I do not have any of his books, but I know from doing a lot of reading on the subject that the old wildcatters pushed the limit on pressure quite high. The 22-250 was a wildcat round before Remington made it legitimate. Most of the loads were much hotter than what Remington decided to make it. It is still a hot number, but not to the extent that was back in the day. The old wildcatters worked with nothing but "signs". They would start stuffing powder into the case until they got flattened primers or sticky bolt handle and then back off just a little. The trouble is, that most of those guns have custom chambers; many with tight necks too. Those tight chambers will not show pressure signs as readily as a standard chamber. You get over pressures and not know it. They had nothing else to work with and were loading by the seat of their pants. I read about a writer that had developed a wildcat and told a technician at a facility that measured pressure that he had been loading this for a long time. His said he was sure his pet load was safe, there were no pressure signs and cases had a long life. He was embarrassed when the technician found out other wise. Another example was a guy that worked with Lil'Gun in a 221 Fire Ball. He told Hodgdon that 16.6 grains under a 40 grain bullet got him 3600 fps and it was safe - no pressure signs. Hodgdon did it's own testing and found out that 16.0 grains was the top pressure limit with a speed of some where just South of 3400 fps. I have several older reloading books from about 30 years ago. There are several examples of loads that were considered safe back then that have been reduced over the years by the same publishers, like Speer, Hornady and Sierra. I think they have better means of measuring pressure now days in comparison to yesteryear or they used signs for lack of pressure equipment in some cases back then. I keep the old books around for amusement, not reference, I use modern up to date books for my reloading data. Good Luck and Good Shooting.
