round ball thru the sizer and .38 special

[Ohio Rusty]

I've shot alot of round ball in .38 cases. I was curious what my pure lead .395 ball for my .40 flinter would do thru the Lee .358 sizer. This will only work with pure lead as WW's are too hard. Anyway, I greased the .395 ball and set the ball sprue down on the punch and pushed it thru the sizer. What came out were these perfect .358 round nosed cylinders with flat bottoms. Nice !! they weigh 91 grains. Interesting to note in the Lyman loading manual there is already load data for the 90 grain 356242 lead boolit. If I coat these with Alox and crimp them right below the round end, I bet these will be a hoot to plink with loaded with red dot, trail boss or unique. Looking forward to trying these when the weather warms up a little more .....
Ohio Rusty ><>

[Digital Dan]

If you'll paper patch them we can talk.

Dan


PS: I did it with a .44 Mag. Patched and loaded 2 per case. Apparently the gun had a full choke?

[Geezer in NH]

Neat Idea! I have 300 cast .400 balls will have to give it a try. I bet BLL will work fine with them.

[bangerjim]

I have done this to make roundballs into 30 and 38 cal round nosers lot. I powder coat everything and the make great plinking loads. I do NOT use grease. Those make perfect No Lube Groove (NLG) projectiles.

I have several NLG standard design boolit molds for several cals also.

I usually cast 9Bhn roundballs for this.

banger

[dudel]

I've done that with smaller balls. Squeeze them in a vise to get two flats, then run them through the sizer. You get Boolits that look like round pills. I load 2 in a 38Spl or 3 in a 357Mag for duplex and triplex loads. Sort of like the big pellets in the .410 PDX load.

[oley55]

bet they would hold more BLL if you lightly rolled them between a couple cross hatch files to knurl then a bit.

[philzilla]

Good idea

[Shiloh]

If the bases are flat and not distorted, why not??

SHiloh

[Thumbcocker]

Frank Marshall thought highly of the swaged oblong ball and wrote several articles mentioning it for the fouling shot.

[BAGTIC]

Just tumble them with JPW and avoid the unnecessary extra work.