New .44 caliber Brooks mold.

[Distant Thunder]

I had some time today to shoot some of the bullets I cast Saturday. It wasn’t perhaps the best day for load testing with gusty 12 to 15 mph left to right wind and every once in awhile it would switch and come from 2 o’clock. That caught me once on shot #9. Except for that one shot the rest held less than 1 ½” vertical.

Not knowing exactly where to start my load development and not having the time to test 3 shot groups I just pulled the bullets from some loads left over from matches this past summer and seated these Brooks bullets in their place. They didn’t shoot too bad and with less wind would probably group near 1 MOA.

This first group is very encouraging and it shows that when my .44-77 is happy with a load it will do well with almost any pp bullet seated over it. There is still a lot of load testing and development to do but I think this bullet is going to do well for me.

As I have been doing with this .44-77 when I’m just at home shooting and testing for fouling control I used 3 breaths through my blow tube followed by one wet patch and one dry patch, load and shoot. It works good at home when I’m not on the clock. That way there are no bore pigs to clean.