Reloading and Shooting Cast Bullets in the Mosin-Nagant Rifle

The Mosin-Nagant 91/30. These rifles are extremely accurate.  This one is 84 years old.

I’m a Mosin-Nagant fan, as you know from reading our prior posts on these fine old Russian warhorses.  I’ve got two, one I use with jacketed bullets and one I use exclusively with cast bullets.  Today’s blog focuses on reloading and using cast bullets in a Mosin.

So what’s the deal on cast bullets?   If you reload, you can use either factory-produced, copper-jacketed bullets, or you can use cast bullets.  Cast bullets are cast of lead, lubricated with an appropriate grease, and sometimes fitted with a gas check (a small copper cap on the back of the bullet).

The cast bullets I’ve settled on as best for my Mosin.  These are 200-grain, gas-checked bullets made by a local caster. The gas check is the little copper cap at the base of the bullet. It prevents the propellant gases from melting the bullet’s base and minimizes barrel leading.

Folks who shoot cast bullets either buy the bullets or they cast them themselves.  I used to cast bullets 40 years ago, but I found it easier just to buy them from folks who know what they are doing and avoid the hassles of melting lead, breathing the fumes, etc.

Cast bullets are a lot easier on both the rifle and the shooter.  The softer metal (lead versus a copper jacket) is easier on the rifling and the lower velocities reduce recoil.   The downsides are that the trajectory is more pronounced due to the lower velocities associated with cast bullets, and generally speaking, cast bullets are not as accurate as jacketed bullets.  But that last bit sure isn’t the case here.   My cast loads in the Mosin are every bit as accurate as jacketed loads, and the Mosin I use for cast bullets is another one of my all-time favorite rifles.  It’s the rifle you see in the first photo of this blog, and in the photos below.

My Mosin-Nagant has been worked on a bit.  I stripped and refinished the stock, I glass bedded the action, and I did a trigger job to lighten the pull and eliminate trigger creep.   It’s a great shooter.
The desirable hex receiver Mosin.   The Mosin-Nagant is an extremely accurate milsurp rifle.

My cast bullet Mosin is just flat amazing.  It regularly cloverleafs at 50 yards, and when I do my part, I’ll get groups under 2 inches at 100 yards.  Yeah, I know, other folks talk about sub-minute-of-angle shooting at that distance, but we’re talking about iron sights and cast bullets here, folks, and it’s all being done with a rifle manufactured in 1935.   And wow, can that 84-year-old puppy shoot…

Open sights, 50 yards, shooting from a benchrest at the West End Gun Club.

This kind of accuracy doesn’t just happen and it’s usually not attainable with factory ammunition.  This is what you can get when you tailor the load to a particular rifle, and you can only do that if you reload.  I developed the load used to shoot the targets you see above trying different propellants and propellant charges, different cartridge cases, and different cast bullets.  The secret sauce?  It’s this recipe right here…

My Mosin load. SR4759 is a powder that works well for reduced velocity and cast bullet loads. It’s no longer in production, but I have a stash.  When I run out of SR4759, I’ll turn to a current production powder and start the development process all over again.

Good buddy Gresh suggested I do a piece on reloading, and I actually had done that already in the form of a video some time ago.   What you’ll see in the video below is the reloading process.   When you reload a cartridge, you lube the brass, resize it to its original dimensions, prime it, flare the case mouth (to accept the cast bullet), add the propellant, and seat the bullet.  With a little bit of music taken directly from Enemy at the Gates (a movie in which the Mosin-Nagant rifle was the real star), take a look at what’s involved in reloading 7.62x54R ammo with cast bullets…

Shooting cast bullets in a rifle is a lot of fun.  A good reference if you want to try loading with cast bullets is the Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook (it’s the one I use).  If you never tried reloading you might think about getting into it, and if you’re already reloading, you might think about giving cast bullets a go.

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Empire of the Summer Moon

When I’m on a road trip, I sometimes know the history of the area I’m riding through, and I sometimes do not.  I’m always wondering about it, though.  I recently finished reading Empire of the Summer Moon, and it was so good it makes me want to plan another road trip through Texas.  The cover tells what the book is about; what it doesn’t do is tell just how good this book is…

Several things amazed me as I read Empire of the Summer Moon, the first being how it could have not known of it previously.   The only reason I learned of it is that I saw Empire in an airport bookstore a couple of trips ago.

They say you can’t tell a book by its cover, but the cover on Empire appealed to me greatly.  The book was even better.  Much of the action described in it occurred in Texas (and in areas where I used to live in Texas); now I want to return, ride those roads again, and pay more attention this time.  And I will.  Just how good was this book?  Hey, when I finished it, I turned back to the beginning and started reading it again.  That’s good.

Riding China

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation on our ride across China to one of the Horizons Unlimited gatherings.    It was a 56-slide PowerPoint deal and I thought I might share it with you here.  It’s big bandwidth, so bear with me as the images load, and enjoy…

The riding was great, the friendship was even better, and the photo ops were off the charts.   Both Joe Gresh and I published stories on that adventure, too.  And don’t forget the book, Riding China.   You can buy it here!

An Aussie Salsbury

In the post-War years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of scooter manufacturers emerged in the United States.   Cushman was probably the biggest one.  Mustang was the exotic one, and it was arguably the coolest bike of the bunch.   Salsbury was yet another.  Salsbury scooters were made right here in California (as was Mustang), but Salsbury production numbers were much smaller.  I’ve only ever seen three…one was at the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Trials about 10 years ago, another was at the Peterson Museum, and much to my great surprise, the third was just last month at the Motor Museum of Western Australia…

It was cool seeing a Salsbury, and doubly-cool seeing it in Australia.  Imagine that…a product made in my own back yard, and seeing it on the other side of the world in Australia.

Back in the USA

Another day, another 14-hour flight, and another week, another time zone reversal.  I love traveling to Asia; I don’t relish the thought of taking a month to get back on US time.   That’s what happens every time I travel to Asia.  When I visit China, Singapore, Thailand, or any of the places I go to in Asia, I get adjusted to Asia time in one day.  Then it takes a month when I get home to adjust to US time.  It doesn’t matter if I’m in Asia for 2 days, 40 days, or 13 months (I’ve done all three); it always takes forever to get back on our time.   I don’t think it has anything to do with direction; it has everything to do with what’s home.  My Asian friends tell me they experience the same thing…when they come to America, they’re on our time in a day or two, and then it takes them weeks to get back on their home time once they’ve returned.

This adventure was two weeks for Susie and me.  It started with 4 days in Singapore, where I taught a class to folks working in the Singaporean defense industry.  I get invited to Singapore to do that a couple of times a year; the topic this time was Failure Mode and Effects Analysis.

Singapore defense industry engineers in an FMEA course. Good times!

It’s a 17-hour flight from Los Angeles to Singapore.   You’d be surprised; it goes by quickly.  The courses are fun to do, we always do them in 5-star hotels, and Singapore is a good place to have a good time.   I watched Crazy Rich Asians on the way over during that 17-hour flight (it’s the first time I’d ever seen the movie).  I was surprised at how many of the Singapore locations I recognized in the film.  I like Singapore.

Next, it was a 5-hour flight to Perth, Australia.   You’ve read the blogs about it and the reason we went (Susie met her pen pal Adrienne for the first time).  We had a hoot.   Gresh and Baja John both told me Australia was a lot like the US, and they were right.  Still, they do have a few things we don’t…

Freemantle Prison in Western Australia.   It’s a tourist attraction today.  Back in the day, it was where the UK sent its convicts.
Pouring a gold bar in the Perth Mint. The Nikon showing off its low light level abilities here, in this case at ISO 2000.
G’day, Mate…a python in a Western Australia wildlife preserve…more low-light-level Nikon chicanery.
Tie me kangaroo down, Mate. At one of the restaurants in Sydney, I could have ordered a kangaroo burger, but I took a pass.
Kookaburra, sitting in an old gum tree. We finally met. He wasn’t laughing.

The morning we left Perth, there was a big hub-bub going on outside our hotel as we got into our Uber car, and to my astonishment, the fellow getting into the car in front of us was Scott Morrison, Australia’s Prime Minister.  He had been staying in our hotel.  There were a few security folks around him, but nothing like you’d see in the US.  He looked right at Sue and me from just a few feet away as he passed.   Nope, I didn’t get a photo.  Maybe right now he’s telling people he met one of the two guys running the ExNotes blog.  His friends are probably telling him it didn’t happen if he didn’t get a photo.

From there it was on to Sydney (a 4-hour flight), and we had another fabulous visit.  We didn’t know anybody there yet, but we made new friends and we had a great time walking around in one of the world’s great cities.   Sydney is a beautiful city and it should be on your list of places to visit.

An iconic Sydney photo…the Sydney Opera House.
I spotted this scooter, a new Lambretta, in downtown Sydney and I struck up a conversation with Barry, the guy you see here. This modern Lambretta is manufactured in Taiwan. Now I know two guys named Barry who ride Lambrettas.  You see bikes and scooters in Australia at about the same frequency as you do in the US.
Our new friend Colin in Sydney’s Rocks shopping area.

And there you have it.  It was another 14-hour flight to get from Sydney to Los Angeles and we landed at about 6:00 a.m. today.  It’s good to be home again.

A 1917 Harley

Here’s another stunning motorcycle in the Motor Museum of Western Australia.  It’s kind of wild that I am finding this exotic American iron on the other side of the planet (see our earlier blog on the 1920 Excelsior-Henderson), but hey, beauty knows no bounds!

The bike is beautiful, and the colors just flat work for me.  I guess they worked for Harley-Davidson, too…in the mid-1980s they offered a Heritage model Shovelhead with the identical “pea green” color theme.  I wish I had purchased one of those back in the day.  Lord only knows what they are going for now.

Check out the exposed pushrods, rocker arms, valve stems, and fuel tank cutouts in the photo above.   And then take a look at the leather work on the saddlebags below…

I’ll let the Motor Museum’s words do the talking here, folks…check out the distances covered on this bike, too!

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A 1950 BSA Bantam

I provided just a hint of the Motor Museum of Western Australia’s treasures so far, and a few days ago I started that with this teaser of a Beezer photo…

The bike you see above is a 1950 125cc two-stroke BSA Bantam, and it’s significant to me because in the late 1960s I actually owned one of those bikes.  It was nowhere near as beautiful as the one you see here.   My Bantam was painted kind of a rattlecan flat black, it had no muffler, and the lights didn’t work.  I bought it for $30 with no title, I rode it in the fields behind our place for a month, and then I sold it for $50 after leaving it on the front lawn for a day with a For Sale sign.  Grand times, those were.   I didn’t even know the Bantam’s displacement back then, but I knew it was a Bantam, and the thing had a surprising amount of power. I guess that’s what two-strokes do, and it kind of explains good buddy Joe Gresh’s fascination with the oilers.  It’s the only ring-a-ding-dinger I ever owned.

The Bantam at the Motor Museum of Western Australia is just flat stunning.  I had no idea they came in living color, and I sure like the colors on this one.

Colors that would rival a modern Harley. This is a good looking motorcycle.

Check out the decal on the case behind the engine.  I’m guessing it held tools or maybe electrical connections (one of the early Bantam models actually had a battery, but it was located in the headlight).

BSA stands for Birmingham Small Arms. Yep, they started as a gun company, kind of like Enfield. You gotta love the stacked rifles logo.

Everything was mechanical and simple back then.  Take a look, for example, at the front brake and its adjustment mechanism. Simple. Cool. You could actually work on a motorcycle without an iPhone or a computer. Better times, I think.

Some of the old British motorcycles of the 1940s, 1950s, and even into the 1960s had magnificent mufflers.   This one stood out.

This, my friends, is a motorcycle muffler!

In researching the Bantam, I found a few facts I did not previously know.  For starters, the design was based on a German DKW, and it came to England, Russia, and the US (yep, Harley had a variant) as war reparations at the end of World War II.   Incredibly, the British redesigned the engine as a mirror image of the German original to put the shifter on the right side (or, as they might say, the “correct” side).  They did a few other things, too, such as converting everything to English units (from metric) and incorporating English electrics (think Lucas, the Prince of Darkness).  The 1950 Bantam only had a three-speed gearbox, but it would hit 50 mph. Interesting stuff.

So there you have it.   Classic bikes galore.  And there’s more.  Stay tuned to the ExNotes blog, as we have a few more photos from the Motor Museum of Western Australia to share with you.  There’s good stuff coming and you’ll see it right here.

More Dream Bikes?   You bet!  Just click here!

Silver and Red

Most all of the fun things we did as little kids were instigated by my Grandparents. Between raising four kids and working constantly to pay for the opportunity our parents were left spent, angry and not that into family-time trips. We did try it a few times but it seems like the trips always ended with someone crying, my parents arguing or a small child missing an arm. With only 16 limbs between us we had to be careful and husband our togetherness for fear of running out.

Things were very different with Gran and Gramps. We were allowed to sleep over every weekend during which we attempted to destroy their house and any of their valuable keepsakes not made from solid iron. Maybe because of our destructiveness they acted as if they liked taking us on adventures. Camping with one hundred million mosquitos at Fish Eating Creek, going to The Monkey Jungle where the people are in cages and the apes run free, and picnics at Crandon Park beach were commonplace events. We had it made.

Twice a year Gramps would take us to Daytona for the stock car races. This was back when the cars resembled production models and ran modified production engines. There was none of this Staged racing or Playoffs. We went to Daytona to see the race. It didn’t matter to us who had the most points or won the season championship because Daytona was a championship all by itself. If you asked the drivers of that era to choose between winning the Daytona 500 or winning all the other races on the schedule I bet you’d have some takers for the 500.

We always bought infield tickets. Camping at the Daytona Speedway was included with infield tickets so we immersed ourselves in the racing and never had to leave. Gramps had a late 1960’s Ford window van with a 6-cylinder, 3-on-the-tree drivetrain. The van was fitted out inside with a bed and had a table that pivoted off the forward-most side door. To give us a better view of the racing Gramps built a roof rack out of 1” tubing. The rack had a ¾” plywood floor and was accessed via a removable ladder that hung from the rack over the right rear bumper.

At each corner and in between the corners of the roof deck were short tubes that a rope railing system fitted inside. Metal uprights slid into the short tubes and were secured by ¼-20 nuts and bolts. Rope was strung through the uprights and snugged making for a passable handrail. The railing was an attempt to keep little kids from falling off the roof of the van. Once the ladder was in place and the railing installed we would bring up chairs and a cooler. A portable AM radio provided a running commentary of the race progress. We took turns listening. It was a wonderful way to watch the races.

Back then Gramps was in what we call his silver and red period, not to be confused with his red and green period. Everything he built in that era was painted either silver or red. For some reason Gramps preferred a bargain basement silver paint that dried into a soft, chalky coating that never really hardened. The whole roof deck was painted silver except for the sockets that the uprights fitted into. Those were painted red. The stark contrast made it easy to locate the sockets.

When you would climb the ladder to the upper deck your hands would pick up silver paint. If you sat on the deck your pants would turn silver. If you rubbed your nose like little kids do your nose would turn silver. It was like Gramps painted the deck with Never-Seez. After a full day of racing we looked like little wads of Reynolds Wrap.

Our camp stove was a two-burner alcohol fueled unit that, incomprehensibly, used a glass jar to contain the alcohol. Even to my 10 year-old eyes the thing looked like a ticking time bomb so I kept my distance while gramps lit matches and cussed at the stove.

The alcohol stove took forever to light, requiring just the perfect draft. The slightest breeze would extinguish the flame. Once lit it didn’t make much heat. Our eggs were always runny and cold. It took 3 hours to cook bacon. The plates Gramps passed out to our tiny silver hands were made from aluminum. Any residual background heat remaining from the Big Bang was quickly transferred from the food to plate ensuring everything was uniformly gross.

Gramps found great pleasure in our complaints about his food. He would smile and chuckle at us if we asked for our eggs hot. When we wished aloud for Granny to be there to make the food he really got a belly laugh. He prided himself on cooking poorly. I never understood why we had the stove in the first place. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches would have been a lot easier and way more appetizing.

After the races were over it took forever to clear the infield. We took our time breaking down the upper deck, putting away the camping chairs and the stove and coating every surface we came in contact with a fine, silver dusting of color. I don’t know why I remember these things so clearly. It must be that silver paint, that chalky texture. I can close my eyes and feel the dry, talc-like residue on my hands even now.

A .300 Weatherby Vanguard

My “new to me” .300 Weatherby Vanguard.

You know, there’s more to the American Pickers television show than just watching a couple of cool dudes and their delightful inked-up assistant traveling all over the world buying cool stuff.  It’s really an education on how business works. Buy low, buy quality, rarity counts, treat everybody well, and sell at a profit. I love it, and I never miss an episode.  And I’ve watched a lot of the reruns.

The other topic American Pickers handles well is negotiation. These guys view negotiation not as an adversarial endeavor, but rather, a situation in which the buyer and seller are working together to find common ground. Backing off when things aren’t moving forward, bundling things to reach agreement, gentle suggestions…it’s all there. The show could be titled Negotiation 101 (it wouldn’t be as catchy a title, but it sure would be accurate).

I love negotiating. It’s a grand game and I love playing it.  Just the other day I took advantage of a negotiating opportunity. You know I’m a firearms enthusiast. I enjoy shooting and I enjoy reloading. I’m always on the lookout, too, for a few guns I still have on my wish list. One such firearm on the “someday” list has been a 300 Weatherby Magnum. I’ve been watching the Internet auction boards for 5 or 6 years now looking for one that was priced right, realizing I’d still have to pay the transfer fees, etc., to bring it in from wherever to California.

Why a Weatherby? Well, as you already know, I once met Roy Weatherby. He was a hell of man and a personal hero. He designed his own rifles and cartridges. The 300 Weatherby Magnum is his signature cartridge. It’s why I wanted one.

So one day a few years ago Susie and I had lunch in Pasadena with a fellow from India. That meeting may someday lead to another secret mission (this time to the subcontinent, which might be interesting as I’ve never been there).

But all that’s beside the point. On the way home, the traffic was terrible (it was the Friday before the Labor Day holiday). We diverted to surface streets on the way back and, what do you know, I spotted a little gun store (The Gunrunner in Duarte). We stopped in and they had a consignment rifle…and it was the one I’d been seeking for several years. A 300 Weatherby Magnum with a scope, a sling, and a case. It looked new to me, but it was used. Used, but in “as new” condition.

“How much?” I asked.

“$500,” the sales guy replied.

Hmmmmm. That was actually a great price. It was an especially great price considering I wouldn’t have to bring it in from out of state, there would be no freight or transfer fees, its condition was stellar, and it was what I had wanted for a long time. I didn’t answer, but I kept looking at the rifle. Susie just stared daggers at me. That’s another negotiating trick. Bring your significant other with you and have her pretend to be opposed to whatever it is you want to purchase. In this case, though, I’m not so sure she was pretending…

I was just about to say okay when the sales guy spoke up again.

“How about $500 and I’ll pick up the DROS fees,” he said (the DROS fees are the fees associated with the background checks, etc., so the State of California can be certain I won’t run out and hold up a gas station with the my rifle).

“Make it $475 and we’ve got a deal,” I said.

And that’s how you get ‘r done, folks, as another one of my heroes would say.

The test target provided with every new Weatherby…this one grouped 3 shots into an inch at 100 yards

So you can see that test target above.   All new Weatherby rifles used to come with a test target like that (maybe they still do; it’s been awhile since I bought a new one).  You might wonder if these targets are really representative of what the rifle can do, and I’m here to tell you they are indeed.  Take a look…this is what I shot with one of the loads I developed for my .300 Weatherby Vanguard the week after I bought it…

An awesome rifle in every regard…awesome power, awesome accuracy, and awesome recoil. The load is the 165 gr Hornady jacketed boat tail softpoint, a CCI 250 primer, and 80 grains of IMR 7828 propellant.  That’s a 3-shot, half-inch group at a 100 yards!

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