Development of PP loads for the .44-77.

[Distant Thunder]

This why playing with numbers is a good way to pass the time and absolutely worthless for actual load development! Still, I'm enjoying it because it is part of the journey. I'm probably not going to sleep a wink Tuesday night!!! I'll be sitting in the recliner by the front window all day waiting for the big brown truck to show! Probably fall asleep before it does and wife will have to knock me upside the head to bring me around. I hope I can remember how to sign my name! This waiting stuff is the hardest part.

Anyway, yea the closest to a bottleneck I've work with is a .40-65 and I don't have any thing else to compare it to. So I really don't know what the bottleneck effect will be. So all I can do is compare it to what I get out of my .45-70 and .45-90. Yet another thing to learn!

The one and only time I made it to the Nationals, back '07 or '08, they chronographed 3 of my cartridges from my .45-90. That was my very effective grease groove bullet over 85 grains of Swiss 1 1/2 and it clocked 1355 fps. Which was exactly the same as that load clocked at the world match at Lodi back then. That was a good load, but I had to keep a close eye out for leading! Paper patching fixed that problem completely.

In my .45-70 83 grains of Swiss goes out at 1290-ish +or- a couple. So that's my frame of reference and all I have to go by.

I do have a bit of KIK 2F. No OE yet, but it's on the list.

So for my next numbers game I drop tubed 80 grains of my Swiss into a case that was fireformed in Kurt's Shiloh and that came up to .340" from the case mouth. Compressing that with a .060 wad looks pretty reasonable. 77 or 78 grains would make me pretty happy and put closer me to my 1300 fps goal. And it is just a goal, I know 1250 will get a good shooter to the top, but I need all the help I can get.

So if I end up with my bullets seated about 3/8" into the case and just a little compression that would be pretty close to what some of the original loads I've seen looked like seating depth wise. The ODG did load that case with 90 grains for Creedmoor in the early days. How did they do that?