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The Lancaster that had arrived needing a new butt pad is now ready to try out. It's in 500/450 3.25". My plan is to take 500/416 brass and see if I can neck that up in my 500/450 2.75" dies. If not, then I was going to try fireforming with cream of wheat or grits, but that takes a 45 min drive each way to where I can shoot. Hopefully necking up with dies will work.

Any advice on either approach?

CJF,
If you wait until your wife has gone shopping and are willing to change to worn out polishing media (will not attract mice) as the filler, you should be able to fire form a few cases somewhere around the house. Since there is no bullet involved, you only have to consider the noise and the mess. In two different houses I have fireformed a few cases by shooting from the basement to the crawl space, through the access door. Another option is an enclosed garage, if you have a "shop vac". If nothing else, you could establish the necessary charge weight before having to drive to the range. I don't have good experience necking cases up with loading die expanding plugs where the final case needs to be the same length as the donor case. If you feel the need to neck them up, you should make, or have someone else make, an expander plug with a longer gentle taper. Expanding the necks by either method will shorten the cases but having to trim to "square up" uneven necks caused by loading die expanders make it worse. Just a couple suggestions.
Mike

2 suggestions. One is to fire form as tapered expanders can sometimes lead to odd necks. Of course, in a case that size it may not make much of a difference. The other suggestion is, if fire forming, don't use grits. For one thing they really make a stink that way and for another thing, that is a criminal waste of one of nature's most perfect foods.

I wish I could fireform at home but where we live here in town that's not something I think will go unnoticed by the neighborhood. Re grits value as a food for the gods, does that diminish after expiration date plus 2 years? I've got a package in the pantry that I've been holding onto for fireforming as it's now quite old.

I've got Unique powder. 10grs sound right?

CJF,
The way to know if a fireforming load is right is to try it. If you load the whole batch and they (or some) don't fill out, you have to drive back and try again.

The rule is that not much attention will be paid to one bang but a second one will draw attention. Try just one and see how it works for you.

Mike & HalfaDouble, you both hinted at the solution...trying the fireforming loads before driving to the range. Well I can report after driving 80 minutes round trip that 10.5gr of Unique is NOT enough to form 500/416 brass into 500/450 3.25". Basically nothing happened to the brass. It was entertaining to shoot a grit shotgun load 10 times. Sounded like what a BPE round would if suppressed

On a positive note, the other Charles Lancaster rifle, the 450 BPE in 3.25", shot very well with 300gr JHP .452" NfB loads that also worked quite well in my Edward Lang, and even better with .458" lead flat nosed bullets weighing 350gr with a NfB load using 4198.











I'll have to post some side by side comparisons of the two rifles. The earlier serial number rifle strangely has rebounding locks, while the newer rifle has the older style non-rebounding locks. Both have stalking safeties.

Note: we had rain yesterday and last night, so I did not move the shooting bench at our range due to the mud, and the range for these was only 22yds. The lighter jacketed bullets were chosen because my Lang has tight bores and I'd loaded them for rifle. With 45gr of 4198 these were doing 1799fps on average for 4 shots with a std dev of 8.9. The larger (.458 vs .452) and heavier bullets (350 vs 300gr) that generated the pictured target were faster at an average velocicty of 1865fps for 4 shots with a std dev of 15.8.

It was not uncommon for an owner to send a loved rifle or shotgun back to the maker to have the locks converted to rebounding.

CJF,
That is the way I learned and wouldn't be surprised if HalfaDouble did too.
Mike