From a 1976 Handloader.....

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Last Post 15 July 2020

Standard Member

JeffinNZ posted this 12 July 2020

Howard D Thomas soliciting interest to form the CBA.

Cheers from New Zealand

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CBA Member

mashburn posted this 12 July 2020

Very interesting post.

Thanks,

Mashburn

David a. Cogburn

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CBA President

John Alexander posted this 12 July 2020

Thanks Jeff. Great to see something about our origins.

Howard Thomas in Indiana and Ken Mollohan in Pennsylvania, the founders of CBA had learned of each others interest in cast bullets when, I think rejection letters from the Handloader got switched into the wrong envelopes to the two of them. They corresponded and decided to see if they could start an association of people interested in shooting cast bullets in fixed ammunition our of modern rifles. People had of course been doing this for a long time but there was no organized known competition at the time nor any journal to exchange ideas and document progress. Schuetzen type competition (breech seating ) had also of course been around for a couple of hundreds of years already.

That notice in the Handloader was their first effort to see if there was wider interest. Thomas and Mollohan starting putting out a newsletter and had their first postal match by the second issue, (1977) The newsletter eventually became the Fouling Shot. Thomas went on to other shooting interests but Ken contributed interesting and groundbreaking articles to the Fouling Shot until his death a few years ago.

At the time, I had been trying to shoot cast bullets with very modest success when I saw the ad in Handloader and have been a member since then. A short history of the CBA, that I should do more work on, is on our website.

John

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CBA Regional Director

Tom Acheson posted this 12 July 2020

John,

Yes, by all means, if you can add to the history of our begginings, please do!

That Handloader article gave me new info about us.....great! I subscribed to Handloader for many years, starting in 1978. I no longer subscribe. I joined the CBA in 1986, mainly to shoot the Silhouette Postal matches. Did not get fired-up about our benchrest game until 1996 or so.

History, especially regarding things I'm involved with, is ALWAYS interesting.

Tom

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CBA Member

RicinYakima posted this 13 July 2020

I ended up here because of Molly. He had posted on some forgotten BB about cast bullet rifle shooting in 1990's, and I emailed him. That is how I got here.

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CBA Member

Dale53 posted this 15 July 2020

Molly married a lady just east of here later in life, and I got to meet him and due to common interests we became friends. He and I attended a couple of gun shows (including the Indianapolis 500 show). After his health started failing, he and his wife divorced and he moved down south of here. In fact, when he moved out he gifted me his stash of bullet metal. He was a VERY bright fellow and quite interesting to spend some time with. I wished we could have met earlier in life, but better late than never... He and I visited each other but I would have enjoyed spending more time with him. Good people, for sure!

Dale53

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Coydog posted this 15 July 2020

I learn of this site is from the site Cast Boolit and what some was saying about here and I wanted to learn more about this art , because to me that is what it is because of the alloy mix and what mainly will work better then other things, Also for the testing some dose and willing to shear on here. What works at the time , thank you for posting the history on this.