**Note: this post is meant to be educational. It is NOT meant to be a company bashing thread. No company names will be used. If this turns into a general airing of grievances I will ask the mods to delete the thread.
Now on to our story......
In April of 2021 I placed a large order with an online cast bullet vendor. The majority of what I received was great, but the .44 caliber bullets have an issue. I am not an expert bullet caster, but I have cast a few hundred and I've loaded many thousands that were purchased online. The bullets in question have extra material around the base. I would guess that the sprue plate on the mold was just a bit loose and it allowed some of the molten lead to spread out from the base of the bullet. This spreading created a flange at the base the looks somewhat like a snail's foot.
My phone isn't the best at close up pictures, but these should provide an idea:
The flanges vary in size but the pictures above are representative of the average.
Not all of the bullets had the extra flange. In order to load 1,000 rounds of ammo I had to sort through 1,500 bullets, leaving 500 "bad" bullets left over for a 1 in 3 failure rate. If the trend continues I expect to have an additional 1,000 "bad" bullets after I finish loading the "good" ones.
Then what do I do?
With the help of an appropriate beverage and a cigar, I began to ponder my options. I've always gotten fantastic service from this company so I'm sure that we could work something out if I called them and explained the situation. I could also break out my own casting outfit and use the "bad" bullets as a source of good hard alloy and just recast them all. However, casting 1,500 bullets using a 2-cavity mold isn't exactly a speedy operation.
As the level in my glass went down and the cigar got shorter I started to wonder just how bad it would be to shoot these ugly things. I recall an article published sometime towards the end of the last century that examined the affects of deformed bullet tips and bases, but that was about rifle bullets. I'm working at much shorter distances with pistol bullets that are going much slower and have a ballistic coefficient similar to my house. How bad could it be?
I let the idea rattle around in my head for a while and finally decided to try it. I loaded up 50 rounds with the "bad" bullets, grabbed some "known good" ammo as a control, and headed for the range to turn money into noise and hopefully learn something.
The test mule for this experiment was a 624 with a 4" barrel, shown here after the range session wearing the traditional Unique powder residue.
To warm up and establish a baseline, I fired 5 shots at 10 yards, standing, two hands, single action, with ammo loaded last year using "known good" bullets. It seemed like everything was OK.
(Yes, there are 5 hits)
I decided to shoot with my wrists supported to remove as much shooter-induced variation as possible. Why wrist support only?
Someday remind me to show you a picture of what happens to a sandbag when a revolver is placed directly on the bag.
Interestingly, shooting while sitting down with my wrists supported actually introduced a variation: the point of impact moved up and slightly to the right. I'll have to experiment with that later....
The first test was at 10 yards. I put up 2 targets and proceeded to shoot in the following sequence:
- 5 shots with "good" bullets into the left target
- 5 shots with "bad" bullets into the right target
- 5 shots with "good" bullets into the left target
- 5 shots with "bad" bullets into the right target
Here's the 10 shot group with the "good" bullets:
Here's the 10 shot group with the "bad" bullets:
Hmmm... There's a bit of diagonal dispersion that wasn't present in the other group. Three shots hit lower on the target at the same level as the X. The hits from the "good" bullets were all above the X, but most of the "bad" bullets went into the same area. Not a horrible group though. To me that looks more like a "two extra cups of coffee in the morning" group than a "throw it all away and start over" group.
Let's go out to 25 yards and see what happens. If the diagonal dispersion and low hits are a product of the oddly shaped bases, it should be magnified by extending the distance.
Again, 10 shots were fired into each target alternating between "good" and "bad" bullets in 5 shot sets.
The "good" bullets gave me this:
The higher than normal point of impact continued and was increased in a linear fashion by the extra distance. Correcting for the high point of impact, 8 of the 10 would fit into the 10-ring and the two on the extreme right and left would still be well within the 9-ring. I'm ok with that.
Now for the "bad" bullets. This target should look like a shotgun pattern, right? Big diagonal line from corner to corner with a few random hits flung all over the target, right?
Here it is:
Huh.
The diagonal dispersion is gone. One bullet cut the X ring in almost exactly the same place as the "good" target. Six hits are in almost exactly the same place as the "good" hits but with less horizontal dispersion. Like the 10-yard target there were 3 hits that were lower than the rest.
Theories:
I'm going to say that the higher than normal point of impact change was due to three factors:
1- The rest forced me to bring my eyes to the gun instead of bringing the gun to my eyes
2- The bench-to-chair height ratio was wrong so I was hunched up like the proverbial monkey with the football
3- The rest prevented my normal follow through
The horizontal dispersion was most likely due to me not keeping track of the front sight when the sear broke. I fail to see any ballistic explanation for bullets with randomly deformed bases producing less horizontal variation than ones with good bases.
No wait....the sun was in my eyes. Yeah that's the ticket. The sun was in my eyes.
For the 3 shots that went low in the "bad" bullet groups at both distances, I'm going to say that it was either shooter error again OR perhaps a velocity difference due to the deformed bases.
Conclusion:
Quit worrying about it, load the darn things and go shooting.
Maybe I'll save two and put them in my shooting bag so that when I completely screw up and shank one into the unknown I have an excuse ready.......
Now on to our story......
In April of 2021 I placed a large order with an online cast bullet vendor. The majority of what I received was great, but the .44 caliber bullets have an issue. I am not an expert bullet caster, but I have cast a few hundred and I've loaded many thousands that were purchased online. The bullets in question have extra material around the base. I would guess that the sprue plate on the mold was just a bit loose and it allowed some of the molten lead to spread out from the base of the bullet. This spreading created a flange at the base the looks somewhat like a snail's foot.
My phone isn't the best at close up pictures, but these should provide an idea:
The flanges vary in size but the pictures above are representative of the average.
Not all of the bullets had the extra flange. In order to load 1,000 rounds of ammo I had to sort through 1,500 bullets, leaving 500 "bad" bullets left over for a 1 in 3 failure rate. If the trend continues I expect to have an additional 1,000 "bad" bullets after I finish loading the "good" ones.
Then what do I do?
With the help of an appropriate beverage and a cigar, I began to ponder my options. I've always gotten fantastic service from this company so I'm sure that we could work something out if I called them and explained the situation. I could also break out my own casting outfit and use the "bad" bullets as a source of good hard alloy and just recast them all. However, casting 1,500 bullets using a 2-cavity mold isn't exactly a speedy operation.
As the level in my glass went down and the cigar got shorter I started to wonder just how bad it would be to shoot these ugly things. I recall an article published sometime towards the end of the last century that examined the affects of deformed bullet tips and bases, but that was about rifle bullets. I'm working at much shorter distances with pistol bullets that are going much slower and have a ballistic coefficient similar to my house. How bad could it be?
I let the idea rattle around in my head for a while and finally decided to try it. I loaded up 50 rounds with the "bad" bullets, grabbed some "known good" ammo as a control, and headed for the range to turn money into noise and hopefully learn something.
The test mule for this experiment was a 624 with a 4" barrel, shown here after the range session wearing the traditional Unique powder residue.
To warm up and establish a baseline, I fired 5 shots at 10 yards, standing, two hands, single action, with ammo loaded last year using "known good" bullets. It seemed like everything was OK.
(Yes, there are 5 hits)
I decided to shoot with my wrists supported to remove as much shooter-induced variation as possible. Why wrist support only?
Someday remind me to show you a picture of what happens to a sandbag when a revolver is placed directly on the bag.
Interestingly, shooting while sitting down with my wrists supported actually introduced a variation: the point of impact moved up and slightly to the right. I'll have to experiment with that later....The first test was at 10 yards. I put up 2 targets and proceeded to shoot in the following sequence:
- 5 shots with "good" bullets into the left target
- 5 shots with "bad" bullets into the right target
- 5 shots with "good" bullets into the left target
- 5 shots with "bad" bullets into the right target
Here's the 10 shot group with the "good" bullets:
Here's the 10 shot group with the "bad" bullets:
Hmmm... There's a bit of diagonal dispersion that wasn't present in the other group. Three shots hit lower on the target at the same level as the X. The hits from the "good" bullets were all above the X, but most of the "bad" bullets went into the same area. Not a horrible group though. To me that looks more like a "two extra cups of coffee in the morning" group than a "throw it all away and start over" group.
Let's go out to 25 yards and see what happens. If the diagonal dispersion and low hits are a product of the oddly shaped bases, it should be magnified by extending the distance.
Again, 10 shots were fired into each target alternating between "good" and "bad" bullets in 5 shot sets.
The "good" bullets gave me this:
The higher than normal point of impact continued and was increased in a linear fashion by the extra distance. Correcting for the high point of impact, 8 of the 10 would fit into the 10-ring and the two on the extreme right and left would still be well within the 9-ring. I'm ok with that.
Now for the "bad" bullets. This target should look like a shotgun pattern, right? Big diagonal line from corner to corner with a few random hits flung all over the target, right?
Here it is:
Huh.
The diagonal dispersion is gone. One bullet cut the X ring in almost exactly the same place as the "good" target. Six hits are in almost exactly the same place as the "good" hits but with less horizontal dispersion. Like the 10-yard target there were 3 hits that were lower than the rest.
Theories:
I'm going to say that the higher than normal point of impact change was due to three factors:
1- The rest forced me to bring my eyes to the gun instead of bringing the gun to my eyes
2- The bench-to-chair height ratio was wrong so I was hunched up like the proverbial monkey with the football
3- The rest prevented my normal follow through
The horizontal dispersion was most likely due to me not keeping track of the front sight when the sear broke. I fail to see any ballistic explanation for bullets with randomly deformed bases producing less horizontal variation than ones with good bases.
No wait....the sun was in my eyes. Yeah that's the ticket. The sun was in my eyes.
For the 3 shots that went low in the "bad" bullet groups at both distances, I'm going to say that it was either shooter error again OR perhaps a velocity difference due to the deformed bases.
Conclusion:
Quit worrying about it, load the darn things and go shooting.
Maybe I'll save two and put them in my shooting bag so that when I completely screw up and shank one into the unknown I have an excuse ready.......
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