First Cast Harvest

Drew_CarreyAB

Drew_CarreyAB

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Location
Central Alberta
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30-30, 173gr FNGC from about 75yards. Netted 44# of cheese smokies :xes
 
Congrats on the deer. I'm planning to start casting for my .30-30 with a 170 grain Ranch Dog mould. What alloy and powder did you use? Was performance as good as what you are used to with jacketed bullets?
 
ACWW with a little tin for fill out. I was running 18gr of IMR-4227. Compared to a Jacketed bullet, it did what it needed to, but I feel that my alloy could have been slightly softer (was expecting abit more expansion). Oh well, there's always next year!
 
A lot of cast hunting bullets rely on a large meplat rather than expansion.

Some guys have been trying to use a bullet with a hard cast base and soft lead point. This is done in two separate pours.
 
Drew_CarreyAB said:
ACWW with a little tin for fill out. I was running 18gr of IMR-4227. Compared to a Jacketed bullet, it did what it needed to, but I feel that my alloy could have been slightly softer (was expecting abit more expansion). Oh well, there's always next year!
Click to expand...

If you have a particular alloy that's working for you, why mess with it?.....I was in the same quandary and tried hollow pointing, and it works quite well. For my 30 cal. I'm using a 311041 lyman mold, water dropped WW, checked and PC coated 'tool blue' and then individually hollow pointed in my Forster rig....has accounted for decent harvest's this year and last from my 'elderly' Marlin 30-30. I can't speak for .308 yet but the project continues and part of the fun......yup
 
I have shot a # of deer with cast boolits, from 80 to 245 yrds, pure lead (200 yrds with a .54 ML and conical) and coww to hard cast commercial bullets (most between 12-1400 fps, never more than 1700). I have yet to recover a boolit from any of the carcasses but one thing I noticed with every one is a clean little round entrance wound and much more tissue disruption at exit than would be made by a "still stabilized" non expanded bullet. What I mean by this is that even tho the bullet doesn't expand, the length of these big slugs cause them to "tumble" creating as much damage as any expanded bullet would.

As I mentioned I have never recovered a cast bullet from a carcass but have recovered lots (mostly coww & hard cast) from other mediums, from clay banks to wet paper/cardboard to solid wood blocks and without exception every one has had one thing in common...while some may have a "smear" of expansion on the meplat, they all have a bend somewhere in the long shank, even the hard cast. When they bend they can't help but start to tumble I think.

Looking at the elongated wound on the pictured doe I would think the bullet had a tumble to it when it came out also.
 
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