Henry Rifle Forums

Loaded a small batch of MB 200 gr. Cowboy #5 bullets with 8.5 Unique to try in my 1873 Uberti Carbine. Much the same as a .44-40 load but in the Magnum brass. Should be in the 1200-1300 FPS range and will check that while testing.

Looks good... now to see if the Uberti likes 'em.

RP

Hoping to get out Sunday to try them out before late afternoon rain moves in.

I've loaded a similar bullet over 5 grains of 231. Not real accurate, but fun to shoot, and has very light recoil.

Managed to find a couple of loads that showed potential with a similar style and weight with my home cast although the best accuracy was at a few hundred FPS slower than where you are hoping for.

I used the MB coated bullets in a batch of 45 Colt. I like those bullets.

220, theres some pretty good groups in there. What was the distance and what is AP50 similar to? Nice shooting.

The 210gr loads were only at 25y the 310gr at 50y.
AP-50 is a little slower than trailboss, similar to HP-38. The AP/AS powders have now been discontinued and replaced with the APS series of powders but I have plenty left.
The AP were a finer powder designed to meter better in small charges for pistols than the AS that were designed for shotgun use although nearly identical in burn rate. For a long time ADI advised you could use AS AP data interchangably.
AS50 was sold by Hodgdon as Universal.

A couple of good groups and plenty of bad ones, interesting the best loads with both AP-50 and trailboss were nearly identical in velocity. Given to 2 powders are similar in burn rate despite a massive difference in density I would guess pressures would be similar. Seems to be where the sweat spot is for that projectile with the alloy I am casting them with.

Does show why you really need to do a little load development, with them all on the one target you can see the accuracy improving and then declining as the powder charge was varied. I use what many would class as a fairly big increase in powder charge between loads but it does limit the number of loads that need to be tested to find roughly where the sweet spot is. Once you have found it you can then vary the powder charge by a smaller amount to fine tune the load. Using 0.5gr increase means I am only test 3 or 4 loads initially instead of 10-15 if I went with a 0.1gr increase.