Question for home loaders?

[CharlesHarris]

While old fashioned black powder, which could be home made, works well in revolvers, shotguns and manually operated hunting rifles, able to use cast lead bullets, t does not work well in modern semi-automatic pistols or military type rifles, AK, SKS, M1911, Glock, etc.

You can do very well with modern smokeless shotgun powders in loading for a variety of modern handguns and rifles, using home cast bullets. If you want to load your own and cast your own bullets which will operate semi-automatically in an AK, FAL or Garand, or even an M4, this can be done using gaschecked bullets and by water dropping the hot as-cast bullets from wheelweight metal, to harden them.

You could do the whole job with just two types of powder, one being a fine-grained, easily measured pistol or shotgun powder of a type optimized for 12-ga. Target or field loads, with 32 grams of shot at 325-350 m/s. The other would be an extruded tubular military rifle powder optimized for full-charge hunting loads in a cartridge such as the .303, 7.62 NATO or similar.

Extruded tubular rifle powders are preferred over Ball types commonly used
In the 5.56mm, because they are more versatile for.use in different calibers, andcharges may safely be reduced 1/3 below a full service charge, so that they are suitable for reduced powder cast bullet loads. For instance, I use the same rifle powder in the .30-30, .303, 7.62 NATO and .30-06, for both full charge hunting ammunition, or cast bullet practice ammunition. The minimum cast bullet, gascheck load which reliably cycles my Garand, has about the same power as a full charge load in the .30-30 and uses 40 grains of military rifle powder, vs. 52 grains in a full charge load with jacketed bullet.

A subsonic small game load in the .30-06 uses the same 155-grain cast bullet, without quench hardening, and no gascheck, and instead uses about the same amount of shotgun powder contained in a .45 ACP pistol cartridge. These small game loads do not cycle the M1, but can be fed manually, and have energy similar to a .38 Special revolver cartridge, being mild, quiet and accurate within 100 yards.