New Load for the Whelenizer

Being trapped at home in Covid-19 purgatory gets a mind to thinking. I’ve had a real dearth of reloading projects. I have two major windows for reloading each year; they are between my two main hunting seasons. By 1 March, I have a backlog of projects that are done and need shooting. I have not been to the farm in nearly a month. I have a window of a couple of months after Turkey Season ends and then I’m back home for a month or so in mid-summer. The larder is still full from winter, so coming up with projects is a bit hard.

I found myself yearning for a new pump rifle the other day. I don’t know why. I really do not need a new deer rifle in any flavor. My Remington 7600, the Whelenizer, is perfectly fine. It is just that 35 Whelen is a little much for whitetail. I certainly do not need another. However, I found myself browsing Gunbroker.com, and there was a minty Rem 760 with a corncob slide that dang near had me hooked the other day. Luckily, I caught myself even before I put it on my watchlist.

Dang Shaman! You’ve got a perfectly good one already. Why mess with another?

The more I thought about it, the sillier it was. However, it did give me an idea: What about a new load for the Whelenizer? What if I tried to match 30-06 performance as well as cost, and recoil?

The 200 grain Rem Corelokt had been my mainstay for a decade and had accounted for at least a deer a year during that stint. I finally gave up on it, because it was a lot of sound and fury and recoil and the deer were becoming no deader than what I was doing with my 30-06. The round also costs about 50% more to load. I retired the Whelenizer for a while and then brought it back out in 2015 with a cast bullet load.

See The Whelenizer Makeover

It has been 5 years now, and we no longer have a Democrat president trying to limit our access to reloading components. Yes, I was able to prove the concept of casting my own deer bullets. Yes, I wanted to take a deer with the cast 200-grain loads, but other projects kept getting in the way. I’ll get around to it, but not any time soon. Still, the Whelenizer and I had a good time together.

The one possibility I saw was going for a lighter bullet– perhaps one that was not ideal for the 35 Whelen but worked well in lighter chamberings. There are not all that many offerings out there. The SPEER 180gr FNSP FlatNose fits the bill. It works quite well in 35 Remington and 358 Win. It’s a bit light for a full house 35 Whelen load. However, if I kept the velocity down, it would be just fine. Hodgdon H4895 powder is a gentle medium burning powder, to begin with. It has also produced the most consistent round-to-round velocities of any powder I have tried.

SPEER 35(.358) 180gr FNSP BULLET FlatNose

According to Hodgdon’s site, a MAX load in 358 WIN would produce 2603 FPS velocity. A MIN load for 35 Whelen would get the bullet going 2649 FPS. That’s in the same ballpark, and it is well away from the nearly 2800 FPS that a MAX load would give. I doubt the bullet or the deer would notice the difference. I aim for the ribs anyway.

Another aspect of this project was keeping the cost down. I still had some 35 Whelen brass, but I wanted to try something different. I found some Prvi Partisan 1-fired 30-06 and decided I would turn it into 35 Whelen. Just to be certain of success, I annealed them first to soften the brass. This would prevent neck splits down the road. It took a bit of elbow grease and some extra lube on the inside of the neck. I ran them through a Redding Full-length Sizing die. The expander ball is tapered, on the RCBS, and Redding dies, so there was no problem. After sizing, I gave the brass a few hours vibrating in corn cob to get rid of the extra lube I had added.

In the end, I had 25 rounds loaded at roughly the same cost of loading comparable rounds of 30-06. The recoil will still be a bit stouter than a 30-06, but not by much. Zeroing 2 inches high at 100 yards will give me a 218-yard point-blank range. The bullet will travel a skosh faster than if it had been fired from a 358 Winchester and bit slower than a factory 180-grain bullet fired from a 30-06.