357 Magnum Deer Load for my Henry Big Boy Silver

so I grew up hunting in West Virginia you know I'm I live in Kentucky now but I'm a West Virginian at heart so I grew up with Ohio right across the river and if you live near another state you know how these cross border rivalries take shape you know people from Ohio for one thing they cannot drive at all they're just awful at driving their women folk not the least bit attractive for some reason they insist on calling their DMV the BMV Bureau of Motor Vehicles whoever heard of that cramped it's the DMV it's the DMV everywhere except for your craphole state but the worst problem of all the worst problem with Ohio was the fact that they only allowed shotguns during gun season large parts of Ohio are very flat but the southeastern portion lots of hills but still you had to use a shotgun and that was a bit of a nuisance because here's the one good thing about Ohio they've always as for you know for my life it's always been one buck per hunter per year over there which means that the growth the Bucks grew a whole lot bigger than they did over in West Virginia where we could kill like seven bucks a year so the only bucks you could find were spikes and three points because they all got smoked every year so if we wanted to kill a big buck we needed to cross the river and in into enemy territory and hunt Ohio so that's what I started doing later on my brother and I actually my brother first started hunting in Ohio and then I hunted there as well later on I lived there you know those details aren't important and if you tell anybody I ever lived in Ohio I'll cut you so we started bow hunting over there and the first time we happened to be over there in gun season it sounded like a war zone everybody with their shotguns it takes at least ten shots to kill a deer I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard a one shot kill over there it was crazy everybody's shooting like crazy and at the time this was really before the rules with muzzleloaders started changing a lot and you could have a scope and an inline muzzle loader and that's the way a lot of people ended up going but recently and to the point of this video within the last few years they've opened up their regulations to allow straight wall pistol cartridges so now the rules say you can use any straight wall cartridge that's between 357 and 50 caliber so that's pretty awesome now I have a no hi oh hunting license and again a tag for gun season this year so what I want to do is I want to take my Henry Big Boy's silver which is a 357 Magnum and I want to work up a little deer hunting load with it so that's the plan for today's video now bullet selection of course that's the most critical thing anytime you're talking about working up a hunting load I found a lot of really good information and a lot of good reports about the hundred and fifty eight grain Hornady XDP hollow-point so this is going to be kind of our primary test bullet but I also do want to shoot a few with 140 grain xtp hollow-point so those are the two bullets we're going to use 158 is the primary test here the 140 is a bit of a backup just in case for some reason the 158 doesn't shoot well for powders I don't want to screw around a whole lot here so I'm going with my two best options as far as my research shows first off is winchester 296 same stuff as Hoschton h1 10 very good high-velocity powder for full house Magnum loads so winchester 296 will be our first powder the second powder is going to be Alliant power pro 300 MP this is a very similar powder to Winchester 296 they look identical and our tests in 300 blackout and the information you find out there on the internet says that 300 MP is a little bit slower burning than Winchester 296 which means we can use a little bit higher charge and hopefully get a little bit more velocity some of the reported velocities with 300 MP are a little bit goofy to be honest with you it's supposed to really get these things smoking for primers I want to use Winchester small pistol Magnum primers the W SPMS for brass i've got once fired Starline brass there we are this is what we've primarily been using for 357 Magnum and that's what we are going to use today load data wasn't all that hard to track down we got the good old Hornady manual which has both powders I don't remember if it has 300 MP now the good part is that the Hornady manual has got a 357 magnum rifle section where they shoot out of a 16 inch barrel in a Rossi 92 same thing with the Hodgdon website they have some rifle data there let's see what's there barely with an 18 and a half inch barrel so we've got a bit of data that you know will apply directly to us and our carbine set up now they don't have data for 300 MP in the rifle section we have to go over to the pistol section but regardless I'm not going to worry too much about Hornady's data we know they're a little conservative sometimes and their numbers for both of these powders are a little bit low but one thing to note here from the Hornady manuals they show an overall length of 1.5 9 0 with both the 140 and the 158 XTP now if we go to the Hodgdon website for h1 10 data Winchester 296 data they show a max charge of sixteen point seven grains and they shoot an overall length that's just a little bit shorter 10,000 shorter at one point five eight zero I was looking earlier at the Kaenel or alignment both of these bullets have got Ken lures and I think the one point five eight zero overall length lines that can lure up with our case mouths a little bit better so that's what I'm gonna go with and Hodgson shows a max charge of sixteen point seven grains and a starting charge of fifteen we're going to shoot fifteen point eight up to sixteen point seven in three tenths of a grain increments so we're going right up to the Hodge to max we're going to shoot four loads so fifteen point eight up to sixteen point seven now with the Alliant power pro 300 MP if we look at the Alliant website they use one hundred and fifty eight green spear gold hollow points now the spear Gold Dot is a little bit weird construction like I don't know if it's plated bonded whatever it's not a normal jacketed bullet and it seems like the load data for the gold dots is a little bit hotter than your standard jacketed data a lot of times so they show a max of eighteen point six I only want to go up to 18 point two just to give us a little bit of a buffer in case we're going to get higher pressures with this xtp with 158 grain xdp then we would with a spear gold hollow-point so let's shoot seventeen point three up to eighteen point two now over on the with 140 grain XTP like I only want to shoot ten of them just to kind of get an idea of how they group and give us a backup in case the 158 is terrible Hodgson shows a max charge with that guy of nineteen point zero grains so I want to shoot eighteen point five and nineteen point zero and we're going to shoot that same overall length of one point five eight zero hopefully that makes sense for groups with each of the powders with the 158 and then two groups with the one forty in Winchester 296 that makes fifty shots and that should make for a good little test so the table is set we're ready to rock and our first step is going to be resizing this brass so we're using our lead deluxe pistol die set which has a carbide resizing die so no Lube necessary we're just going to run these guys up in there and want to make sure that we have good contact between the shell holder and the bottom of the die at the top of the stroke we do so that guy is right resized and ready to rock now before I forget here at the same time we've got our flaring die let me grab a bullet so I don't want a flare of tun but the normal resize case you'll see that it's bad pain in the butt to get a bullet sitting on it halfway decent so let's give it just a little bit of flare I think right now I've got this set up at kind of the starting spot in the direction so we might need to screw it down just a little bit more nope not really just that little bit is all we need here you can see now that it is set them down inside of there a little bit and that is plenty for a jacketed bullet like this guy yep no problems at all so that's what we'll do resize and flare so I wanted to run the the numbers on these guys through a ballistics calculator I ran it through the the Hornady website has a decent one for velocity I think 1650 is a good goal I think we're probably going to exceed that a little bit especially with the 300 MP but for running than the preliminary numbers I chose 1650 and it looks pretty darn good to me with a 50-yard zero I'm three point one inches low at 100 yards so it looks like this is gonna be a good you know point-and-shoot sort of trajectory out to a hundred yards I think that's what I'll cap myself at you know this will be a hundred yards an end gun because if we look at you know the numbers here at 100 yards we're still going 1350 six feet per second so that's that's like point-blank numbers with with the revolvers and for those of you that was my first plan was to just actually hunt with my Ruger GP 100 match champion but the barrels not long enough they have a minimum barrel length of 5 inches and I think my GP 100 is like 4.2 or something so the GP 100 wasn't a good option or a legal option I think it's a good option yeah just not legal I do have a scope on the gun for today's tests but I think I'm going to take it off once we get a load worked up and we're and we're sure that it's shooting well I think I'm just going to take it off and actually hunt with open sights so as you can see I'm getting the primers put in these guys with my RCBS hand priming tool so we're going to be ready for powder here in just a moment yeah one thing I forgot to do was hit the case mouth with a quick deburr and chamfering tool of course it's best to do this before you prime so you don't have to worry about contaminating your primers with brass shavings but sometimes you forget so that's it nothing crazy just a little bit just to get rid of any burrs on the case mouth that might cause us problems during bullet seeding so we are now ready for powder so I'm going to throw each charge and then trickle it up to perfect but before I start weighing out my final charges I've got ten pieces of brass that I'm going to just load up as ciders try and get this scope dialed in a little bit so I'm throwing right around 16 grains which is near the starting point on our winchester 296 loads so I think I'll just go ahead and use this setting and throw these first ten and then come back and trickle the others that's what we'll do let me throw these first ten charges the ciders and then we will get our bullets eating die setup all right we know we're seating to just about at our candle or so we can use that to at least get things close okay that should be pretty darn close there we go that one's 1584 let me go ahead and seat a couple of them here we'll see if they are coming out pretty consistent yep fifteen eighty five so very very close let's good and dollar down a couple more thousandths maybe too far that one went to 1578 yep 15 78 I want to just dismiss our yeah it's looking like fifteen seventy eight and fifteen seventy nine our two most common lengths here on these first ten so I think that's good that's good looking bullet seating setting so let's move over we're using the Lee factory crimp guy that came in our setup I've got it set up so we screwed this guy down until we feel it touch there it is they say half turn for a light crimp in one turn for a heavy crimp let's look at the light the half turn setting yep she's definitely curled into the candle or just a smidgen but you know what let's go ahead and just go with what they call the heavy cream there's one turn let's see what that looks like Wow yeah that feels way too heavy there we go that's a little bit lighter the press seems to take a little bit less effort than that full turn that full turn just felt a little bit too heavy so this is baby 3/4 of a turn on the leaf factory crimp die and you can see that case mouth getting tucked in there pretty nicely that looks like good looking around to me I think that killed a deer I think it would so basically what's remaining is me measuring out 50 charges and then doing this exact same thing with with those bullets so not much to see we'll probably just skip it all and go straight to the range but if something interesting or important comes up as I'm loading our other 50 I'll definitely turn on the camera and let you know but otherwise I'll see you on a range okay folks we've got a target out at 100 yards there's my chronograph and back here is my big boys silver my Henry big voiceover looking beautiful except for a bunch of smudge marks and finger prints which are just plain unavoidable I don't know what I was thinking about buying a silver one but it sure is pretty when you shine it up to be honest so I bought this scope mount this is a Henry scope mount and this is a four to twelve vortex crossfire I've got on there I thought it was gonna look SuperDuper goofy with a scope on it but it actually looks kind of freakin sweet man like that doesn't seem too ridiculous my initial plan was to get a like a little maybe like a 1/2 for power scope in silver and I was hoping Henry had some scope bases that would match this gun but they they don't or at least they didn't a year ago whenever I bought this base all they had was black so that was a little bit disappointing but overall still pretty good-looking package if you ask me so I've got this guy sighted in I got it sighted in at a hundred yards our cider loads which I think we're about 16 grains of Winchester 296 we're already almost 1700 feet per second so I think some of the velocities were seeing are going to be silly but hopefully we don't hit pressure problems man the stock on this thing is just freakin beautiful got the large lever guns are just a thing of beauty alright let's get to shooting okay first up is fifteen point eight grains of Winchester 296 all right that's not a bad group to start out with yeah not bad at all so moving on to sixteen point one grains all right sixteen point four grains okay last up with Winchester 296 is 16.7 grains I'll tell you what these groups are okay but I'm not sure I'm doing the gun justice because this scope this vortex crossfire to scope it doesn't have adjustable parallax and I don't know where the parallax is set from the factory but it damn sure ain't a hundred-yard if I move my head you know if I move my head around behind the scope crosshairs are moving all over the place and trying to lay on the ground and shoot this is already a challenge as far as cheek weld and eye position and that sort of crap goes so yeah I'm struggling a little bit here but the groups downrange are not too bad alright sixteen point seven grains all right groups pretty darn good but boy those philosophies are all over the place a little bit pretty crappy standard deviation numbers all right time to move on to power pro 300 MP our first charge is seventeen point three grains I'm interested to see how crazy these velocities are all right decent group there to start off with the power pro 300 MP 1711 is not crazy and that's our first standard deviation below 20 so the signs are good so far the brasses looked good all along haven't really run into any primer flattening or anything like that so I'm moving right along seventeen point six grains of 300 MP okay seventeen point nine okay last up with a 300 MP is 18 point 2 grains alright so our velocity didn't really climb as much as I expected it to and that last standard deviation number kind of went to crap a little bit so let's move on to the hundred and forty grain Hornady XDP first up is going to be eighteen point five grains of 296 okay last up is nineteen grains with the 140 all right so I didn't know what to expect here you know putting a scope on the Henri for the first time but those groups aren't bad at all especially with the scope difficulties I was mentioning so let's get back to the bench and talk this over all right let's start with a look at the brass and it'll be a really quick look because this brass all looks outstanding let's see this row right here would be our top charge of 300 MP which is our probably our highest pressure load still very nice-looking primers yeah nothing weird going on this off-center firing pin in the big boy always kind of freaks me out a little bit but I don't think it's a problem it's just yeah not quite centered so yeah that's about that's all I got to say about that looking good HR groups they weren't quite as good as I thought but I'm still pretty ok with this Winchester 296 best woman was 1.8 and the worst was 2.2 so pretty good consistency right around that 2-inch mark and 300 MP started out exactly the same way except these last two opened up a little bit kind of had a high shot on both of them that really screwed things up a little bit and our 140 grain XDP yeah best group of the day there 1.5 inch was our last group and 2.4 inch so looks like about a 2 inch average I'm ok with that I was for some better standard deviation numbers with Winchester 296 it's 30 to 35 yeah these are these are pretty gross numbers and I think that's the reason why we kind of saw a little bit of a little bit of a weirdness here with 1706 and then it dropping back down to 1692 given a little bigger sample size I think that probably would have ironed itself out the numbers were a little bit better with 300 MP you know in these in these upper teens we had the last one here was 25 point three and then for some reason the 140 Greiner was better you know bigger charge wait maybe a little bit less excess case capacity thirteen point one and thirteen point seven the velocities overall though were excellent you know we basically got up to 1700 with Winchester 296 and then got up to about 1730 here with our 300 MP that's pretty smoking fast man that that's uh I just I find that impressive for a hundred fifty-eight grain bullet to get it going that fast 357 Magnum is a little more capable than I thought and then yeah the hundred forty Greiner we were up above 18 hundred feet per second 1862 so we were definitely pretty smoking fast here on the velocities so I'm trying to decide what to do what to go with you know this this crazy shot here really made this a whole lot less attractive than it otherwise would be I really think it was a fluke though I think with the the 12 power scope plus the parallax issues I was having that it could have been me but man that's all that's an awful long way away you know what to be honest yeah this is what I'll do here here's this is my hunting load 16.7 grains of Winchester 296 we didn't get any pressure signs the group was okay nothing weird was going on here plus I have lots and lots of Winchester 296 300 MP I've only got one pound of and it's a little harder to find you know on the shelf than Winchester 296 or H 110 so that's good that that lets me avoid groups that were possibly opening up but I still wonder if this might have been me so that that's it we'll go 16.7 grains we'll call it 1700 feet per second and that ought to do a great job that ought to do a great job on some dear yes overall this was super successful you know if I was gonna leave a scope on the gun maybe I would try and tweak the loads a little bit or find the best accuracy I could but you know what I'm pulling off the scope I'm gonna be shooting open sights whether the gun shooting two inches or two and a half inches I'm not going to be able to tell or care so this is good we got where we needed to be in the end so I think that pretty much covers it I hope to have some 357 Magnum pistol stuff coming up soon you know with the with a Ruger GP 100 it's been way too long since I've shot that gun and had it out so alright I think that's where we'll call it done if you want to help support the channel come check me out at patreon.com slash reloading and I will see you guys next time [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 204,335

Rating: 4.7348871 out of 5

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Id: UiC32voJd4s

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017