Good Ideas Are Immortal

Somewhere during the latter part of the twentieth century, my shooting moved to a new chapter, and I found myself fireforming cases for a new chamber in a Ruger No. 1.

- Dan Hilliard

Gone was the .22 Hornet, in was the K-Hornet. It was a simple and enjoyable journey that gave justification for many trips to the range.

With the passage of time, a new century arrived, but along with that came a step backward in time. Slug guns, bullet casting, paper patching; you all recognize the symptoms I’m sure. It never occurred to me that the ways and means of times past would revisit to save my bacon, this in a variation of hammer die technology.

Just a few years ago, a treasured relic of yesteryear came into my life. A Model 54 Winchester in remarkably good condition with a chamber enhanced by none other than Lysle Kilbourn.

The bore and function are flawless. A slugging of the bore indicates a nominal groove dimension of .2225 inch, so in consideration of the scarcity of components in those days, I picked up a Lyman 225438 mould with the intention of preserving my supply of properly dimensioned jacketed bullets by fire forming with cast lead. The first excursion was disheartening to say the least. The necks split in three out of three cases, so I set the Remington brass aside and moved to the Winchester stock. One out of three split, and I consigned myself to the process of annealing brass. It is a process I don’t particularly enjoy, but neither do I embrace the thought of destroying a barrel with such pedigree.

Round three of the fire forming led to improvement but not a solution. Roughly 30 percent of the Remington brass failed and about 5 percent of the Winchester brass did so as well. I was perplexed and frustrated. I revisited the annealing process and found with a second round of treatment, the failure rate dropped to about 15 percent with the Remington brass and less than 3 percent for the Winchester; better, but not good enough. I hope you appreciate that the sample sizes were small, 6 and 12 rounds per brand, respectively, and the loads were mild. Caution is indeed the better part of valor.