Reloading for CAS

[Southpaw45]

Iv been shooting CAS for about 7 years now and started and continue to use .45 colt. I to use old model Vaqueros. I tried many different powders and bullet weights and I settled on using 5.5grns of Trail Boss with a 205grn Bear Creek bullet. Trail Boss has to
Be the best and SAFEST powder to use to down load recoil friendly loads with the big .45s. I use the same load with my rifle too. My primer I use now is Wolf LPs. I started using them while trying to
Save my Winchester primer supply during the Obama buying spree and have stuck with them. After about 11K wolf primers used, I have only had one dud and one primer that came without an anvil. All my CAS pistols and rifles have lightened hammer springs and I never had ignition problems. I'm not saying there the best primers out there. Just saying there great for the price. Happy shootin Pard....

[Southpaw45]

One more thing. Starline brass is great but as the years go by in Cowboy shooting, I lost and recovered alot of brass from many matches. My brass supply consists of I thing brass from every manufacure. It all works great. Except AMERC brass. That stuff gets crushed in the vise.

[AMProducts]

+1 on starline brass. Personally I stay away from trailboss, it's really expensive for what you get. for .45LC, 5.2-5.5gr of TiteGroup is my load behind a magma 200gr RNFP. When I say magma, it's a standard bullet, call D&D bullets over in ontario, they make some of the best bullets out there for reasonable prices http://www.danddbullets.com/

[Southpaw45]

Titegroup is a good powder for the .45 Colt indeed. Two problems with Titegroup. You can double charge a case and won't ever realize it until you fire it. Boom! Can't do that with Trail Boss because it will be almost spilling out of the case being so fluffy. Second is Titegroup produces a snappy recoil and loud report. Something that's avoided when shooting as fast as you can and trying to get repeated target acuisition. That's another good quality of Trail Boss. As for the cost, sure it might be a few cents more a round but having all the great qualities of this powder that was designed for use with large volume cases with lead bullets outweighs the extra cost. Not saying that Titegroup is a bad powder for CAS but after I switched to Trail Boss, I knew it was the right smokeless powder for the big ol .45 Colt.

[Lucas McDennis]

I agree with Southpaw45 (and I use Titegroup for certain loads myself). I just butted in again to quantify the extra cost of using Trail Boss. I buy powders and primers in huge bulk, maxing out a HazMat shipment when I purchase (though sometimes Hazmat is free from Grafs if you buy enough primers or powder, or if you belong to a shooting club, etc), so I'm guessing on some local retail prices here. I rarely pay retail for ANYTHING related to guns and shooting.

So I'm guessing a one pound canister of Titegroup, for instance, is about $32 out-the-door (I pay about half that, by the way). That's 7000 grains of powder. While it falls below Hodgdon's published starting load for Titegroup, it would take about 4.9 grains of this powder to push a 200 gr. Cast LRNFP to 706 fps out of a 45 Colt. At local retail prices this is about 2.2 pennies worth of powder per load. Other fast pistol powders would cost about the same.

Now, a nine-ounce canister of Trail Boss goes for, what, about $22 out the door? Hodgdon's starting load for Trail Boss with that same bullet in 45 Colt is 5.5 grains, for a published velocity of 706 fps (which is why I interpolated to that speed for Titegroup). Simple arithmetic puts the powder cost, if purchased at local retail, at 3.1 pennies. That's 0.9 of a penny per load more expensive than Titegroup.

If you can find a way to buy powder cheaply in bulk, you can cut that difference to about half a penny per load. Seems a cheap price to pay for the increased ease of loading, and the insurance against double charging.

[Lucas McDennis]

One more thing. Just noticed Powder Valley ( http://www.powdervalleyinc.com/ ) is currently waving their Hazmat charge if you buy a case of five bricks (5000 total) of CCI or Federal primers. It's a good time to load up on primers and powders. They're selling Trail Boss at $11.20 per 9-oz canister, or $85.50 per 5 pounds.