In another thread, I mentioned some work that Jim Taylor did a number of years ago to generate some quiet cast bullets handloads for vermin control around the ranch-house (e.g. fox in the henhouse, bunny in the vegetable garden, coyotes harassing the calves, etc.). He wanted these loads to be quiet, so as not to scare the sweet little old lady living across the highway from him, and also not to startle the stock in his barnyard. He also didn't want them to be overly powerful because he just wanted to kill the pest, and not damage out-buildings, tractors, etc. in the area. He had tried light charges of pistol powders, and not found a combination of accuracy and quiet that he was looking for (position sensitivity?). He knew he wanted a low pressure load (to keep it quiet), but he figured that he needed a case filling load to get the most uniform ignition (good accuracy). This led him to consider using powders that are normally considered "too slow" for the application. Key caveat here -- these powders MUST be easy to light in order to work well at these low pressures. These requirements led him to experiment with IMR 3031 with cast bullets in small capacity cartridges in his leverguns (e.g. .32-20, .38 Special). Basically, the idea was to fill the case to the bottom of the cast bullet. I just finished revisiting Jim's experiments, using the .38 Special case (I don't own a .32-20 levergun at the moment) and the H&G #51 160 grain SWC. 10.0 grains of 3031 fills the .38 Special case to the base of the H&G #51, which was then crimped firmly in place. From a 6.5" Ruger Blackhawk .357 Magnum, this load produced 425 fps; and from a Marlin 1894 levergun, it produced 460 fps. Qualitatively, I would say in both cases it was quieter than a .22 handgun or rifle, respectively (more of a pffft, than a crack!). In both guns, this load shot to the sights, and hitting walnut sized rocks at 15-20 yards was no problem, and required no sight corrections. Yes, there is a fair amount of unburnt powder (and with the levergun, I could actually see it coming out of the muzzle into the sight picture when firing the shot, weird!), but I don't see this as being a problem because this is not the sort of load that one is going to go out a burn through a large pile of in a plinking session, it is intended for a specific job and only a few shots would generally be fired at any given time. Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in these results so I thought I'd share them with you.