Back in my college years I was poorer than the proverbial church mouse, so there was no big time partying or traipsing off to Florida during spring breaks for this young shooter and handloader. What I did with the small amounts of money I could scrape up was buy some quality guns and the powder and primers needed to shoot them. As for bullets, I made all those myself.

(From left to right) .30-40 Krag, .303 British, .30-06, .40-65, .45-70, .45-90, .45-100

For my rifle shooting I managed to find a Springfield Model 1903A3 .30-06 still in full battle dress. And for a few dollars I acquired a Lyman No. 311291 mold with which to cast 170-grain roundnose gas-checked bullets. I fired thousands of rounds through that rifle, and not even one of them was a factory load or jacketed bullet. It didn't take me long to realize that with the peep sights it was equipped with, I could get my home-cast bullets grouping within a couple of inches at 100 yards. Great fun was had in experimenting with alloy hardness and different powder and primer types.

With that background it's no wonder that even though I can now afford to buy bullets today I still have an extensive bullet mold collection. I can cast bullets for rifles as small as .22 caliber and as large as .58 caliber. It doesn't seem to surprise anyone to hear of good cast bullet accuracy being delivered by big-bore rifles, but I've experienced some fine grouping with cast bullets even from .22 centerfire rifles such as the .222 Remington and .220 Swift.

Right now I am loading cast bullets for a wide variety of rifles and shooting them at targets as close as 100 yards and as distant as 1000 yards. The cartridges those rifles are chambered for range from modern bottleneck, smokeless powder rounds to large-bore, straight-sided blackpowder rounds. To achieve success in reloading all these different cartridges with lead-alloy bullets I poured myself requires vastly different techniques and components. But the actual effort expended to prepare good cast-bullet rifle ammunition is just a bit more than when loading good jacketed bullet ammo. And the satisfaction gained from doing all this yourself is immeasurable.

My most recent shooting interest has been in bolt-action military rifles, so in my rifle racks sit U.S. Krags, Model 1903 Springfields, Model 1917 Enfields, and a modest assortment of foreign-made types. The amount of jacketed bullets fired through these bolt actions has been modest because I've been working up cast-bullet loads for all. Conversely, my shooting passion for almost two decades has been competing in the NRA's Black Powder Cartridge Rifle (BPCR) Silhouette game. And more recently I have joined those fellows shooting the NRA's Long Range Black Powder Target matches.

Lone Star Rolling Block

For BPCR Silhouette the metallic targets are placed at 200, 300, 385, and 500 meters. Those sound like faraway targets, but consider that the Long Range matches are fired at paper targets placed at 800, 900, and 1000 yards! The target's black bullseye is 44 inches wide, and its 10-ring is only 20 inches in diameter. Only lead-alloy bullets are allowed for both of these NRA-sanctioned shooting games. My competition rifles for these sports are one or another replica version of the Sharps Model 1874 or Remington Rolling Block. I have them in calibers such as .40-65, .45-70, .45-90, and .45-100. (I'm just getting around to working seriously with that latter cartridge.)