.355 GNR

I’ve gotten around to shooting the American Hammer Marlin 336 in .355 GNR this week. Thought I would post some things I learned.
First, I haven’t done any fire forming to this point. I started with new Hornady .30-30 cases. I used Ramshot Enforcer to just below the shoulder and a 1/4 sheet of toilet tissue tamped down on top. As a side note the primer pockets on this batch were extremely tight. I had to use my press to seat them rather than the usual hand priming tool, and still had a few that I had to shoot twice to get to ignite. Maybe this is typical of Hornady brass? I had varying degrees of success with the forming. Some expanded to .35 caliber while others were still at .30 caliber. You can kinda see from the pic all the irregularities. At this point I had Gary take a look and he said to go ahead and size them carefully and with the inside of necks lubed. Next time I wouldn’t be afraid to fill the cases up to the shoulder and as Gary suggested maybe a bit more tissue to hold the burn back a little more. I used One Shot and went slow and didn’t have any problems. They looked better but still pretty rough. I made sure they would chamber and went ahead with the starting load of H335 and a Speer 180 gr. I tried putting a light crimp on one and it wouldn’t chamber. With all the wrinkles and such the crimp caused problems so I just loaded without a crimp this time around and just single fed them. I had time to fire a few and offhand at 50 yards they were very accurate (for my ability). The gun has the red fiber optic front sight and XS peep rear sight, a perfect combo for this type of rifle. It’s a very nice gun and shoots about like a .30-30 as far as recoil but is easy to see that it is much more powerful. It’s gonna be a fun one.