Forming Cases and other things

[Distant Thunder]

Sam,

Back in August of this year, as part of having Shiloh put a .44-77 barrel on my old Sharps .45-70, I did pretty much the same thing with some old 45-90 brass I had. I first trimmed them to 2.3" and then fire formed them in my original roller in 11.7 x 56mm. That was done to expand the case body out to about .513". I then sized them in a Lee .43 Spanish die and filled the case to about 1/8" from the mouth with 2F Goex. I seated a wad on the powder with just a touch of compression.

I did a few from .45-90 and a few from .300 Win Mag brass with the belt turned off and a larger rim swaged on the cases. I brought all of them to Harris, Minnesota and I seated some paper patch bullets that Kurt brought with him. Kurt let me fire formed them in his very nice .44-77 Shiloh. We did have a little trouble chambering them because the Lee die was a little long to the shoulder, but Kurt got them in and I fired them offhand and hit the 1000 yard berm with most of them.

The end result is all the cases look pretty darn good to me. I may have to refine the process a little to make cases but these will work. The .300 Win Mag cases look very good but are a lot more work to make.

I did push the rims forward on the .45-90 and increase the diameter to .620" so I don't see any extractor issues doing it that way. They extracted from Kurt's rifle without any problem.

There's no sense in doing to much more until I have my rifle back from Shiloh, but I'll have some cases to work with then and many more I can convert if I need to.

I'll post some pictures of the fireformed cases this evening.