I know Trail Boss is made for lead bullets and cowboy loads, but..
Can you shoot a jacketed bullet with it?
Say a 250 grain Hornady HP-XTP with 6 grains of Trail Boss? Waiting on some 255 Keiths to come in.
Any problems with this?

No reason why you can't use jacketed bullets with Train Boss. The reason Trail Boss is mostly used for Cowboy loads is that it fills the case so well with the reduced loads popular in Cowboy shooting; helping to prevent double or triple charges in a case. It has nothing to do with the Cowboy shooting rules that say only lead bullets are allowed.

I imagine velocity will suffer. As for safety a fella could always email http://www.imrpowder.com/ and ask, just to be sure.

quote:

Originally posted by chumly:
I know Trail Boss is made for lead bullets and cowboy loads, but..
Can you shoot a jacketed bullet with it?
Say a 250 grain Hornady HP-XTP with 6 grains of Trail Boss? Waiting on some 255 Keiths to come in.
Any problems with this?

My friend bought a 500 S&W and I thought it would be a good idea to make up some "familiarization" rounds, as it is his first firearm. He had also bought a bunch of 50 AE bullets (300 grain or 325, I can't remember), so we thought these would be good to use.

quote:

Originally posted by nordrseta:
I imagine velocity will suffer. As for safety a fella could always email http://www.imrpowder.com/ and ask, just to be sure.

When I could not find jacketed bulled load data, I contacted IMR for their advice (also for loading data for the seldom-used 500 S&W special brass).

IMR had no data for the 500 Special and their reply for the jacketed bullet question was a cryptic "Trail Boss does not like jacketed bullets".

Followup inquiries to IMR ("How does Trail Boss express its dislike for jacketed bullets") produced no response.

So much for customer service.

The end of the tale, we loaded up some rounds in the 650 to 900 fps range (out of his 4" barrel) based on Trail Boss' cast bullet published data for that weight cast bullets and they worked fine.

I figure they would make a darned good home defense load as well as a good practice load.

I would tell the load we used, but since I would be depending on my memory (my notes are not here) from a year ago, I will refer any inquiries for load data to your loading manuals. We used cast load data and kept it on the low side.

I'm still a bit steamed at IMR's attitude. If anyone gets a better response, please let me know.

Good luck, good shooting.