saboted cast boolits? lube alternative

[injuredminnow]

I'm new at casting but experienced in the plastics industry. As I research lubing, paper-patching, jacket swaging, and gas-checking, it struck me that for muzzle-loading, many bullets come with plastic sabots (a .45 bullet saboted up to .50). Having the education and a decade's experience in polymers, what's to keep me from putting some R&D into simple, cheap plastic sabots that one could use with swaged bullets. For example, a lead bullet could be swaged to say .330 and then pressed into a non-discarding sabot bringing it up to .357 and then loaded into a 9mm case. What am I missing here? I'm not talking about driving a plastic sabot at 3000fps. I'm thinking more along the lines of 9mm and .45 slow but heavy bullets for target shooting. It would eliminate leading and the lubing process and would allow for non-cast, swaged bullets to be made. High-temp plastics are no problem and they can be made with "squashing" rather than "smearing" properties. What am I missing? Should I just stick to designing more plastic caps that go on the ends of canes? Even after the dies are built, I could produce 1000 little sabot cups and sell them for under $10. Tell me why I shouldn't even try.

Brett
Milwaukee

[Frozone]

We have an entire section devoted to saboted lead - look up Paper Patching ;-)

Come to think of it - aren't most jacketed bullets just a form of non-discarding sabot on the lead? :kidding:

I can see a small market for your idea, but I can't help but feel this is a little like the old saw about how to make a million dollars in the gun business, Start with 2 million and know when to quit.

[Chicken Thief]

If there was money to be made, we would have seen a big market of them by now.

The accelerators for 30 cal has problems with accurasy.
As for frontstuffers i think it's just laziness.

[Geppetto]

Give it a try Brett, I'm in Waukesha and would be glad to help beta test your products.

There is a little bit of a "reinvent the wheel" in your idea. I guess what would the advantage be? You can sling soft lead slugs at low velocities without introducing additional components (gas checks, paper patch, jackets, plastic sabots) with good accuracy as is (boolit plus some lube), so what advantage would you achieve? Unless somehow you reached a considerable improvement in accuracy or if you substantially reduced the price. Perhaps there would be a greater market in making cheap plastic bullets for practice (for the non hot glue crowd), rather than sabot?

[MtGun44]

Sabots will cost how much? Lube costs a tiny fraction of a penny, maybe 1/100th of a penny or even
less and I can drive 8 BHN range lead with a conventional lubed design to "book" values of 1500-1600 fps in
a revolver (max velocity .357 Mag - at pressure limits) and shoot into an inch at 25 yds. Not suggesting
that only I can do this, pretty much anybody can do this if done correctly and not very difficult to do.

I think the question to ask is - For X amount of added cost and Y amount of added effort, what will I gain?

Not trying to talk you out of it, but just pointing out the issues in marketing a new idea,
there has to be a cost/benefit look early on. Conventional designs have the cost of a lubrisizer, a one
time buy but you can use pan lubing for nearly nothing except more labor, and the tumble lube
designs are cheap, if not as forgiving and broadly useable. The lubricant itself is vanishingly
small. So this is your competition, unless you are going to replace the copper gas check, which is
a significant cost item. If you can do that for full rifle velocities (GCs are entirely unnecessary at
any pistol velocities) and at a lower cost than a copper alloy GC, then you may have a real market.

OH -yeah - please add "while retaining the same excellent accuracy standards" to the above.

Bill

[rintinglen]

Even a gas check is only 3 or 4 cents. The cast of swaging equipment versus the cost of casting equipment pretty well eliminates your idea from being economically viable. The accuracy of discarding sabot rounds, at least in small arms to date, is not sufficient. Remington has made their "Accelerator" line for years and it has never been a great seller, because it doesn't deliver equivalent performance.
Now, if you are solely interested in it for funsies, well that's different. We do a whole lot of experimenting here looking for "something Better." And perhaps you will have a serendipitous discovery. Somebody had to invent rifling, revolvers, and the reloadable metal case. Maybe you can develop a plastic cartridge case, or superior sabot, or something else nifty, but don't invest your life savings in this idea.

[gray wolf]

If you have to clean a barrel that's leaded, well that's bad enough.
But no thanks to cleaning a bunch of plastic crud out of the barrel.

[Doc_Stihl]

I have an old bag of clear plastic sabots that are a .50 caliber designed to use a .429 bullet. No idea what the brand is. For giggles I stuffed some 310 WFN as cast in them and tried it in my 500 S&W encore rifle. I loaded them over unique I believe to 12 grains. Accuracy was surprisingly good and the "fouling" cleaned up with a couple strokes of a kroil soaked patch. I never revisited trying them again because I only have 15 or 20 left, but I think the idea is sound. In a 45 if you could use .358's that would be interesting.

If I could buy 500 for $15-20 I'd buy a bag. Assembling a sabot is WAY quicker than gas checking and lube-sizing.

[Doc_Stihl]

I wonder if I could run the sabot backwards and make it non-discarding.....

[pmer]

I've used sabots with cast boolits a few times muzzleloading. I have tried sized/lubed and unsized and it worked great.

As long as we're dreaming here, I could picture a 44 special self defense round using a sabot.

And Doc, I wonder if 50 cal ML sabots would work in the .500 S&W?

[quilbilly]

I have used sabotted handgun boolits in my muzzleloaders for years off and on. 429's in my 50 and 9mm in my 45. I use patched round ball exclusively for deer these days. I found the sabots extremely accurate at long ranges but the pistol boolits were less effective than round ball on deer at ranges under 120 yards. The 50 cal sabots with a 260 gr 429 boolits work better for elk however.

[injuredminnow]

Thanks for all the input guys. My purpose for developing a non-discarding sabot for handgun cartridges would be to eliminate the casting and lubing process as well as making seating easier. While lead wire and a swaging press do cost more, many casters swage their casts anyway and with my method, you don't have to worry about alloys. Also, 9mm is particularly tricky to reload cast as forcing an oversized boolit (.358) into a case will generally result in unintentional swaging. The solution, a taper crimp, if done wrong, will effectively reduce your cast to an undersized bullet anyway. I'm pretty new to reloading cast so I suppose given time and practice, I'll figure it out as many of you have done. I just thought if people are going through the trouble of paper patching, (which I would think would be really hard on rifling), I would attempt to come up with a cheap and easy alternative. I may give it a go. I figure it would cost a few hundred dollars in dies and plenty of trial and error, which my boss wouldn't mind so much. If I pull it off, I'll let you know the results. By the way, most plastics that I work with have a higher melting point and is less brittle than lead so fouling would not be a problem.

Brett

[fcvan]

If I could figure out how to make a sabot for putting a Lee 501-440 RF in a 12ga wad I'd be launching them as slugs. Heck, a sabot in 12ga without a wad. I'm sure there are lots of possibilities!

[texassako]

One member seems to have had some success with sabots, the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjTmXOjA5RU&feature=youtu.be . I might try it with a lightweight .30 cal cast boolit one day. The sabots are a lot more than $10/1k and are a tight squeeze into the case.

[Elkins45]

I would be happy to play with any prototypes you come up with.

My homespun idea for sabots would be to make paper ones like the rough recycled paper often used for egg cartons. Those could be compressed almost as hard as plastic and would hopefully shoot just like paper patched boolets. I know how to pulp paper in a blender with water but I haven't quite figured out how to precision form and dry the little paper 'cups' I'm envisioning.

[SciFiJim]

Brett,

Your idea may have more merit than you realize. As lead gets harder to find, more guys are thinking of trying to find a way to use zinc boolits.

I have been saving all of the zinc wheel weights I get and have about a bucket and a half. Your sabot idea may be just the ticket for use with zinc boolits.

If the cost of the sabot can be kept down to about the cost of gas checks, a lot of guys would still be able to shoot their rifles when their lead stash runs out.

Because of the larger number of shots fired with pistols, sabots for pistol calibers might not be as financially feasible. You might try sabots for .30 caliber rifles first and then expand from there.