311284 "reject" bullets in the 7.62x51

[P.E. Islander]

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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[3delta]

That's interesting. Ive shot 150 grain remington jacketed bullet over 13 grains of Red Dot ("The Load" as it's called) through my Ishy and was rather pleased with the accuracy. A mild load that is fun to shoot. I'll have to go through my lead bullet dies and see what Ive got and give the Unique a try. Thanks for the info.
Carl

[P.E. Islander]

I've done a fair bit of shooting using the 13 grains of Red Dot load, but almost always with cast bullets. It works well, and is clean and cheap. Red dot is bulky enough that a double charge is going to over flow most any military ".30 cal" that I can think of, which is a nice safety feature.

Much as I like the Red Dot, I like the 16 grains of Alliant 2400 load even better - it seems more position insensitive. It invariably gives good groups if the bullets are good.