So I have my brass (200 virgin Lapua) and components for metallic jacket shooting. I'm already good with that aspect. But as part of this build I am going to be working with cast bullets.
I enjoy casting my own bullets and seeing how accurate and fast I can push them. It's a self reliance thing maybe? Anyway, I cast for 224, 7mm, 30 cal and 32 cal. Since cast bullets obviously are not as well made as match bullets, you can get away with brass that is not 100% uniform. I have been able to get consistent 3/4 MOA at 100 yards with one of my hunting rigs with cast bullets. It's a 30-06. But those kick hard because the load I have is in the low 50kpsi range and pushing a 210ish grain flat point around 2000 fps. I also have a 30-30 that will do one hole groups at 50 yards at around 1100fps. All of those loads were done with once fired brass from different lots of factory loaded ammo.
Keeping on the subject of brass though. Finding the perfect fit for the bullet to the throat/leade blah blah blah is time consuming and requires alot of fit testing. Changing bullet bearing surface sizes, nose sizes, brass neck tension etc. So there is alot of creating dummy loads, resizing, expanding necks, expanding mouths, bullet pulling and so on. There is no reason to mess up virgin brass doing this. And the first couple test loads are going quite obviously tell you what you need to adjust. Then you might have to go down the rabbit hole of heat treating your bullets so you can determine what bullet hardness is required for your specific velocity/accuracy goals. So that imparts a whole new round of test fitting, and shooting Again, no point using virgin brass for that either. Once you are 90% there is when you incorporate your very good brass, and tune that last 10%. At least, that's the way I approach it.
There is a whole discipline of cast bullet benchrest shooting. Not that I will be doing benchrest or competing, but it is practiced by many in the cast bullet community. Mostly they use 30 cals. However, I want to see what I can achieve in the 6mm. I think casting is fascinating and I would be smitten if I can come up with a 1MOA load at 300 yards.
Back and forth in this thread comes from people who have this selfish notion that if you are building a rifle in XYZ cartridge, then you obviously must intend to use it exactly the same way as they do. One should not have to predict the future and include 12 caveats in a wanted add to keep these people at bay.
I get that, even though sometimes condescendingly, they are trying to help and avoid costly mistakes, but the basis for that help is shortsighted and not well thought out. If you like blueberries on your pancakes, it doesn't mean that everyone eats them the same way.
