Ken, you are a gold mine of useful information for my goal of achieving an adequate deer-killing load with minimum recoil. You are obviously very knowledgeable about hard cast -- makes me want to get a copy of Veral Smith's book. You were also right about knurling the .430 bullets up to fit a .452 sabot...I tried this morning rolling a 280 gr. between 2 files and couldn't even get one up to .435

I have 2 reasons for wanting make the 280's work, if possible:

Supposedly the ratio between recoil reduction and bullet weight is 2 to 1, meaning that the 280 grain is 18% lighter than the 330 grain, so the reduction in recoil should be 36%.

Since a wider meplat is better according to another website, and since Harvester's website shows the 280 gr. meplat at .340 and the 330 gr. meplat at .300 I was going by that. But since reading your post, I measured the ones I have here and while the 280's do measure .340, the 330's measure .325, so the difference is less than Harvester says...though my examples are 8 years old.

I have no bullet-on-deer experience to know if there is any real-world difference between the 2 meplat sizes. The few deer I bagged years ago were with the 330's and they worked just fine.

A 44 mag. out of a rifle is quite effective on deer from what I know, so the lower 209 powder load you suggest is going to be on my 'try it' list. In the end, which ever load/bullet combination gives good accuracy will be the one I use. Thanks for all the info. on the options available.

I'd add that the photo shows you cast some very pretty bullets, if it won't make you vain. Though I also read that swagged bullets can more accurate than cast due to havjng no air pockets in swagged, so maybe vanity won't get the best of you after all. Grin.

John