Thinking some more...

[geargnasher]

Several ideas I've been discussing separately with a few different cast boolit shooters this year have sort of collided at once and formed a completely new picture for me. I want to throw this out there and see what the rest of the crowd thinks.

The concept of swaged boolits is very old, but is difficult to accomplish with any sort of traditional swaging or casting equipment. One fellow I know has taken to making swage dies for grease-groove rifle and pistol boolits and just "bumps" them in the swage die after lubing (to keep the grease grooves from collapsing or distorting) and has achieved very much improved accuracy from doing so. The bumping uniforms the boolits and squeezes out any hidden porosity or air pockets.

One downfall of the cast rifle boolit, particularly at high velocity and in fast-twist rifles is lack of bearing surface to "grip" shallow lands. This is exacerbated by the need to eliminate about half the land-gripping bearing surface via lube grooves. It has been proven through paper jackets, copper jackets, and copper-enhanced, tougher alloys that increasing strength in the "splined" area of the boolits increases the accurate velocity potential of a boolit significantly in a given rifle. Reducing the twist rate does the same thing by relieving stress on the engraved part of the boolit engaging the drive-side of the lands.

The newest rage here, epoxy coatings, has already been show by several people to be capable of withstanding the high heat, high pressure, and high stress that fast-twist, high-powered rifles loaded to their potential puts on them.

Epoxy coatings don't really require any lube grooves, now do they?

So how about making swaged "slicks", powder coating them, and shooting them just like J-words without the inconsistencies and tediousity inherent to making paper jackets? Lube inconsistencies are eliminated, bearing surface doubled, a stronger "skin" on the boolits is added, why wouldn't these be capable of copper-jacketed performance with a little care and attention to case neck support? Gas checks would still probably be necessary, as well as a final sizing for uniformity, but with all the DIY gas check makers out there, this could still be a totally at-home boolit manufacturing process except for mining lead ore, generating electricity, and manufacturing the coating itself.

One would need a core mould (push-out style would be fine), a swage die (a pound-type could be easily devised and machined so folks without an expensive swage press could final-swage cores with just a hammer), and a powder-coating setup.

It sounds so crazy it just might work.

I'm envisioning a heavy steel block for swaging with a small, say .100" meplat and ejector pin, and a punch that would fit closely and squarely through at least 1" of the block before contacting the boolit base. The punch could be made with a cupped tip to swage gas check shanks or plain base, and the core mould could be made in two halves by Tom at Accurate Molds with either a bevel base or gas check shank cast in so little metal is moved when swaging a check shank.

Oh, and a big thanks to you boneheads who came up with these ideas in the first place and foisted them on me for my torment. Thanks a LOT. :kidding: You know who you are!

Gear

[starmac]

I have been thinking about this as well, but in a somewhat different direction. Instead of the swage die, why can't we just have a mold built with no lube grooves.

I haven't gotten all the way through the powder coating threads, but my son has a commercial powder coating setup, and uses it everyday, if it would work for bullets, it wouldn't cost me anything, but would be whatever (sometimes custom) color he happened to be shooting that day. lol

[geargnasher]

Tom could whip out a slick mould, with or without a check shank, in no time. I only mentioned the swaging thing because even a light swage that doesn't change the cast shape much at all except to just forge it more perfectly can make a huge difference in accuracy. I thought that since slicks are easy to swage anyway, why not? It's not mandatory though, just icing on the cake.

Gear

[sthwestvictoria]

Home made molds for slicks have been mentioned a few times before:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?141729-My-Homemade-Mold-for-an-Ugly-Paper-Patch-Bullet

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?72054-Home-built-paper-patch-mold&highlight=mold+paper+patch

There was another link I am searching for which was even more ingenious using a single piece of bar stock and G-clamps as handles. I'll keep trying to find it.

Edit: found it:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?199849-New-35cal-PP-boolit&highlight=35cal+pp+boolit

[dbosman]

Herters used to sell relatively inexpensive swaging dies.
Any patents have all expired.
I've got only one Herters catalog and it lists dies for fractional jackets. Does anyone know if they sold just a lead swager?

[Love Life]

A few members already have slick sided boolit moulds. As soon as I pull some irons out of the fire I plan to transition over to all slick sided moulds and sell off my traditional moulds.

I plan to get an ES PC system to play with that as heavy for caliber bullets push full snort should fall within the capabilities of powder coating and possibly HI-TEK. I still have some more experimenting to do with the HI-TEK though, and others are light years ahead of me. The potential is there, and all that has to be done now is further testing.

What I have seen playing with the 8mm is that the alloy is still the determining factor. I still have to use lino, but groups shot full snort in my Remington 700 in 8X57 have been sort of promising. I am shooting a 325365 over jacketed doses of Benchmark. From my testing so far, the best accuracy is from the low end of the charge ladder to the middle. Things get wonky near the max charge. I have monotype and stereotype to play with as well. Then there is the copper enriched alloy...

More to come as winter is my favorite shooting time.

[leftiye]

Or, just swage the bullet without jacket (use standard dies), heat treat (or not), and powder coat.

[geargnasher]

Or, just swage the bullet without jacket (use standard dies), heat treat (or not), and powder coat.

There is that.

Gear

[runfiverun]

and it works too.
I have been swaging my 223 boolits up to 227 then heat treating and re-quenching for quite a while now.
I have also been using spent primers as gas checks and a slick sided boolit straight from the die, tumble lubed in my modified 45/45 lube to good affect to about 1800 fps for quite some time now.
many of my 44 mag boolits are bump swaged in a 430 die, I can hollow point them in the same die.
I have also modified a couple of molds to pour slick sided 312 diameter boolits.
I went a little further on one of these and made the mold able to take 5-16th copper tubing sleeves.
I done a write up on them a couple of years back and got shut down on the idea by several members [and some support from a couple of others]
so I took them hunting and shot a number of deer with them. a 190 gr sleeved boolit at 2400 fps is a stone cold deer pounder with excellent expansion and the half jaxket controls how big the mushroom gets.
anyway my new swage die is in 312 diameter, the one coming is in 308 diameter.
I have been eyeballing this P/C stuff as a faux paper jacket for a while now i'm just waiting for the thickness to be exact.

[Pilgrim]

Quite a few years back one of the popular "technically inclined and curious" gun writers ran a series of tests using (IIRC) a .357 S&W comparing as cast - lubed boolits to same boolits-slightly swaged. The difference in accuracy he found using that gun, dies, yada yada was a quite marked improvement. Unfortunately for all of us that writer died fairly young so we lost a good experimenter. He did not complete all of the tests planned before his demise. I've often thought about making/buying a swage die to use in my rockchucker for this very purpose. It won't do squat for velocity improvement, but might show good accuracy improvement with certain moulds and guns. I doubt you will find great improvement with all guns and moulds, but who knows??

[dsbock]

I have also modified a couple of molds to pour slick sided 312 diameter boolits.
I went a little further on one of these and made the mold able to take 5-16th copper tubing sleeves.
I done a write up on them a couple of years back and got shut down on the idea by several members [and some support from a couple of others]
so I took them hunting and shot a number of deer with them. a 190 gr sleeved boolit at 2400 fps is a stone cold deer pounder with excellent expansion and the half jaxket controls how big the mushroom gets.

I'm interested in seeing your write up. Don't let doubters shut you down. Without experimenter's like yourself, we would still only be shooting round ball out of muzzle loaders.

David

[quilbilly]

This reminds me a lot of when I was competing and hunting with recurve bows then looking on at the first compounds with wonder. I switched to longbows just to be an iconoclast. Did the same with muzzleloaders when inlines came out then I continued with FFF Goex and side locks. I will celebrate your achievements and have fun being an old-fashion fuddy duddy.

[Iron Mike Golf]

Hey Gear, what dia are you thinking of swaging to? .001 under groove dia? Not knowledgeable about PP, so I don't know rules of thumb there.

I've wondered about run's idea of a deeper GC. Not a half-jacket, but mebbe 2-3x deeper than a regular GC.

[runfiverun]

the bigger gas check thing would be pretty easily accomplished.
you'd need to have an oversized disc made then a [maybe stepped] push through gas check maker.
it would definitely help control stripping in the rifling when pushing things hard.

the write-up was on this sites sister sight which no longer exists i'd have to re-shoot and
re-do the write-up.
i'm sure this would break the girls hearts as I centered the boolits around their 31 cal rifles.
I do still have 3-400 of the original 1500 bullets I made for them kicking around.
little girl put a serious dent in them over the last few years and even took them hunting this year in her little argie, but didn't get a chance to use them.

[btroj]

I think this is an excellent idea. Is it possible to get a swage to make a 180 gr 30 cal to fit a short 06 case?

The swage would help with consistency but even a smooth side bullet set up for a GC would be easy to cast with consistency. No lube grooves would make it easier to use an alloy that didn't flow as easily, maybe something with Cu in it?

[shooter93]

Think a standard heavy reloading press would swage ww alloy or ww alloy with some tin without undue wear or damage? Bumping is one thing but I would think fully swaging a larger caliber bullet might start to strain things. One of these days I do want to get an RCE setup for making bullets for a double rifle. I may try the coating thing but for the most part for the way I shoot now the traditional lubed bullets work fine but I guess a guy can always use another experiment...lol.

[500MAG]

Couldn't you just size down in 2 steps? Say you take a lyman 314299 and run it through the 312 sizing die, then down to 311 without lube. Maybe coat them with a lube to ease the process. Possible?

[Jailer]

Or, just swage the bullet without jacket (use standard dies), heat treat (or not), and powder coat.

I think this plus a final bump after gas checking and powder coating would give you the desired results.

The alloy you use would determine the velocity envelope up to the point that the PC fails. A copper rich alloy would be a winner here for high velocity.

Haven't a tried a single one of these (except some powder coating), just thinking out loud here.

[popper]

Gear - I agree with you completely. A hammer 'bump' swager die for cast. Not completely convince of the smooth side design. A slight and shallow groove gives the alloy a place to go vs flowing into the base area, around the punch and leaving a tail. Possibly a tapered die without nose punch that would allow 'impact' removal? I definitely would coat & GC before swaging. Consider that moulds would now need to be 'undersized' or CBs require pre-sizing before swaging. Wish I had a shop to do some experimenting.
P.S. if somebody does this, I'd like to see results of a 200F cast put into the 500F swager die then WD. Should at least double the strength of a low Sb alloy.

[montana_charlie]

So how about making swaged "slicks", powder coating them, and shooting them just like J-words without the inconsistencies and tediousity inherent to making paper jackets?
Because I am paper patching everything I shoot, I haven't been reading any threads on bullet lube. But, I have noticed that many of them have to do with epoxy coatings.

I haven't read any of those, but I automatically assumed that 'slick' bulets would be the ones being coated.

CM

[popper]

Charley - I was trying PP then found the PC thread and never looked back. PP performance without the trouble.