Advice please

C

Clubster

New member
All,
After many years of being out of the reloading scene I decided to get back in it the other day. Just finished up selling off guns I no longer need and now have narrowed my needs into a few cartridges to reload moving forward. Looking to reloads .38 Special wadcutter, .38 Special Gold Dot, .44 Mag wadcutter, .44 Mag Gold Dot, .357 Mag Gold Dot and 12ga target loads. I am trying to use the least amount of powder/ primer variants to stock. In a perfect world one brand primer and one brand powder but that is not reality. On the 12ga hulls I will be using green sts and gold nitros. It seems I have quite a lot Red Dot, Hi Skor 700x and CCI large and small pistol primers with Winchester 209 shotgun primers.

Any recipes worth a hoot for the above or do better powders exist for my needs?
 
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Red Dot works well in 38 Special with both jacket and cast bullets and wad cutter bullets. I have used two grains with the button nose wad cutters seated to the crimp groove. I have used 3.5 grains with 158 grain jacketed and cast bullets. Please double check your loading manual I'm going off of memory.
 
Welcome to the forum.

The Red Dot and 700X can handle wadcutter loads in all the revolver cartridges mentioned, including the magnum cases. For the Gold Dots, especially higher power, consider 2400, if you can find it. It won't quite keep up with the magnum spherical powders, velocity-wise, but it's pretty potent and it downloads better than they do, so you can do 38 Special +P loads with it and not just magnum loads. It will also light up well with standard primers, where some of the sphericals need magnum primers to do their best.
 
HS-6 actually should go well for semi-warm .357 and .44 mag and 12 gauge. You can also safely load the specials with it, but un-burnt powder and erratic velocity will likely be prevail as HS-6 doesn't burn very well under PSI in the low-mid 20k range.

I don't really use much red dot. I use 700x for .38spc and .45acp, and it is an excellent powder for both of those calibers. Reading tells me it is quite good for 12 gauge target loads. As UncleNick said, 700x will also give you fair wadcutter loads even in .44mag. 700x is to fast to give you anything even remotely approaching low magnum velocities for full-house .357 or .44 though.
 
Clubster,

H110 and HS6 are both older formulation spherical propellants, so you will want to add magnum primers to your shopping list for best consistency with them. 2400 is what Elmer Keith and his associates used to develop the 357 and 44 Magnum loads originally, but H110 and 296 (same powder differently branded) will generally gain you a bit more velocity. Not enough to matter in most practical situations, but a bit. How much depends on barrel length, among other things.
 
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