38 Special round ball loads

[goon]

Anyone ever tried any round ball loads in a .38 Special. I've been thinking about it for awhile and I'd like to try them as a cheap plinking load.
What size should I use? I only see .350 and .375 round balls available and neither of them are the "right" size.
Will the .375 swage down just by being seated in the casing?
Any other way to approach this?

 

[mkl]

I've shot 00 buckshot out of a 32 S&W just for kicks.

What size is 000 buckshot? Maybe that would work.

 

[rcmodel]

I haven't tried it, but if I did:

000 Buckshot is supposed to be .360", or .003" over the bore size of a .38 Special.

If they will hand seat to just level with the case mouth, I would smear a dab of bullet lube or other grease in the case mouth to lube them through the barrel and prevent leading.

However, round ball loads as used in cap & ball revolvers are over-size for the bore, mashed into the cylinder with the loading lever, and come out of the barrel looking more like cylindrical bullets with rifling marks down the side, then balls that barely touch the rifling.

rc

 

[snuffy]

This 000 buck is advertised as .360, which would be perfect for 38/357 bores.
http://www.ballisticproducts.com/prodinfo.asp?number=SBK30

8# would give you approx. 800 pellets. I did some experimenting 25 years ago with buckshot in 357 shells. It worked, but accuracy was terrible. Not enough area for the rifling to grab. Very low loads were the best, but IIRC the velocity was only 600 fps. Any attempt to drive them faster resulted in patterns instead of groups, and leaded the barrel badly. I tried 2 and then 3 balls stacked, again patterns instead of groups. Recovered balls from the multiple loads, showed they flattened against each other, becoming almost square!

Try it if you must, but you will find what I and others have found. Neat idea but in practice not practical.

 

[jfh]

I still have a few boxes of the Rem ball load I bought about twenty years ago--but haven't looked at it for some time. Is that in a .357 cartridge?

That load did work, IIRC. That is, at 7-10 yards, three good holes about 1.5-3.0" apart. I probably fired it from a 2" SP101, but it might have been from a 6" GP100.

As an aside, Dean Grinnel has an article about building up a similar type of round with 40-gr(?) round pellets from a Lee mold. That article was from the mid-Eighties, in one of the gun annuals--and it was accompanied by appropriately-hot load recipes. Obviously, it was written long before the PC concerns about factory ammo only for self defense.

Jim H.

 

[goon]

Thanks.
I'm not really planning to try a multi-ball load unless I do it just for fun.
I just want to load one pellet per load to have a cheap, easy shooting plinking load to sort of make my .357 act like a .22.

 

[Jimfern]

44 MAG balls

I haven't tried it with 357, but I recently got some .433 round balls and Speer Reloading Manual 10, which shows < 600 FPS loads for this ball. When I first read this I thought I could save a couple of bucks for some slow plinking, but looking at round ball prices, I may as well use regular lead cast bullets. I will probably try it out with the lead balls I already have, but I don't plan to make a habit out of it.