Any advice from someone with previous experience on this subject would be appreciated. I bought some hard cast lead bullets sized .330 to make some plinking loads for my M95 Austrian Steyrs in 8x56R caliber. The 115 grain bullets are originally intended for 8mm French Lebel revolver.

I want a plinking load around 1,100 to 1,200 fps.

I am thinking of something in the following ballparks:

8.0 to 10.0 grains Red Dot
10.0 to 12.0 grains Unique
something under C.E. Harris' magic load of 16.0 gr 2400
(because of light bullet weight)

Any other suggestions welcome.

The following comments assume your 115gr bullets are LEAD and not jacketed - if they're jacketed then what follows does not apply.

Interesting... we've been looking at the same cartridge, likewise for plinking. We don't have the M95 yet... but we did the ballistics work: if one takes the 170gr 30-06 CAS loads on our website (look under levergun data/studies... yes: strange place for '06 data) and scales them by ~.7x one'll end up with 115gr bullet 1000-1200fps 56R loads (turns out that the 8x56R and 30-06 differ by only 2.1gr of capacity (68.2 3006, 66.1 x56R), as such to scale the 170gr 1100fps '06 loads for x56R use: all one is really compensating for is the reduced bullet weight). BTW: I'd be looking toward 6 grains of either RedDot or Unique for your 115gr'er and 1000-1200fps... suspect the 8-10gr and 10-12gr loads will generate way more velocity than you're looking for, and likewise will probably keyhole badly. [I assume you have a chrono, or access to one - when you do shoot, please record the velocities and post them back here - there's more than just 2 of us interested in the x56R and data].

do shoot straight,
greg
www.gmdr.com

Interesting comparisons on case capacity of the .30-06 against the 8x56R.

Lead bullets in use for sure. Rather small doses of fast powders can be used with lead; PT Kekkonen wrote at some length about the dangers of going too low in charge weight using jacketed bullets. That's another story.

Yes, since I made this post I went back and compared some other data and concluded that my original esimates for Unique and Red Dot were too high for the target velocity. I also want to look at Bullseye in the 5.0 to 6.0 range.

Will let you know how it plays out.