Reloading .43 Remington Spanish

[vulture]

I have a Remington Rolling Block chambered for the .43 Spanish round, this is the bottlenecked cartridge not the Reformado, my problem is the neck on the fired cases will not hold a .439 bullet, they just drop right through, they work great in new unfired brass. I've tried to neck size the brass but even then the slugs don't fit very tigh, I've even run them through my seating die turned out enough to prevent the case from touching the crimp ring in the die. Do you think it would be safe to shoot the larger slugs made for the Reformado chambered rifle, I think they are .440 if my memory is correct? I've read that when the Spanish made the Reformado chambering they left the bore diameter the same as the Remington made rifles, so they were shooting a .440 slug down at .439 bore, but they might have let their military personel do a lot of things I wouldn't want to try. Any help here will be greatly appricaited. Thanks folks, Vulture.

[tjack]

Vulture,
Slug your bore. I have many 11mm Spanish Rolling Blocks. Groove diameters run from .439" to .448". For those on the larger side I shoot the .446" 11mm Mauser bullet.

[tjack]

Head space problems are easy to correct with rimmed, bottle necked cartridges. The signs I observe is the primer backing out partially on firing. True Value Hardware stores have marvelous selections of "O" rings. Find one that is skinny enough to fit in front of the rim (coming in from the bullet end) and will allow the breech block to close and the hammer to drop. Slight resistance to the hammer falling is desirable. When fired, the shoulder of the case is moved forward; the base is being held tight against the breech block. Neck size your cases only (don't set the shoulder back). Several of my rifles require no sizing as the bullet is a fairly snug fit in the neck. A little crimp holds the bullet.
I've never heard of the neck being blown off a case on firing. Chamber dimensions: few of my rifles/carbines will chamber a case fired in another chamber. I mark my cases to go with a specific gun.

[vulture]

Thanks for the comments guys. I have a bunch of new brass loaded up and once the weather will let me I will run a some through this rifle, then I'll have a better understanding of what my problem is. I had hopped that I could reload these without having to resize them. There is no sign of case stretching, the old and new case lengths are almost identical, this is just once fired brass though. I will have to slug the bore, but when a .439 slug is placed in the muzzle of the rifle it doesn't want to go very far into the bore. Thanks again.

[remingtongeo]

I've been shooting my 43 Spanish (Argentinian) that has a .445 bore for a long time. I went to Western Bullet and bought the 43 Mauser bullet in .446. Cast the chamber and bore.

[jon_norstog]

My brothers and I bought Argy rolling blocks back in the 1960's and have been shooting them ever since. We used the old Remington berdan-primed brass and RWS primers until the brass gave up.

We used to use smokeless powder - Unique worked pretty well, with cornmeal over the top. I used 3031, which would not kick the .439 bullets hard enough to get a purchase in the bore. I bought a .446 mold and that took care of the problem. I think the Argies were arsenal refurbed at some time, perhaps during WWII and that the bores got broached to clean them up.

Over all I think black powder is the best stuff for these old rifles, and I don't mess with smokeless anymore.

My own "carbine" got stolen by someone I trusted years ago. I got my father's old rifle, which he had rebarreled to .44 mag. I had Roy Bedeaux make up a new barrel to match the original contour, 45-70 with whitworth-style rifling. That rifle is very accurate and I shoot nothing but black powder.

jn

[vulture]

I HATE WINTER!!! OK, got that out of the way, by the way, it snowed here last night, thus the sentiments on Winter. I haven't done much with the Rolling Blocks, I have three now, the original Argentine in .43 Spanish Remington, a .43 Spanish Refromado, built at Ovido, and a NY .50-70 Remington. I got some 50-70 rounds loaded, plenty of .43 Spanish Remington, and still haven't done much shooting, stupid me! I might take some of the advice here on going with a larger bullet diameter in order to ease reloading. I've never done this before but have read many comments on other boards of folks who do this all the time in order to deal with oversized chambers. It seems to be the consesus that as long as you have a good rifle, very soft lead, and moderate loads you do just fine. If you try to make a magnum out of the rifle then you wind up with accuracy issues do to stripping the rifling, gets worse I understand when using a very tight slug driving at very high speed, don't know about this myself. My next project is to try to put a reloading bench in our spare room so I can work on things during the Winter months, then load up all the spare brass I have sitting around, including some more .43 Spanish Remingtons, my .43 Reformados, some more .50-70's and a bunch of brass for my Martini Henrys and Sniders, it could turn out to be a fun Winter after all, even if I can't do much shooting. Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving, if you observe it, if not then just have a wonderful day, and may God bless all of us, in His own way and time, what ever we may believe in. Sorry to get religious on you, just want everyone to have a wonderful weekend coming up, and I wish more people saw fit to subscribe to this board and post here, these old rifles are some of the greatest ever built in my opinion, wish I could afford more but the wife says I have more than I need now, who knows, maybe she is right, but I don't think so!

[jon_norstog]

The original Remington factory loads had a hollow base lubed bullet made of very soft lead. They were pretty accurate, when they went off, about 50% of he time IIRC. We got pretty decent accuracy out of all of our .43s. With our young eyes we could breaK dinner plates at 200 yards every time using the long rifle. I can still see a dinner plate at that distance, but hitting it is a little iffy.

jn