Seating gas checks

If you do any bullet casting, eventually you want to cast for a centerfire rifle. I have a 6 hole Lee mold that casts a duplicate of Lyman's 311041 bullet. This is an old bore riding design that is wonderful in .30 caliber rifles. It was designed for the .30-30 Winchester.

I had cast a bunch of those and needed to size them and seat gas checks. This is normally done in one operation, using the Lee push-through sizer.

However, yesterday afternoon I was watching the grandkids, and I had a 7 year old that loves to tinker with me on my bench. I let him seat gas checks, and I'm going to have a really high reject rate on this batch. Really high.



He got a lot of them right, and he got a lot of them wrong. Any of us can mis-seat a gas check. They are supposed to be seated square on the bottom of the bullet. More than anything, a square base is important to bullet accuracy. When you are seating checks, there is a certain feel, a certain knowledge that comes with seating thousands of these things.

Lead is cheap, and gas checks are easily available. If grandson hadn't given us this example of .... how to say this... neophyte technique.... then I wouldn't have been able to give this little tutorial. I can't imagine how these bullets would fly, but the seating technique was creative. Very creative. They'll go into a bag with sprues and be remelted the next time.

Yesterday was just another afternoon at Pawpaw's house, seating gas checks. With time, he'll learn.