Powder coat 358 125 Lee flat nose in a 9mm High Point carbine.

Attachment 185393

Before and after picture. This is powdercoat HF red shake and baked. Red covers the best as others have observed. Bullseye was the powder. I sized them after powdercoat to .357 .3585+ , and .360. The .360 did chamber but there was some drag so I am calling it too large. The .3585 worked very well and the . 357 was indistinguishable from the larger. They worked way better than the 356 125 TC boolit that I tried first. There were key holes and wild misses and that mold is no longer on the menu. I believe I would be okay hunting hogs with this rig and this loading. I want to take a garden trowel and did up more slugs next time.

Issue you will run into is swaging down the bullets loading them. .357 using the standard .355 9mm expander they wont stay 357. The Lee expanders are a bit short anyways, so ends up swaging part of the bullet. I used a similar NOE 158gr bullet in my 9mm. Had alot of issues, keyholing etc.

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Originally Posted by Tackleberry41

Issue you will run into is swaging down the bullets loading them. .357 using the standard .355 9mm expander they wont stay 357. The Lee expanders are a bit short anyways, so ends up swaging part of the bullet. I used a similar NOE 158gr bullet in my 9mm. Had alot of issues, keyholing etc.

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That's why you use either a Lee 38 S&W expander or one from NOE.

I use a set of Hornady dies with a fixed expander plug and it seems to do a good enough job of expanding the neck so that the bullets don't get sized down . I don't see how to get the die apart to measure the expander but it is seeming to work. The 356 nominal boolits did seem to seat easily.

Nice work! What alloy was that and what did you shoot it into?

Scrap lead with a hint of tin, pretty soft in other words. I fired through a pumpkin into sandy dirt. At some point I will get to seeing how my groups are running. So far smashing pumpkins is as far as I have gotten. I was told by a local cop who stopped to see what I was up to that High Points will never hit anything and at the time I was shooting the .356 boolits which were not capable of hitting anything. I didn't argue with him but I knew that I was simply using the wrong boolit. I had another High Point when we were in Michigan and that one would hit what I wanted to hit and now so will this one. Still I am in the proof of concept stage and gaining confidence.

I have one in 45 that will hit whatever the nut behind the trigger points it at. Just wish it took 1911 mags.