Making Odd Ones Shoot

I well recall the drive that made me become a reloader. I had a .45 Webley Mk VI, a fine revolver that had cost me all of $13 and was modified to accept .45 ACP rounds in clips. The gun was fun to shoot but ammo was costly. Reloading was the obvious answer, so that’s where I began my reloading career. Reloading for that old beast was simple. I bought a Lee Loader for .45 ACP and used it to reload for the Webley and for one or two other of my early .45s.

One day it was time to upgrade, so I bought a Lyman Spar-T, a turret press, that served me well enough until I got my RCBS Rock Chucker. By then I had branched out into many other reloading needs, and the ‘Chucker reloaded almost every round I’ve put together since the day I got it, back in about 1974. I say almost because some rounds just can’t be loaded on a normal press. This is where pure gunsmithing comes into play.

Today you can buy almost any size brass or bullet you might need for reloading, and also loaded rounds engineered and assembled by major makers for many of the really odd old calibers. Today’s shoot- It weighs nearly 12 pounds and even so, its recoil is not for the faint of heart. Loaded with a 900-grain custom bullet, the questions are how do you get the brass sized and determine the correct bullet, and how do you get that bullet made? ers have it mighty easy compared to 40 years ago.

Here’s a tip: I don’t think this golden age of reloading components and oddball factory ammo will be around forever. I hope I’m wrong, but if I had a rifle needing, say, .400 Jeffery ammo, currently made by Hornady in this country, I’d buy a lot of it. Ditto brass and bullets, and the high-end "dangerous game" Hornady bullets are some of the finest in the world. Some years back, reloading for unusual cartridges was not easy.

Because components used to be hard or impossible to get, reloaders back then had to figure out how to make their strange rifles shoot by using what was available. A sizing die for a .30-06 might be able to compress the walls of a strange cartridge enough to get it to fit in the chamber of a rifle when no other option existed other than to make a chamber cast and spend through the nose for custom dies. That trick is still often useful today.

Forty years ago Ross Seyfried and I wrote apiece for American Rifleman about making odd-bore double rifles shoot when components could not be found ("Paper Patching Makes Biggest Bores Work" in the June 1978 issue.) We paper-

Author made a sizing die, pictured, out of a steel bar bored to the exact size. The brass cases are pushed in using a vise and then a lathe, and removed from the sizing die with the wood rod shown, which also acts as a deprimer. The cases were first annealed. patched bullets to fit. By the way, that was his first appearance in a major firearms publication, though not mine.

Back then it was impossible to get 0.475-inch diameter bullets for my .470, or 0.411s for Ross’s This was not at all critical and easy to make on the lathe. Determining how heavy was the tough part. Figuring out the correct weight was done by experimentation with a variety of custom-made heavy bullets combined with lots of past experience with big double rifles. .40-cal double rifle. Cases were also unavailable for most of the oddballs.

Some desperate shooters resorted to turning brass cases on a lathe for the big old rifles. Some of us acquired a few Berdan-primed rounds and put up with decapping them until the cases wore out. Happily, at about that time, Jim Bell came up with his "basic brass" which could be formed into cases for our strange, generally British, rifles. And so we managed, back then, but even today some items just can’t be found.

I recently sold my Alexander Henry double twelve-bore rifle, which required brass cases and a 900-grain bullet. Nope, I couldn’t load those on the Rock Chucker, nor could I buy those huge, heavy bullets over the counter. I’m told the old Hollywood Senior press might have worked to size the cases, but I never found one along the way. However, I was able to load three-inch .500 Express cases on my Rock Chucker, and I made plenty of rounds for my old Churchill .470 double rifle on the ‘Chucker by being clever.

My .470 handloads served me well in Africa. Loading those big British rounds was easy once we had brass and bullets readily available, but not so with the big brass cases for the 12-bore double-barrel Henry. How did I get the Henry to shoot? I had about a dozen brass cases that would not quite fit into the twin chambers of the old rifle. I needed to bring down their outside diameter by a few thousandths, not a huge amount, so I made a loading die.

This was in the form of a ring of steel about an inch long bored to the correct size for the rifle’s chambers (chamber casting told the story). The steel ring was stout enough to take the sizing forces. I eased the hole in

He carefully bored out the mould to the author’s precise dimensions. The result was perfection, which meant the author had to shoot the darned things. Masterful work. my new sizing die at one end to get the brass case started. I shoved each case into the steel ring with my vise as far as I could and then finished the job on my lathe, holding the ring with the chuck and driving the lubricated case all the way in with the lathe’s tailstock before driving them out with a dowel.

I had to anneal It weighs 900 grains and needs to be paper patched. Author’s friend Ned Christiansen made the mould from an existing NEI mould to the author’s exact dimensions. They are rubbed with Alox or beeswax or something slippery to ease their passage down the bore. the cases before sizing them, and of course everyone knows how to do that. Firing pressure was low so I had to size the cases only once.

Seating primers, either the shotgun type or common rifle primers (I had both types of 12-bore brass) was a matter of starting the primer and pushing it all the way home in a big vise, with the mouth of the case against a block of wood to avoid damage. I had to make a tool to slightly open the mouths of the sized cases to permit the insertion of the paper-patched bullets without tearing the patch. I cut a taper on the end of a steel rod and shoved the cases onto it just enough to turn back the case mouth.

I also made a simple loading block to ease the handling of these big cases. The proper size Forstner bit in my drill press and a block of 2×6 solved that one. Then came the task, in the case of the Henry, of finding out what powder charge to use. With a double rifle like the Henry, the most pressing task actually was to determine the proper bullet weight. With my Henry that was not easy. Because I am the British Cartridge editor for Cartridges of the World, my literature on the subject is comprehensive.

Despite this, my bunch of books told me nothing. There was nothing I could find, anywhere, that told me what the bullet weight was supposed to be. However, there were some clues within the rifle itself. One of these was the weight of the rifle, which was stout. Nearly 12

pounds. That meant the rifle was built to deliver serious horsepower. The fast twist rate also indicated a heavy bullet. Despite all this information to the contrary, I first tried round-ball loads with varying degrees of luck, mostly bad. Those tests indicated a stout powder charge was indeed needed and definitely a heavier bullet. But how heavy? To manufacture heavy bullets I drilled holes in a 2×4 and filled them with molten lead.

I then turned the resulting plugs Recoil with the 900-grain bullets was considerably more. to the right size on my lathe, making the diameter correct for paper patching. I rounded the plug noses to look like bullets. I fired several different weights of these. That gave me more clues. After many months of experimental testing I finally determined the rifle needed a bullet of 900 grains. The next step was to design a mould.

Several sheets of paper filled with straightforward math calculations based on the mass of lead per cubic inch gave me the size of the mould. I designed it with a semi-circular nose, so half the volume of a sphere gave me easy numbers for the expected mass of the nose, and then of the completed prospective bullet. I ended up with around-nosed cylindrical bullet with a step where the rounded nose met the side of the bullet, kind of around-nose Keith design.

My friend Ned Christiansen, the incredible Michigan gunsmith (Michiguns, Ltd., m-guns.com), made the mould from an old NEI mould I sent him. The first pouring with a lead alloy slightly harder than pure lead gave me exactly what I wanted, just under 900 grains. With pure lead it would have been right on the money as designed. I phoned Ned and told him I had some bad news. "What?" he said. "Is the mold wrong?" "No," I told him. "It’s perfect. It makes gorgeous bullets of just the right size and weight.

The bad news is that now I have to shoot them." As you might imagine it’s not a lot of fun shooting heavy loads of powder behind 900-grain bullets. The rifle shot them quite well, enough to tell me all I needed to know about the Henry. Let me tell you, that was a real rifle. I have a 9×56 Mannlicher Schönauer rifle for which I’ve made cases using some oddball techniques you might find handy one day. I have a set of 9×56 M-S loading dies that are completely useless.

They don’t compress the brass enough to get it into the chamber, and also are for the wrong bullet size. Thing is, there were three "standard" bullet sizes for this caliber. My very early, threedigit-serial-number rifle needs a slightly smaller case than standard, and also requires the smallest of the three bullet sizes, which is 0.353" diameter. (For reference, the other two sizes found in 9×56 rifles are 0.355" and 0.358".) I made cases for this fine old rifle using a complex, multi-juggling process.

I began with .30-06 brass. First, I annealed the necks, then sized the cases full length in my .400/350 Nitro Rigby die to squeeze the lower brass enough to fit the chambers. Then, I necked the cases down in a .358 Winchester sizing die with the neck-expander/primer punch removed. I cut the cases to length, deburred them, and fire-formed them in the rifle with data suggested by Ken Howell in his magnificent Designing and Forming Custom Cartridges book.

I used Bullseye powder, pistol primers, tissue paper, and cornmeal. The resultant cases were usable without further outside-neck turning, though that might have been a necessary step depending on the rifle in question. Bullets were relatively easy for the 9×56. I loaded the

30-06, .350 Rigby, .358 Winchester, and 9×57 loading dies to get the brass made, sized, cut, fireformed, and finally loaded into suitable ammo for the fine old rifle. Then it’s time to make new stuff, any way you can. cases with some custom Hawk 250grain bullets of 0.353" diameter, using the .358 seating die. I arrived at the correct powder charge by reference to the .358 Winchester loading data and carefully experimenting.

Instead of all this juggling I could have popped for a custom-made RCBS die made to my chamber cast, along with a trim die to cut the cases to the right length. However, that’s expensive. Also, as noted above, I had on hand a set of dies for a .350 Rigby that were just the right size to squeeze down the lower part of the case just enough to allow the brass to fit the rifle.

This was all just ducky until one recent day after some years of not shooting the 9×56 Mannlicher I wanted to reload my cases and also make some new ones. However, in the interim years since last shooting this rifle I sold my .350 Rigby double rifle together with its loading dies. Uh-oh! Now I’m stumped until I find another sizing die that can squeeze the bases of the new brass enough to fit into the rifle. Ah, the joys of owning oddball rifles.

One more thing: I had been buying special-order bullets from Hawk to fit the M-S. Now I want to be able to shoot easily obtainable and lower-cost standard bullets. I have on hand all kinds of 0.358 diameter bullets of good construction and it’s easy to get more at the local gun store but they need to be made a little bit smaller. The solution seems to be to make a simple swaging die to reduce their diameter. I have a design for this but have not yet made the tool.

I suspect an unused sizing die can be bored out to do the job, using my old Rock Chucker. Let’s hope it works, when I get around to it. Another double rifle I had, made by Erskine in the 1800s, took short 12-bore paper cases and around ball. It was relatively easy to get that rifle shooting. I used a common 12gauge shot-shell loader to size and prime the cases but I had to shorten them significantly.

As I did for a 10-gauge shotgun on hand which also needed shorter cases, I used a proper-size dowel in the lathe, put the case onto the dowel so that friction on the case would grab and spin it, and then shoved an X-Acto blade clamped in the tool post straight in against the spinning case. This easily cut them to the right length.

With a supply of shortened rifle cases I loaded the proper powder charge and the proper-size ball purchased online from the Log Cabin Shop in Lodi, Ohio (Log- Cabin Shop. com), on top of several Wonder Wads (RMCoxYoke.com or TrackofTheWolf.com) and secured it all in place with a roll-crimper running on my drill press. One trick to increase bullet size is to paper patch them, and I don’t mean just lead bullets. As Ross Seyfried and I proved long ago, paper patching works very well with jacketed bullets too.

We did that with my double .470, wrapping common .458 bullets to fit. I later used that trick with my 6.5 x 54 Mannlicher- Schönauer up in Alaska. I wanted to try light jacketed bullets in the little rifle so patched ‘em up to fit. Worked like a charm. Without the great expense and delay of procuring custom reloading dies, clever reloaders can assemble rounds for nearly any rifle or handgun of any age.

All it takes is a bit of serious thought and sometimes some work with a lathe or mill, and you can usually come up with usable bullets and cases, or even a swaging or sizing die, and get the odd bundook working. With some modern cartridges of relatively high pressure the hardest trick might be determining the correct powder and charge. Carefully cross referencing as many loading books as you can get your hands on and looking at similar cartridges ought to give you a place to start.

Proceed with caution and best luck to you. AG