Hardball/cast 230 grain equivalent loads for EIC practice

I am entering the EIC service pistol quest for a challenge for my 50 year old eyes. I am trying to come up with a reasonable, but practical, training program for my 1911 45 acp. I have my 230 grain round nose FMJ bullets. I was curious if I could put together a lower cost practice cartridge using cast 230 grain bullets that would have similar sight settings, and accuracy.

Has anyone come up with a cast/swaged bullet eqivalent for the 230 grain fmj hardball load? I was thinking of the Lee 6 cavity 225 grain 1R mold, or possible the Lyman 225 grain 452374 mold. Any guesses as to how "close" I could come to the hardball load (230 grain FMJ / 4.6 bullseye) with cast? I guess it would be too much to ask if the sight settings were the same, but hopefully close.

Is this approach unrealistic, and a waste of time? I know one answer is to shoot, shoot shoot and practice with what you will shoot with in a match (hardball), but I'm just scratching my head and wondering if I could save a few dollars in jacketed bullets, and get more trigger time in with a reasonable substitute cast/swaged load.


Again, this is for hardball/EIC distinguished pistol match shooting, not for wadgun/2700 competition.
Thanks in advance.

My .45 hardball practice / training load was a 230gr cast round nose bullet over 4gr of Bullseye powder. I never checked it with a chrono but it kicked about the same. Accuracy was fine - at least as good as my FMJ hardball loads and a lot cheaper. I don't remember if I had to adjust the sights at 50 yards or not. At 25 yards the sights were fine. Most of my practice was at 25 yards with an MP3 player and sustained fire commands. I don't consider this an unrealistic approach at all. To me you can't duplicate match conditions anyway so do the best you can. Shoot enough slow fire to be sure of your gun and yourself and lots of rapid fire with recorded commands. Good luck.

My personal preference for the bullet mold would be the H&G #34, which duplicates the FMJ profile. Mine drops bullets right at 230 grains with wheelweight alloy. Ballisti-Cast (www.ballisticast.com) has Wayne Gibbs' old cherries to cut H&G molds and they're very reasonably. In fact, Ballisti-Cast has a group buy going on at CastBoolits.com and you can get a 4 cavity mold for $120. That is dirt cheap and an excellent buy for a mold that will last your lifetime. From my own experience with Lee molds and even Lyman, you're more likely than not going to be disappointed. Undersized bullets are the major problem, which will lead your barrel and give you relatively poor accuracy, especially at 50 yards.

Ballisti-cast group buy at castboolits.com

I checked out the Ballisti-cast group buy on castboolits.com. I ordered a 230 RN mold ( H&G 34 or Ballisti-cast #634) plain base 4 cavity mold. Thanks for the heads up. Production should be in May.

Just a few days left in the group buy if anyone wants a Ballisti-cast mold at about 35% off list pricing. Sign up ends April 27, 2012.

When I was still chasing points I came to the realization that what I needed was the practice with open sights. I had plenty of hardball ammo, but didn't want to squander good ammo learning to shoot open sights. So I decided to save it until I needed to get my sight setting for the EIC match and the EIC matches.

I just used my long line loads of 4.4 WST with a 210 gr H&G 68. They were more accurate than hardball ammo, so gave me a higher degree of accuracy. Felt recoil was less, but not that much more. The recoil difference wasn't noticeable in match conditions for 30 rounds.

Not attempting to discourage anyone from picking up a new mold, just trying to give an inexpensive option.

Al Schirado
Distinguished #1298
June 2003