Thread: Much Better Grouping with my Rossi .357 Levergun

Just like after a domestic squabble.... when things settle down... a man is inclined to ruminate on what went wrong and what might be done better.

I felt my beautiful Rossi Puma had let me down. Sure she looks good, and we'd had some good times, but during some recent serious testing she just would not group consistently. I never asked her to be perfect... I'd have accepted a two inch group at 25 yards, but she wouldn't even do that. When we first got together I remember shooting a business card at 50 yards, but now some shots were all over the place. I wondered if maybe some the poor performance was my fault, so I shot some groups through some old .22s with open sights and found that I could still group acceptably well.

I thought about what might have changed since I loaded my first .357 ammo. I had new primers. Previously I'd been using Federal, now I have CCI. I'd also started crimping my cartridges because that is often advised for tube magazines.

So I re-lived the old times a bit. I kept the same powder load, but I decided not to apply a crimp. I doubted that the primer brand could make such a dramatic difference, so I used the CCI. I sat the bullets deeper in the case. Plus I decided to load a few wadcutter projectiles that I'd been given. These were old Lapua bullets with some serious thick lubricant. I went out today and shot some groups. The results were very encouraging. I'm now thinking that i don't have to break up with this saucy bit of equipment.

It seems that the projectiles are firmly held in the cases without crimping, especially when seated deeply. Besides, these are mild loads and I seldom load my tube magazine to full capacity. If I use wadcutters, I can only have one in the magazine because the lack of a tapered bullet doesn't allow the magazine stop to slip in between the cartridges. Interestingly, the rifle easily feeds wadcutters from the ramp into the chamber.

I'm not an expert shooter or reloader, so I don't dare to state any definite reasons as to why my groups were better today. It certainly seems that not crimping helped, and perhaps the deeper seating did too. I know that some folks argue that a three shot group is not good enough proof of accuracy..... but a good three shot group is just fine with me and it conserves powder and bullets. A pig appearing momentarily in a gap between two trees requires a good one-shot group.

Whereas some of my older crimped cartridges might have previously shot a 2.75 inch group at 25 yards, the groups were mostly down to around 1.4 inches today. And the wadcutters were phenomenal... my group size was about 0.7 inches and they hit right where they should on the target. So my gorgeous gun is plenty good enough for bush work.

So... after the satisfying shooting (in this case it was the equivalent of 'make-up sex'), I thought I should shoot off my few old crimped cartridges so that I had the brass to start afresh with new loads. Most of my cartridges are loaded in Starline brass. But I have a few nickel plated cases I was given... and I trimmed these to the same length as the Starline to keep things uniform. I shot off the Starline ammo, and the groups weren't marvellous. Then I loaded the nine remaining nickel cases I had and shot them all at one target. These grouped in a much tighter pattern than the other crimped cartridges to give a group size of around 1.7 inches.

Why did the nickel-plated stuff shoot better? Dunno. Perhaps it is stiffer brass and that somehow affected the crimping. Perhaps it was because I carefully chamfered the inside and the outside of the case after i trimmed it, whereas I didn't trim or chamfer any of the unplated cases. After reading about them, I'd formed the opinion that the nickel plated cases were possibly inferior in some ways to plain cases, but they certainly performed well.

Here is the wadcutter group: