Cast Bullets - RELOADER'S PRESS

Reading through older hand- loading manuals recently, roughly from the 1930s to the 1970s, it was apparent that nearly all of the popular writers of the period started out shooting cast bullets in rifles and handguns.

- Dave Scovill

That’s understandable to some extent, because there were hardly any jacketed handgun bullets available, save for handmade swaged, and a lot of folks, such as Townsend Whelen, wanted a cast bullet for foraging loads in their favorite hunting rifle. The late Al Miller would be a classic example; most of his handloading projects in military and domestic rifle calibers included a number of cast bullet loads that helped to keep those rifles in the field during the off-season.

The late Ken Waters rarely did a “Pet Loads” for rifles or handguns that didn’t include a generous selection of cast bullet loads. Even Wolfe Publishing handgun editor John Zemanek, who traveled the world as a handgun competitor until settling down in Utah, told me that he almost never used jacketed bullets, with the exception of product tests, because he couldn’t make them shoot as well as the cast bullet loads he used to collect hundreds of championship medals from all over the world that filled glass display cases in his trophy room. John also used cast bullets exclusively when hunting feral hogs along the Virgin River in northwest Arizona and big game in Utah and Texas.