YES, I'm only using 1 alloy for everything!!! Rifle/pistol/hot/mild
It's the pc'ing process that actually makes a huge difference, namely heat and the amount of time the bullets spend in that temperature.
A little background:
I've been swaging my own bullets for decades. Typically the cores are soft lead or the dies would crack/shatter. 1 step in the process was seating the cores or simply smashing/expanding the soft core into the cup. You either had to cut your cores from wire or cast them and then run them in a squirt die to get them a uniform weight. Casting pure lead for cores had the same problems as casting bullets with pure lead, you need tin for good fill out. Well, a way around casting soft cores then running that core in a squirt die was to cast cores out of an alloy that would allow the core to fill out making the weights of the cores more consistent (pistol hp/plinking ammo). Now I have consistent cores that are too hard to swage. Enter heat, namely 375/400* for 15 minutes. That annealed the metals in the alloy that made it hard.
Guess what you do when you coat bullets with the dry power coating (no chemicals needed)???? Yup, you got it, heat the coated bullets to 375/400* for 15 minutes.
I've showed this picture before, what most that see it DO NOT GRASP has what is actually been done to this bullet and how that translates to load pressures and the now ANNEALED SOFT LEAD COATED BULLETS!!!
This is nothing more than a lee 230gr blackout bullet. The bullet has a boattail. I made a bump die to reshape these now soft/annealed bullets to the throat of the chamber in a custom 308 bbl. As you can see, the bullet now has a gc instead of a boattail and the arrow is pointing to a step in the bullets body. The other thing to note is that the pc is still intact even after all that expanding/bending/swaging.
A very crude drawing of what I did to that bullet.
As you can see the bullet body tapers from .3095 to .309. When the bullets seated, the gc will be just below the neck of the case, brass springs back. The larger base ensures the bullet doesn't get scraped when being seated and then the brass springs back grabbing the .309 body. The arrow is pointing to a step in the bullet. That step is were the freebore/ball throat ends and the rifling begins. Typically you want .001 difference between the freebore dia and the lead bullet. Freebore is .310 and the bullet is .309. The leade of the throat is .308 with the angle of the throat being 1 1/2* taper. The bumped/swaged bullet has a 3/4* taper. A standard lead bullet when set properly will engrave the riflings. The amount of engraving depends on the bullet design. The more the engraving the better the bullet/bore alignment, the less deformation of the bullet & more support for the core of the bullet (yes even cast/lead bullets have a central core) when the short start pressure of the load pushes the bullet. A picture of a plain bullet and the rfling marks on the nose and the same bullet that has been bumped and the rifling marks on it. This is how I did the testing when I was doing the final lap on the bump die (polish/test/measure/polish/test/measure).
That's 1 1/2* vs 3/4* ='s an even rifling depth that is the whole length of the throat.
SSSSSOOOOOOOOO, what the heck does all this have to do with a darn pc'd bullet????
Well, if that bullet can be bumped/swaged/changed that much in a press that exerts a couple ton (4000psi). What do you think the pressure of your loads are doing to that bullet???
It's expanding the bullet to fill the voids!!! The question now becomes how much pressure can these soft/annealed/coated bullets actually withstand???
Darn 9mm's, small cases & high pressures along with a little amount of change in the powder or oal creates huge changes in the bullets performance. I have 3 different 9mm's, they slug .355/.356/.358. When I test pistol bullets for accuracy I like to use contender bbl's. If I can't get an accurate load with a bullet in a contender bbl, then somethings wrong with the mold/design of that bullet. Anyway, using conventional wisdom/cast bullet knowledge I sized the 9mm bullet to .356 to be used/tested in my .355 bbl. So now I got a bunch of .356 bullets laying around, great!!! HEY, I got an idearrrr, why don't I try them in the other 9mm's???? What's the worst thing that could happen, leading??? So armed with the knowledge that these bullets are now soft (learned that from swaging) I loaded up some HIGH pressure loads, namely 5.5gr of longshot and went to the range.
Taurus pt111 g2/.358 bbl/5.5gr longshot/.356 bullet
They chronographed @1050fps out of the 3.2" bbl. No leading, tumbling, accurate enough for what they were designed for and excellent expansion.
I had no problems with these .356 bullets in the other 9mm that had a .356 bbl. After these tests I learned that I could throw the traditional (I'll get it right this time) PAGAN sizing and lubing rituals out the window. From there I did the same tests with the 44's and ended up with the same results, 1 size worked in all of them.
Well if I can use an undersized bullet then I should be able to use an oversized bullet???? SSSOOOO I started testing that idearrrrr also and guess what, it works. But only to a point, anything over 30,000psi and bad things start to happen with bullets that are .002/.003 oversize. So now I'm sizing everything to .358 for the 9mm/38spl/357's and .430 for the 44cal's.
Bullets yes even lead bullets have a central core and extreme pressure affect that core and words like plasticity come into play. Typically pistol bullets aren't affected as much as their llloooooooonnnnnggggger bodied rifle counterparts. With rifle bullets the nose of the bullet is already in the riflings and twisting while the body and then finely the base of the bullet is sill either in the neck of the case or in the freebore. The end result is 1/2 the bullet is being pushed/expanded to fill the void while the other 1/2 not only has expanded but torque is now being applied to the "core/body/center" of the bullet from the twist rate of the rifling.
I'm just now starting to do a test on rifle bullets. I'm going to use 2 bullets, the lyman 311465 and the saeco 301. The 311465 cannot be altered/bumped and will be tested with traditional lube/size methods using a typical rifle alloy and pc'd bullets. The 301 will be traditional, pc'd, bumped traditional, bumped pc'd.
Traditional ='s an alloy of (#15 range lead/#5 monotype/2%tin) that is water quenched, gc and lbt lube.
Pc'd ='s nothing more than scrap 9/10bhn range lead that has been annealed in the pc,ing process with a gc installed.
Both bullets will be sized to .310
I'll be using 6 different powders that range from fast burning to slow burning. That will allow me to test the bullets with high pressure/low speeds (fast burning powder) to high speed low pressure (slow burning powder). This rainbow of pressures and speeds with give me a full range of pressures affects along with rpm thresholds.
While not looking for extreme accuracy by any means, I'll be looking for how the groups walked in until they are the smallest and at what point did they blow out.
As far as rifles go, if your having a hard time finding 22lr's then you might consider looking at using up your scrap/junk lead and cast up some bullets and pc them. I ended up with several loads that grouped like these using nothing more than scrap lead/ pc. No gas check no nothing, just light loads of pistol powders.
Free lead, light plinking loads that a child could shoot & around 700 loads to a # of powder. That's 3.5 cents for powder @$25 a pound & 3.5 cents a primer for primers @$33 a 1000 or $.07 a round.
