There's a lot of things that affect the alloy/lube of a bullet. The design of the bullet itself, differences in firearms, etc.

Awhile back I did a little testing with a snubnosed 38spl (2" bbl). Used 5 different powders and 7 different bullets looking for high performance 38spl p+ loads.

I didn't use the lyman 358477 (bottom left/red) bullet because I wanted to test bullets in the 150gr/160gr weight range. The top performers, these bullets were as much as 50fps faster with the same loads.

They had higher velocities because they sealed that 2" bbl faster. Smaller based bullets wasted more pressure being pushed/compressing the grease groove. A bullets design/base has a lot to do with how a bullet performs. Bevel bases are the worst with cast bullets unless your either using them in target loads or they have a long body/short nose.

16bhn rifle bullets for a 308w

Doing head to head comparisons, lube vs coating
1st outing with lubed

Most reloaders would of looked at the target and decided the cast bullet reached it's limits. The bullet is the lee 312-160tl bullet that is designed to be tumble lubed. I lubed the bullet with LBT blue. So I took the same bullets lubed with LBT blue and put a coat of 45/45/10 tumble lube on them also and re-tested.

Yes lube affects accuracy, too little and no accuracy. No leading but no accuracy. That initial test with that lbt/lee bullet didn't lead the bbl. But a little more lube shrunk the groups in 1/2.
The pc's lee bullet on the other hand not only had higher velocities, they were more accurate.


Coated bullets don't need to find the correct alloy/load pressure/lube to have a high performance accurate load. The coating seals the bbl just like bullet lube. The difference is the coating is already there. It doesn't need to rely on the the correct load pressure to compress the correct alloy for that pressure to have the lube seal the bbl.
Did a little testing with a 44mag awhile back looking for plinking loads that would do 1 1/2" groups @ 25yds. Same powders, same bullets cast at the same time/alloy, same shooter, revolver, dies, etc.
With traditional cast lubed bullets I had 3 loads that weould hold the 10-ring on a nra target @ 25yds. With the same bullets that were powder coated I ended up with 13 loads that would hold the 10-ring on the nra 25yd target. 3 v13 is huge!!!!

I'm sure I could of easily found more loads, it actually got boring.

8bhn/9bhn bullets and powder coating and size the bullets correctly:

1100fps/25,000psi load for the 9mm using 125gr cast pc'd bullet that are 9bhn sized to .358

16,000psi/900fps 38spl loads shot from a 357 using 158gr 9bhn cast pc'd bullets sized to .358

18,000psi/930fps 44mag target loads using 200gr wc's cast with 9bhn alloy, pc'd

With any of those soft alloy'd pc'd bullet I can easily do 200+ round range sessions and not have to clean anything. No carbon ring, nothing/nada.

Too many people overthink the whole cast bullet/leading thing. Soft bullet, good fit & either good lube of coating is all you need. I've ran 16bhn cast bullets up to 2900fps in my 308w. Countless 1000's of casters have used nothing more than free ww's (12bhn) for all their lead bullets needs for decades putting countless billions of bullets down range.