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Jumping Frog wrote:Load 50 or so and make sure they will feed in your gun before you load them all. Taking a bunch of rounds apart with an impact hammer is tedious.

That particular Lee mold will not feed in a lot of guns. If they work in your gun, that's great. They wouldn't feed in mine so I gave the mold to a friend because they fed just fine in his .45. Some .45's will even feed empty cases, others are more picky.

Forget about whatever people have told you about loading a 200 gr LSWC to an overall length of 1.250". That COL works great for an H&G 68 style of bullet, but the Lee TL452-200-SWC has a completely different nose profile.

If you load to that length, you'll have almost 0.100" of bullet base sticking above the case and it will never chamber in a gun -- the shoulder will jam (hard) into the rifling. They are a real ****** to unjam in the gun too (I know the hard way). No, the correct way to load the LSWC profile is to have about 0.030" of the shoulder showing above the case rim - about the width of a fingernail.

That means this bullet design requires a cartridge length of about 1.182", calculated as 0.898" case length + 0.030" shoulder above case rim + 0.254" bullet nose. Note also that the Lee bullet base is roughly 0.028" longer than the Lyman base, which means a Lee-loaded round has about 9.5% less case capacity than a Lyman-loaded round. Thus, make sure you stay on the lower end of the loading chart -- no max loads.

Here is a picture I took of bullets I cast from a Lyman 452630 mold versus the Lee TL-452-200-SWC. Look at the nose profile. It is short and squat compared to the Lyman.



This also shows the nose profile when both are seated to give a similar shoulder.



Good luck with your new endeavor.