For as long as I knew him, a very good friend of mine, John Wesley Cusey, now deceased, carried a 5 1/2 in bbl Colt 45 from the time he got up in the morning until he went to bed at night. Every day he would shoot at least a cylinder full of rounds loaded with the 454190 bullet. He also loved to cast bullets. At the age of 82 he slipped and fell on a patch of ice and died from the fall. At the time of his death, he had approximately 27,000 454190 bullets lubed and stored in 1 lb coffee cans.
Several years before he died Wes asked me to hone out the bore ride portions of the ancient Lyman 2 cavity mold that he used for casting as they dropped from the mold at 0.454 on the bands and 0.450 on the bore ride portion.
It was a slow process to open just the bore riding portion out the additional 0.004", but once the job was finished, it transformed a bullet with mediocre accuracy into a real tack driver from both Wes's Colt and my Uberti Colt Clone.
This improvement in accuracy was evident for both smokeless and black powder loads. Wes shot smokeless and I shot the holy black. One time, I had 100 rounds lubed with homemade Emmert's lube and loaded with 30 gr. of Goex FFG with some corn meal filler on top that I wanted to shoot up and reload the cases. I shot all 100 rounds as fast as I could, reloading and firing until the pistol was so hot I needed gloves to load and fire. The pistol was not any more fouled at the end of 100 rounds than it was after 12 rounds and I could not perceive any deterioration in the accuracy.
I only have about a half can of those bullet left as all of Wes's stash and the mold was destroyed in a fire a couple of years ago.
It sure would be great if a 6 cavity mold was available to reproduce a bullet with the same dimensions that shot so well in our pistols.
This is a sketch with measurement values from a sample of the bullets I have left.
Tom Myers
