gun dreams

[Steve]

A friend of mine used low powered rifle loads, with cast lead heads, in .308. He was assured by the manufacturers that Unique powder was safe ( from memory I think he was using 11grns ), but after shooting several hundred of this load one blew his rifle up. We don't know why, speculation is that it might have been handled differently and the powder was all sitting towards the front of the cartridge or his powder measure threw a light charge.

I have avoided normal pistol powders because of this, and use Trail Boss which is a bulky but low powered powder usually used for "Cowboy Action Shooting". It's a relatively safe powder, basically if you can fit the powder in a case without compressing it then you won't exceed pressure limits on any modern cartridge and you can work downwards from there.