And you can count me as one of the fans of the Lee molds, I have a couple different 45/70 molds, 44, 357, and 30/30 molds. The only ones I have to resize after casting are the 30/30, all the others throw bullets that are fine to lube and load as is (might want to resize if powder coating). The aluminum molds heat up much faster and don't require the preheating or throw near as many subpar bullets before they get up to temperature as steel/iron molds do.

Okie dokie ,...well my aunt decided to stay out there for four hours picking pecans so decided to do some other stuff revolving around this lil project. so decided to get the rest of this brass and try to anneal it to see if I would get better / easier conversions. I really should invest in one of those fancy lol auto annelaing deal but till then ... 12mm deep well socket with a bolt and nut and my drill ..and a lil and torch. pretty sure I over did alot of these honestly






So they definitely where easier to convert and I went ahead and expanded them too while the line was still in them ...but honestly I got the same amount of split cases and crushed necks . just old brittle brass best I can guess ... but hay better now the. trying to load it in the wife's .270 . so something I also wanted to do was to go ahead and set my shoulders back just a hair past where they needed to be from the firefoemed brass ... but well , I really couldn't. funny enough all the .270 brass had shoulders already .005-.008" off of where the brass fire form too. which I found near because usually when I did this stuff I was almost always moving the should too far back...vs here it just far back from the rip. first pic is a fire formed .35 case the other is just a regular .270 out the bag

wolfie how long does it take for you to put together these posts

ok now that's done time to put a lil gas on this thi.g so I don't get crucified for not shooting it fast enough lol.
So I'm just not gonna mess with the traditional cast loadings . For multiple reasons. What I will do however is look at using a reduced load . So H4895 has this quirkly like deal where you can down load the crap outta it for a lot of cartridges, and I just so happen to have two cans of it. so from Hodgon's own side they give you a formula on how to make up a load .... please for the sake of all that's holy do you own research before you do what I do ... should be a given...but hay


And my Hornady manual hair so happens to have a load for H4895 and a 200gr pill. so lil bit of math and I got my staring load for this reduced charge and I can just keep working up from here




So 33.8 for a staring charge gets a hair above half way in the case loading it up same bullet same type cases 50yd everything the same except powder and charge





and our first 5


not bad still about a .223 on recoil but but bumped up 2gr to try and get some more velocity so 35 he and I just ran out of finished brass the second bras was just finishing drying so only three rounds for this and wasn't sure about the velocity here . the magneto can get weird with case bullets



I mean it's ok but wanted at least 1800 on the low side aiming for 2100fps . but brass finished drying , finished prepping them and decided to bump up another 2gr and go for 38.0 gr . five total three for a group and since I was loosing light and really wanted to hear that " Ping" two for the steel... and again idk what withe the velocity. evend up tossing out the two really low ones but still seems odd




really smacking my poor gopher target around . and right now looks to be dropping about 1.5-2" @100yd with a 50yd zero

lol it's honestly not too bad at all. the deal is I use these posts as note books anyways so the more time I take among them the easier it is down the road when I need to look back and read though then again.

but I just do it all off my phone so it's not too big of a deal just take a few second to snap pictures as a go and I'll type it all up and up load when I have a lil break between other stuff if I have a good Internet connection I can usually get a section typed up and banged out in les then 10min... only deal is I have to do it within 24 hr for stuff will get fuzzy and confusing

I ah e a few lee mold too but man them MP brass mold are just too sweet , especially in the HP game

O and a lil super cut in case I never get aeoudnt I editing the whole thing up

Your couple of low velocity readings may be because of a low load density. Large case, small amount of
powder. One shot its back on the primer and the next up against bullet base. Just because Hodgden says so doesn't mean it's ideal.
Really need to work on proofreading - I had to read that 3 times just to figure out what you're saying. Good luck.

If you don't mind cleaning after every range trip or even a single round fired, if you want lower velocity and less recoil, I would try filling the case with black powder. I think you would get less velocity spread. A little more recoil due to the heavier powder charge but certainly a lot less than a full charge of smokeless.

ok quick update. not too much done today , had to have my physical for work and then the wife wanted to go out , then had a AR pistol to rebuild after someone.... well they don't wanna watch a 2min video...anyhow dad came over and let him shoot it and he loved it



anyhow was running out of light and wanted to try 40gr of 4895 just to see . This thing has been doin good at 50yd so decided to just run input to 100yd . interesting deal . @100yd my center aiming dot almost perfectly covers a 2" target @ 6x .. probably not the best thing for load testing ...but if I said I needed a higher mag scope for 100hd load testing im 99.9% sure someone would explain how they shot bench rest quality groups with their 2.5x old. red field scope or something lol.



And the velocity is still being weird . coonlove , mabye I'm just a lil dumb but just seems weird to me that I was getting pretty stable velocites with much lower load density but this getting more erratic as we go up.... it's usually the opposite with alot of my loadings... but I barley load 4895 so. anyhow took off the really low one just to see and better but still somthing don't seem right and had a half decent group...for cast at least , going and ...idk what happens with the last one on the right..I'll see if I have a lil more time to retest this tomorrow

spell check on these new phones has been killing me lol

idk about that , wanna get into black powder loading eventually but not sure about with this

1) Maybe try a little Dacon on top of the powder before seating the bullet.
2) Are your brass all weight or brand sorted?
3) Are you getting the same neck tension on your bullets?
4) to help with the brass forming try a wet lube on the inside of the neck. STP oil treatment works well for me, inside and out, neck brush inside, case lube pad outside, avoid getting too much on the shoulder or you'll get dimples. Not the end of the world if your fire forming anyway.