By Scott Mayer
MTM Cast Bullet Boxes
MTM Case Guard
https://www.mtmcase-gard.com/
MTM never fails to come up with some clever plastic product I probably would not have thought of and now can’t live without. This year it’s the Cast Bullet Box and Gun Cleaning Patch Catcher. I’m an avid bullet caster and have always kept my supplies of sized and lubed bullets in cardboard boxes. The problem with that is dust always seems to find its way into the boxes and onto the bullets. Granted, the dust is only a minor annoyance, but it’s still an annoyance. Al Minneman who heads MTM, is also a cast bullet shooter. Every year I try to visit him and his fellow competitors at the N-SSA National Skirmishes. They’re good folks, I get to hear about what new things they’re working on at MTM, and we talk shooting.
Al competes with a Henry and I shoot a ’92 Winchester in .44-40 just for fun. Shooting and handloading for the Winchester means I frequently have bunches of 200-grain lead flat-point bullets on hand. While I usually have on hand several empty plastic boxes that jacketed rifle bullets came in, those boxes are just a little too small to store many .427” cast bullets. The New Cast Bullet Boxes from MTM, however, are larger, will hold as many as 160 .45-caliber bullets, and probably 180 of mine.
A fellow like Al who shoots a lot also gets to clean guns a lot, so it’s not surprising to see MTM come up with yet another product to help make gun cleaning easier. This time it’s a patch catcher you simply pop on to the end of your barrel.
MTM Patch Catcher
How many times has something like this happened to you: You’re in your shop and squirt a shot of aerosol solvent down the bore of a rifle and let it sit to do its work. Later, the news is on television, you don’t want to miss it, but you also have to finish cleaning that gun. You bring the gun into the living room meaning to simply dry the bore while watching the news, you run a tight-fitting patch down the bore, and watch like an idiot as you push a blue drip of fouled solvent from the muzzle and onto your wife’s carpet.
That happens to me all the time. So far, I’ve simply been thankful that we have a dark speckled carpet and that a simple blot of a paper towel is all it takes to hide my frequent lapse of good judgment and save me from my wife’s ire. Maybe instead of the blue drip, you’ve watched as a white streak of foaming bore cleaner shoots out of the muzzle, streaks across the kitchen, and lands on your wife’s grandmother’s antique china cabinet where it eats the finish off.
In either scenario, MTM’s Cleaning Patch Catcher might be just the thing to save your or my neck going forward. All we have to do is remember to pop it onto the end of the muzzle before spraying that shot of solvent down the bore. Any overspray gets caught in the box instead of going airborne or squirting out of the muzzle, and when pushing a patch through, both the blue drip and the dirty patch land in the box to be thrown away later.
Post Office Flat Rate shipping boxes are strong, light weight and low cost (free) and the small size will hold about 500 to 1000 bullets depending on caliber. The patch catcher is a good idea. I have one that uses plastic soda bottles. Screw the cap back on and throw away when done.
Free when used for mail.
J. Upchurch must be a man who has everything and in need of nothing. I like the ideas of the products as my loading room is not dust free unfortunately. I too have used old plastic peanut butter or mayonnaise jars for bullets, but they don’t stack all that well. These look like they would. Also, after one gets near the bottom it takes tipping to get the bullets out of the jars.
I have a similar patch catcher and do use and like it.
MTM Patch Catcher? Why? I use a empty cereal box to catch brush bristles and patches.
Their plastic cast bullet storage get real man! Empty mayo or peanut plastic jars does wonders.
J. Upchurch, I’m with you man. I do the exact same thing, except I use my work bench to catch the patches. Pick them up and throw them in the trash right next to the bench. No big deal.