Has anyone ever used Hodgdon H-335 in a 38-55 load?
I'm always on the look-out for powders that cross over into other calibers in order that I keep only a few powders in my stock as opposed to a different bottle of powder for every caliber. Over the years I've been able to consolidate several calibers that use the same powder with decent accuracy. The other day I was looking over the chart of load data that was inserted in the package for an older set of Lee 38-55 dies. The data is a little odd and obscure in some ways. For example, they list the following types of bullets with load data below each catagory: 200 grain Jacketed, 220 grain Jacketed, 240 grain Lead, 250 grain Lead,...and then this:
255 grain Bullet.
Uhhhh, what??? What does that mean? 255 grain lead, jacketed, cast with a gas check, a bullet made of stone??? Ordinarily, I wouldn't care pay attention to such a listing but under this listing is a load for H-335. The min load is listed as 35.0 grains and the max is 37.0, giving a max velocity of 1679fps. I have never seen H-335 used for the 38-55 in any of my load manuals so I thought I'd double check this load by going to a local gun shop and looking up this data in a Lee load manual. In the most recent manual (the one out on the shelves currently), there is no listing for H-335.
Well, I thought I'd experiment a little bit and so I tried H-335 under my 264 grain gas checked bullets. The loads I used were 34.0 and up to 35.0. What I discovered was kind of nice! The 34.0 grain load was probably one of the most accurate loads I've fired from my Thompson Contender 38-55 with very repeatable tight groups at 100 yards and all bullet holes touching. I'm a little skeptical about using this powder as a regular load as the data seems to be somewhat unreliable and therefore, I'll discontinue this load until I can find some concrete literature with H-335. Hence my question here: Has anyone ever used H-335 in their 38-55 Win loads?
