.36 "Buzz", a 67 gr. HB bullet for cap and ball guns.

[Adirondack Jack]

About 13 or 14 years ago I played with a '61 Navy quite a bit.  As is my habit, I wanted to see what the potential was out of the little .36 caliber pistol.  So of course I went about stuffing as much powder as possible into it.  In those days there was no REAL BP available locally that I knew of, but I had a pound of Pyrodex RS leftover from an affair with a .50 Hawken, so I used that.  With a .375 round ball, ya simply couldn't stuff enough powder in a .36 to amount to much by my lights (my experience until then was mostly magnum loaded .357 and .44 guns), and of course a round ball isn't ever gonna expand unless shot agaisnt something like steel......  What I figured was needed was a stubby hollow base bullet that would load ON THE GUN (had to be short), and allow a little more powder charge, carry it's own lube, etc.

So using whatever technology I had available (a mini hobby mill and rotary table), I cut a small chunk of brass leftover from a cannon project into a mold, complete with a base pin, and commenced casting HB .36 caliber bullets.  Even with Pyrodex RS, the short, hollow bullet loaded with no wad, allowed enough powder to be loaded that the gun suddenly began to "bark" and act like a "big boy" pistol.  Likely in part due to the "inflation" of the bullet skirt holding the buillet back a bit, allowing for a better burn.  In any event, I got enough velocity for a sonic "crack" like a rifle, and the bullets, when shot into rough pine boards, would open into a nice mushroom cap.....

My dad siezed upon a target of opportunity with the "Buzz" bullet from the '61 one day, as I'd left it fully loaded on his kitchen table while I wandered up the road to visit a neighbor.  He dispatched a rabid raccoon handily.  He said it just fell over dead when hit through the shoulder.  There was no visible exit wound, but we didn't look too hard as handling a rabid animal with anything besides a shovel ain't too smart.


I dug out the mold last night and cast a couple samples.  Boy they look rough to me now, as I have learned just a little about such things over the last years, but there it is, a 67 grain HB bullet, a RB for scale, and the mold base plug so you can visualize the HB.

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

Sort of a mini-EPP/UG. But gentler, hard on the outside , hollow in the middle

[Adirondack Jack]

Sort of a mini-EPP/UG. But gentler, hard on the outside , hollow in the middle

That's what a pard said.  He called it "Pre-EPP".  As I said, I didn't know much about bullet design at the time, nor did I have the proper equipment to make the mold, but it ends up pretty close to El Paso Pete's concept because we both wanted a bullet that would load in the C&B guns without removing the cylinder, and it had to carry its own lube.  I wanted the velocity and expansion, which a "collapsing" hollow based design allowed.  Airgun pellet on steroids 

I may improve the mold itself, maybe get a proper block cut, but first I gotta load a few in the better half's '62 Pocket Navy and let em flicker over the screens with some Swiss just for "research" purposes 

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

At the other end of the weight spectrum, whatever happened to MAKO's heavy conical idea for the .36?

[Sir Charles deMouton-Black]

"Will he know what I am talking about if I just ask him that?"

Probably.