I'm looking to come up with a load using a 180 gr. WFN hard cast bullet. The primary use will be hunting and general woods carry. I'm hoping that I can get this close to the
180 grain Buffalo Bore load. 1375 fps out of a 4" barrel seems pretty ambitious, but I'd like to try to get at least 1200 fps. I will be using a 4" GP100.
I've narrowed it down to two bullet choices:
Cast Performance 180 LWFNGC
Missouri Bullet 180 WFN
I'm open to other bullet suggestions if you have any.
I have lots of H110 on hand so I'd like to stick with that.
So, my questions are:
Is a gas check necessary for this type of load? The Cast Performance bullets cost almost three times as much as the Missouri bullets.
Min and max charge data seems to be difficult to find for this type of bullet in .357 mag. I did find a post from several years ago on another forum for the 180 Cast Performance bullets
The Lyman manual load data for H110 and IMR-4227 is as follows:
OAL = 1.590"
H110 - 12.7gr 1112 fps 29,900 CUP, 14.0gr 1266 fps 42,000 CUP
This data is from the Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook #4, and is somewhat consistent with what is given for 180 grain Nosler partitions directly from Hodgdon (min, 13 gr., max, 13.5 gr., COAL 1.575). Does anyone have any other suggestions on where to look for starting data? It seems like everything I find about 180 grain bullets is for jacketed bullets.
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated