It's not so much friction as the lube limits gas cutting. As the hot gas tried to get by the bullet base, the lube melts & helps seal the micro gaps between bullet & bbl. You can shoot moly coated lead bullets w/ varying degrees of success, but a quality lube seems to give best results across a wide vel spectrum.
Good morning
Take a non lubed properly fitted Gas check bullet & fire it and you will learn alot about lead mining. Lube will help seal a too small diameter bullet but that too small bullet should never have been shot to start with. Bullet diameter is far more important than than hardness. Add a good lube as stated above & you probably will have an accurate combination.
Actually a jacketed bullet is aided with lube. Consider .. Why does that first shot from a clean oiled barrel hit low ? Could it be that oiled barrel causes less friction. Those jacketed bullets leave friction generated deposits on barrels or else we would not see the black coated bullets for sale out there.
Lube on cast bullets is very necessary due to the softness of lead and all the forces exerted on it as it travels down the barrel. Twist, inertia, roughness of the bore... try all that on lead without lube and there just is not much hope of that soft metal getting the job done.
Lead alloys were used for bearings until RPMīs got to high even with a constant oil bath. But if the oil flow stopped those bearings went out real fast... ask any Model T mechanic.
So there are numerous good reasons to use a properly fat enough lead bullet made of a properly hard enough alloy for the acceleration applied with a good enough quality lube to get said bullet to the barrel end without suffering the calamities placed upon it.
Mike in Peru
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