Trapping boolits without damaging their features?

[oldandslow]

Greetings casters, 6/11/13

I'm working on a couple of rifles (30/30 and 30-06) and would like to examine the fired boolits (180 grain AccurateMold GC'd at velocities of 1700-2200 ft/sec, water dropped to BHN of 15 and 21). I've tried firing into a container with 3 feet of sand but just ended up with crushed lead balls. Any ideas for something I can do at the range or in the woods to recover the boolits and check the rifling and gas checks? Thanks.

best wishes- oldandslow

[Jupiter7]

Swimming pool or large vat of water is about the only way I know of.

[Hickory]

I have found perfect boolits on my shooting range that went through a snow drift, but did not make it to the back stop. But to reproduce this may take years if not decades.

[Tatume]

If the bullets are not very hard (18+ BHN), this method will cause them to mushroom some, but you should still be able to examine the shank and gas check.

Take phone books and tie them into bundles of about eight inches, using strong string in both directions (side to side and up and down). Put the bundles in a barrel or 40 gallon trash can, fill it with water, and allow the books to soak overnight.. The books may absorb all the water, so the next morning refill the can and allow to soak again. Place the bundles on a table to make a continuous row as long as needed (40" for 454 Casull), shooting through the books (front/back covers). You should be able to get at least five or six shots without paths crossing, maybe more if a scope is used. Results are often dramatic, and the entertainment value is well worth the effort.

Take care, Tom

[451whitworth]

British barrel maker Metford used saw dust with a little oil

[Pakprotector]

I suppose it depends on how perfect you need the boolits to be. I'd try 10-15' of pipe, loaded with several sacks of pillow stuffing and terminate with a pool of water that has at least 3' of path length. line up the barrel and pipe carefully, and be careful, some might conclude you're making something like a muffler...:)
cheers,
Douglas

[L Ross]

In my copy of Dr. Franklin Weston Mann's book, The Bullet's Flight, there is a detailed description of preparing the oiled sawdust for catching bullets. My copy is the 1997 reprint by Palladium Press for the Firearms Classic Library, and the information starts on page 59. Mann stated that when recovered from oiled saw dust, the 187 grain soft lead bullet was "perfect as can be detected by with eye or magnifying glass and hundreds have been caught in the same manner to perfection".
In my opinion every student of the rifle and of cast bullets in particular should read this book.

Duke

[Mal Paso]

The Bullet's Flight from Powder to Target:

http://www.castpics.net/subsite2/ClassicWorks/The_bullet_s_flight_from_powder_to_targe.pdf

[fecmech]

I am fortunate?? to live in the Buffalo NY area which every year provides me with suitable bullet trapping material. Here is a very small sample.

[dondiego]

Hickory - I shoot into snow drifts all of the time and the bullets look new except for the rifling...............after the snow melts. Easily reproducible if they don't hit each other. I think fecmech is doing same.

[fredj338]

Anything solid is going to damage a bullet, even water & high vel is "hard". A long trap filled with cloth packed semi tight is a good collector. The sawdust thing would be sim.

[45-70 Chevroner]

I once decided I needed to see what a 22 bullet looked like after I shot it into a bucket of water. The bucket was a 3 gallon fire bucket probably used for fires a long time ago. I shot streight down into the bucket, the bullet went through the bottom and flanged aginst the cement underneth and it also flanged out on the inside of the bucket and sealed the hole. So much for that expierment. I did gain a litte info from it though, I knew I needed more than 12" of water to catch the bullet. I was 23 years old at the time, luckly time has tought me a lot of leassons. :Fire:

[Timbob]

I use a bullet trap I made out of some osb filled with rubber mulch. I left one end of the box open and staple a folded up plastic garbage bag and a sheet of cardboard over that end which I shoot through and replace the cardboard as needed to keep the mulch in. Its 11x17 on the open face and 18" deep. It stops my handgun loads including 357 magnum about 10 to 12" deep. As long as the boolits don't hit each other, they look almost good enough to reload. Its very easy to see how the boolit is taking the rifling.

[TMSCU]

Tie a string onto the bullet and fire it straight up. Hold on to the other end of the string and follow it to the bullet. Seriously, about the only way is firing them into water. Find someone in the country that will let you fire your bullets into their swimming pool.

[shredder]

I have found perfect boolits on my shooting range that went through a snow drift, but did not make it to the back stop. But to reproduce this may take years if not decades.

Funny you should say that. I had the same experience this spring when I found little piles of my cast boolits after the snow drifts melted away. It was a learning experience to see them so perfect.

[Von Gruff]

I tried with the understory from a pine forest and put cardboard seperators to make it easier to find the bullets
http://i667.photobucket.com/albums/vv39/VonGruff/Cast%20bullets/010_zps840cf1f3.jpg (http://s667.photobucket.com/user/VonGruff/media/Cast%20bullets/010_zps840cf1f3.jpg.html)

Need a re-thingas even a 1600fps load hit the end and the media was a little abrasive as it removed some bullet markings.

[303Guy]

Water should really deform the boolit at those velocities. Rubber mulch is great but when compacted it does mushroom the boolit.

73302

Sand is only good if the velocity isn't too high and the alloy is copper toughened. At least I think it's the copper that holds it together.

73301

Those two would have been about the same ball park velocity wise and the same alloy.

Rubber grinds also tends to polish the boolit. Not always - it depends. Still, one can read quite a lot if the mushroom doesn't consume the whole boolit.

73303 This one shows rifling skid.

At lower velocity with a tougher boolit one can read a whole lot more. These two were with shotgun powder to get the pressure up to bump up the boolit along its whole length and still be slow enough to capture. The trick is to get the pressure of the second one using rifle powder.

73304

[oldandslow]

Casters,

There are a lot of good suggestions. Being in the tropics I don't have access to snow even though the results looked good. Ditto with the phone books (since the internet became prominent I don't get the volume of phone books I used to). This leaves a water based trap as my easiest option unless I can find rubber mulch (where would I look?) or a big pile of sawdust. Any ideas on what depth of water I'd need to stop a medium velocity rifle boolit (4 feet?, 5 feet?). Thanks.

best wishes- oldandslow

[303Guy]

Well, Mythbusters did a show in which they attempted to stop fmj rifle bullets, including a 50 Browning. They borrowed an Olympic size swimming pool but found the penetration was not all that great - just a few feet. They had difficulty recovering the bullet fragments. A shotgun slug had some appreciable penetration although that wasn't fired into the swimming pool.

[mroliver77]

Only good results I have had is with dacron( pillow stuffing) We used a pipe but Van Gruffs box looks better to me. Should not be hard to find enough cheap. You can get it from pillows, stuffed animals, furniture etc.
I fluffy sawdust in VG box should also work. Let us know.
J

[Bigslug]

The two approaches I know of for forensic collection are water traps, and a steel cylinder filled with what amounts to shredded bits of Kevlar vest material. I would tend to think the latter could be reproduced with a 5-6 foot tube or box densely packed with shredded sponge, foam rubber, packing peanuts, etc... The idea is a steady reduction of speed that is no so rapid as to disrupt the bullet's shape.

[RobsTV]

Pinnacle red rubber mulch at Walmart for around $4 a .8cf bag works great. Pack it into the large buckets that chlorine tablets come in (20 or 30 gallon?). I also add a layer of rubber sidewalls from old used racing slicks at the top and bottom. Keeps the loose stuff in place. I mainly use this to reuse the lead, but depending on alloy, it also shows mushrooming, or nearly perfect reloadable except for rifling.

[snake river marksman]

While it may be difficult to find the proper volume of phone books in this age of the internet, I've noticed that there is a large container of newspapers out behind the local newspapers print shop. I plan on asking for a quantity sometime in the near future in order to do some testing myself.

[gtgeorge]

I use extra large rolls of straw/hay for a back stop and when the roll is shot up really good from thousands of rounds I dis mantel it and recover all the bullets. The staw grabs the bullets and slows them down and I have stopped 7mm mag, .223 etc with great results. I found it out by accident when I shot my first archery backstop with a metal backing plate behind it and found the bullet did not come out the other side.

[oldandslow]

Casters,

With the hope that I could trap my boolits with a water trap I welded a flat metal plate on the bottom of a 3.5 foot long thick walled pipe, (3" ID ,quarter inch walls). Off to the jungle I went and set it upright by a creek bank and filled it to the top with water. I bungeed a layer of cardboard over the top to decrease the gas effect on the water and first fired a .45ACP round (800 ft/sec, BHN=8). I stood on the creek bank above the pipe and held the pistol several inches from the pipe opening. Other than about a foot of water from the pipe drenching me it went well.

Next up was the 30/30 with a lead round nosed copper jacketed bullet. Same procedure except the result was the full four gallons of water in the pipe was hurled upwards soaking both me and the rifle. Both .45 and 30/30 boolits showed nose damage from hitting the bottom metal plate but the back half of the boolits were intact and the rifling sharp.

Lessons learned- I need a larger diameter water vessel and it needs to be a bit longer. Rain gear might be a good idea too. Actually I think the next step is to line up a bunch of old plastic paint buckets packed with wet newspaper, old clothing and maybe some rubber mulch from Home Depot.

best wishes- oldandslow