The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

The steel cases are Bulgarian 150 grain silver tip, the brass are reloads with pulled X39 124 grain bullets. It's much cheaper to pull bullets than buy the Hornady ones with the plastic tip.


Not that it will bother you lot in the UK, but brass cases can't be used in an SVT 40 without wrecking them. SVT 40's have fluted chambers to aid extraction.

If using Military ammo it has corrosive primers beware.

Alpha1 wrote:If using Military ammo it has corrosive primers beware.

But it's cheap ! And a breeze to clean in an M-44

The gun in question will be a Russian manufactured M44 of 1945 vintage. What is the best diameter soft lead ball to slug the bore with and where can they be sourced, I take it you add the ball at the muzzle end and drive through with a wooden dowel?....it's my first time

If the FB consensus is FL sizing does't badly affect brass life I'll just get a set of Lee Pacesetter dies and start having fun. I've got some H4895 in stock so that should sort me out for a few loads!

A .375" will do nicely, black powder shooters have them beg a couple of a .36" shooter.

Clean and oil be barrel and oil the ball, sit it on the muzzle and hit it home with a soft faced hammer, when in the barrel a ring of lead will come away, push through with a steel/brass rod of near bore diameter. Dowels can break in barrels and cause no end of problems, the slug will push through easily once seated and you can feel for rough/tight/loose spots in the barrel.

Once seated it won't need driving you own weight will push it through easily.

Great, getting a .36 should be easy and with my weight maybe I should put a backstop at the breech! I have a digital caliper, so I then measure the raised grooves on the slug?

And the bore dimension as well, you need both.

The East Germans had a 54r short range training round that used the 124gr 7.62x39 bullet.They were actually produced in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania to East German specs and had a blackened bullet to identify them as practice ammo.Not the most accurate 54r ammo but the idea was to get recruits used to the recoil of the 54r.

Well I've just found out that the 54R lee dies I bought on saturday are .308 as standard.
I've now got to buy a lee 303 expander pin so I can resize to fit the correct bullets.
I have a Russian M44 which is .311.
Even more confusing was that .303 bullets arent .303.
Also the reloading data for 54R is for .308 bullets not .303.

Mark

Following C E Harris's cast loads for military rifles guidance he recommends a number of low power rounds for gallary and 100m shooting. These loads use Alliant Bullseye which I don't have, however I do use a fair bit of Hodgdons Titegroup. Looking on the latest Hodgdons guidence Titegroup is directly below Bullseye on the burn rate table so these loads should work with TG. Just got to find the 125gr / 150 boolits now

I noticed that in the Lee manual, loads are for .308 bullets, could you let me know where you manage to get the .303 expander from.