I suspect perform as they should and that explains him being able to put two rounds on top of each other at 300 yds. But others do not, maybe tumble down the bore behind the bullet while the hot gasses cut the base to pieces and we get our enormous vertical variations.
So, I told him to load up some ammo using the 200 gr bullet he uses in his Springfield. That's the 314299. Put a GC on it, size it, lube it and load it. Make maybe 25 round and we will start at 300 or 400 and if they shoot like I think they will, the problem has been solved. I also told him to call Redding and bitch about the mold. I suspect that they will stand behind it. He can give them the numbers we measured for the GC base on the bullet.
As I was leaving, Steve was very relieved. He's a very gracious man and was thanking me up and down. He admitted that he was starting to think that he was losing it as a shooter. But, he does damn well with his .32-40 and .22 rifles so I knew it was not him. But we all know how you can start to have doubts when things seem to fall apart for no reason. I was happy to have found these issues. He'll probably kick my butt next Sunday in the .22 match. But that's okay. That'll make me happy, too.
