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by Terry N. McArthur
This past season I managed to recover two paper-patched bullets from deer I harvested. The bullet I use is cast from a Hoch mould, and fired from my Ruger #1 in .375 H&H. One bullet was recovered from a Washington whitetail and the other from an Idaho mule deer. The unfired bullet in the photo weighs 339 grains. The weights of the two recovered bullets are 332 and 332.2 grains. The weights of the bullets were probably not that close to each other when I loaded them.
The Washington deer was about 150 paces away. Pacing off a shot isn't very precise when you're sliding down a rock bluff or wading the Palouse River. The bullet entered the left flank and was recovered under the hide of the right shoulder.
The Idaho deer was about 70 paces and was hit high in the right shoulder. The bullet traveled along the spine and stopped about even with the hips.
Both bullets were cast from lead so soft that the hardness barely registers on the LBT hardness tester - call it pure lead. I never have had much luck with paper-patching much harder bullets. In one of Paul Matthews books he said harder lead will work if the bullet fits the barrel and doesn't rely on being slugged up to grab the rifling. I have shot a few deer and bear with air cooled wheel weight bullets so I know that alloy will expand.
This bullet drops from the mould measuring .368" on the nose and .372" on the body bands. After patching with nine pound onion skin paper and running the bullets through a honed-out sizing die, they measure .375" on the nose and .380" on the body.
It is kind of hard to find soft lead at the right price. Free is the word I'm looking for. The way the price of gas checks keeps going up one wonders if they are made of gold or gilding metal.
I used to lose my .375 H&H cases pretty quickly due to cracks just ahead of the belt. I rarely do now with the method I have come up with for sizing them. I remove the decapping stem from an RCBS full length sizer and size the cases just enough that they will drop into the chamber. This results in the neck being too loose to hold a bullet so I neck size and decap in the neck die. A slight funnel-shape is left ahead of the shoulder. A Lyman M-die is used to expand and bell the case neck.
My present load is 60 grains of IMR4831, corn meal filler and a card wad, all compressed with a home-made die. If you try to compress the filler when seating the bullet, the bullet will expand too much to chamber. I seem to need the filler to get any accuracy. The paper-patched bullets probably don't have enough resistance by themselves to make the powder burn right.
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