I recently acquired a Saeco #449 4 cav mould on e-bay. This mould is no longer listed in the Saeco catalog. I was looking for a PB design of around 215 to 220g for use in my S&W 329PD. A Kentucky expert and I both looked at the picture on e-bay and decided it looked like a PB. When the mould finally arrived it was a gas check style. I was disappointed, but fired up the old furnace anyway. I quench cast a few out of ww+1%Tin and loaded them with 8g of Green Dot. I was supprised at how accurate they shot offhand from the wispy 329PD. The holes in the 25 yard target are anything but "clean" since this design has no wadcutting type shoulder like Lyman's similar 429303. The best news was no leading sans checks! As it warms up,(May in these parts) I expect to do some accuracy and chronographing work with this design comparing it to the aforementioned 429303 and my old standby 429421. The meplat on this boolit is a little larger than the point on the 303, but not much. It is definately what I'd call a truncated cone.
Does anyone else have any experience with this design in .44 mag revolters?

Lately I've been giving thought to the most accurate bullet shape for informal (perhaps including long range) revolver target shooting and plinking. Wadcutters are out because of range considerations and I personally believe a hollow base is a key to their superior short range accuracy.

Most of us have used SWCs forever. I have read several accounts of how accurate roundnose bullets are though. What each individual revolver will prefer will vary, but disregarding factors like cutting a clean hole for target scoring what will shoot the best groups at all ranges on average?

Lately, I've been shooting the Lyman 'Cowboy" bullet for the 44/40 (210gn) out of my Ruger B/H 44mag. Velocity and accuracy on 200m rams is good but lacking the real knockdown power of a heavier projectile.

Valdez, I tend to agree with BAW. A cowboy design with smooth sides (ease of loading) with 60 percent meplat, or having enough meplat to cover the primer completely in literal cases where a 60 percent coverage won't be enough (like possibly some of the small pistol calibers). ... felix

Another Keith basher!!!
Elmer did that when young over 60 years ago when little if any knowledge was being put out by anyone else. One of the first bullets to provide good close and long range accuracy! Technology improves and people changed his design for the worse. Most modern clones of his bullet shoot poorly. That ain't his fault, he complained about the changes. Ask someone with an old original design how they shoot. LBT ogival wadcutters don't have the velocity/accuracy range of the Keith either. And besides, Elmer was an old man with nothing to prove or defend, since he led the way. Think about it!

If you do a search in the favorite loads forum for 480, you'll come up with the load work I did a couple of years back. I tried nearly a dozen different bullet desings, mostly of the LBT shapes, and one SWC. All bullets were capable of 1" 5 shot groups @ 50 yds. Even the 460 gr WFN. The WFN's are reported to need 1200-1300 fps to shoot accurately, and it is a long bullet, but I was getting the same tight groups @ 1050 fps I was getting with the LFN shapes. I've gotten vary good accuracy from the 310 gr LFN driven at 950-1000 fps, and the 400's @ 1100-1200 fps. When I load down to 700 fps, the groups run 2-3" @ 25 yds.

Me thinks within reason, the mechanical accuracy is much more important than the bullet design.

I'm still planning to have a keith style SWC of ~270 gr made for my 480, so I can see how it performs in my gun, and will hopefully provide good groups when driven at 700 fps.

I did send some of those WFN's to a guy in the lower 48, and he said they started flying funny around 150-175 yds, but the LFN shapes did well on out to 400-500 yds.

The only long range testing I did was with the 310 gr LFN out to 200 yds on a steel ram. The gun could easily keep them on the ram, but I was the limiting factor.

In a .475" bore the meplats are: LFN's 73%, the Lee 400 gr 77% and the WFN is 81%

From what I've read about and what I've shot in the past, the largest meplat was for stopping game that would hurt you. Whereas they were great stoppers up to 50 yds., they weren't aerodynamically constructed for longer ranges. The Keith seme-wadcutters were about ideal for longer range. Back in the day, using the 250 gr. Keith semi-wadcutter, we found that they carried against most wind movements and were still accurate at about 250 yds. We were just plinking at anything on the mountainside that would give us a visual feedback on whether hit or miss. We must have killed a whole bunch of 10' boulders in those days.

Yes, Valdez, a fat meplat (not necessairly entirely flat) is required for accuracy when dealing with an unknown boolit requirement. For example, there is only one BR boolit (strongly pointed) that shoots extremely well in my BR gun, but there is a host of round nose boolits (simi-pointed) that shoot darn good, and some are good enough for a non-competetive match or two. It has to do with how well the boolit fits the gun for ignition, and where the weight of a boolit is in relation to its center, not to mention the amount of bearing metal required for clean and consistent engraving from shot to shot. Therefore, a WFN might imply too short of a nose section, and a LFN could mean a nose that is a little too long. It's pure magic when a boolit just seems to shoot good at any velocity, and this magic is difficult to determine for any one particular gun. I'd say for a revolter, a 40 percent flat meplat would be minimum with a nose that comes in to that meplat fairly fast. Maybe, we are talking truncated roundnose boolits, eh? That Eley 22 match boolit would be a design I would try for grins, but only after a good cowboy boolit was on the bench. Might have Dan at Mountain Molds help with a little R&D, and provide several shapes for actual shooting trials. ... felix

Valdez---You notice nobody will give a definite answer? That's because you just don't pick your friends nose.

This was the 90% meplat target.

1.75" at 50yds.
That's not exactly a terrible group.
If your shooting 45's and would like to try some of the different MM noses, drop me an email and I'll see if I can round up a few. They are all in the 320-350gn range.

I did a rather limited test with www.mountainmolds.com on different nose designs on heavy 45 bullets shot out of my Raging Bull 454.

http://members.fortunecity.com/howda/mm454.html

The smallest nose that we tried was a 70% and it seemed to shoot the best with 3 shots on a couple different targets cutting the same hole. The 80 and 90% nose did well, but didn't seem group quite as tight.

I don't know anything about bullet design, I just like to pull the trigger.

50 yards.