I picked up a used Lyman 311284 bullet mold at the last gun show I attended. I cast a few just to see what sort of diameter this mold example dropped. Whith wheel weight alloy this mold drops a 223 grain bullet of .310" shank and .301" nose diameter. Excellent!

While warming the blocks up there were of course a lot of wrinkley bullets cast, these I generally put back in the pot when I am finished. However this time when I was finished casting I took a look at the "rejects" and decided that despite a few wrinkles most of them didn't look too bad so I decided to shoot them, mostly as an experiment. The ones with bad bases went back into the pot, but the remainder I lubed with Lee liquid Alox and let them dry overnight.

They were then loaded, unsized and without gas check, in some "DA 60" 7.62 brass, over a charge of 7 grains of Unique.

I took this ammo to the range the next day to fire in my Ishapore 2A1. To my surprise a ten shot group from 100 yards went into around 3", not bad for iron sights and ammo loaded with "reject" cast bullets! To be fair to the Ishapore, it does have a very good bore, even if the exterior is rather grubby looking! Ten shots over the crony also yielded a surprise, the average velocity of ten shots was an even 1000 fps. Recoil was extremely mild, of course, and the noise level was low as well, about like firing target velocity .22 ammo out of a rifle.

As you can tell I was pretty pleased with how this all worked out, now I'll have to try some more but loaded with "good" bullets instead of the wrinkly ones.
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