New .44 caliber Brooks mold.

[Distant Thunder]

45-110,

That is why I ordered this mold with a flat base, I'm a fan of the LDPE wads and I have hard time seeing in my mind how it doesn't push into the cavity. The cavity that Brooks cut for this mold is fairly shallow or I would have machined it flat before casting a single bullet. Being the ODGs used cupped base bullets and I'm always interested in what they used and how they got it to work I decided to cast a few while waiting for Brooks to make a flat base for this mold. He insisted on making it for no charge because I had ordered a flat base with the mold. Very good of him I think.

Well the mold casts very nice and easy with the cupped base once I get it hot, it's no small mold. The sprue hole is rather small, but it fills super easy. The first batch of bullets looked good enough to try and being short on time as I said, I just pulled the bullets from old loads and seated these new bullets in their place. I patched one and ran it into my size die and it zipped right through with barely any effort! I pushed it up into the bore and it went in pretty easily, a bit easier than I usually like but not bad.

After shooting the first few targets with my thicker paper I thought I would see how the thinner paper would compare. There's some old guy on here that claims the .44-77 really likes thinner paper. My #4 target makes it hard to argue with him. It's only one target but it did look good to me.

So for now I will continue to work with the cupped base version and see how it goes. I will also work with the flat base at some point down the line, but hey this is working.

I was worried that the poly wad would push into the base cavity and functionally be too small to seal behind the bullet. That would likely lead very badly, but there has been no evidence of any problems so far.

If the wads were sticking to the base I’m pretty sure that would have showed up on the target as flyers. I have had a few of what I call outliers, shots that are just a little out of the main group with no discernable cause, but no flyers as in shots that are wild and randomly well outside the group 1 moa or more.

The patches from both papers are all well shredded and laying 3 to 5 feet in front of the muzzle which is 5 feet off the ground when I’m shooting out of my shooting shack. So patches are separating cleanly and quickly. With the patches folded over the base and between the wad and the bullet I think it would be pretty hard for the wad not to be pulled off by the patch when it separates.

I do plan to experiment with some different wad combinations and I’ll see if any problems show up then. So far so good!