Can someone help me identify this supposedly 50 AE bullet and more?

[Stilly]

147826

I bought this single cavity HP mold last year and after about 20+ drops it finally started giving me something I might be able to work with. I thought it was a Lyman devastator, but I could not find it anywhere so maybe not.

I believe the mold is made of bronze or brass but I could be wrong, I know it is NOT aluminum. When I bought it I was told that it was a 50 AE mold but THAT was all they knew. It has a dark golden color, like a brown/gold.

IF anyone has any information on this type of bullet then great. It is much appreciated. I plan to PC these and hopefully shoot them out of the Deagle. So far I have not shot PC out of the bird yet, I was waiting until I got a job and could afford to spend $500 on another barrel to test out whether or not PC plays nice with its gas system. Currently I only have plated rounds I push through it but this mold has been sitting and I wanted to cast a small batch of these up and see if I can have some ready when I do get a 50 AE barrel...

Thanks for your time and if you want pics of the mold let me know. I think it said AE on it, and then a 14 or something else, but it was an old used mold.

I threw this one on the scale and saw 280.xx but I did not think to grab the calipers and measure the diameter. (plus the dog was in the way of that and I did not want to kick them out of the way).

There are 3 things that ID this mold.
AE
501
142

So I believe it is a AE bullet with a .501 diameter but I am stumped on the 142, the brand of the mold and possible load data (but that is not too hard to track down. I think I can find that). Worst case I will use 300gr load data.

147837

I am guessing this is either an RCBS, Lyman, or Ideal mold, but I do not have much mold experience for some of these older ones.

147838

[whisler]

If it is RCBS, Lyman, or Ideal I believe it would be an iron mold and you should be able to ascertain that by checking with a magnet. Good luck with identifying it.

[scaevola]

I can't help you with your questions but I'm very interested in your experiences using PC in the Desert Eagle. Cheaper bullets for the .50 would be nice.

Please post what you learn.

[Stilly]

In Theory PC should be better than Plated. Maybe I should load up some PC in the 44 and shoot them all. I THINK I have read somewhere else that someone was already shooting PC out of the Deagle. But that info was months ago when I saw it, or maybe they were getting ready to. I think it was mid-late last year actually. I will revisit this with an update. I am supposed to be shooting tomorrow night so maybe I will take some PC with me. Of course, it will suck for all the others near me at the range. :)

And for what it is worth, the mold IS magnetic. Strongly magnetic...

[sigep1764]

Well let's see some pics of that Deagle and the target damage!

[Stilly]

All I have readily available are these. I only started recording Deagle loads when I got my Rossi Ranch Hand and had to "break it in" with 200 rounds of .44. (so glad I was able to cast those...)

http://www.stillyvision.com/files/deagle/deagle2.jpg

This was before I changed out the grips for those nice Hogues and changed out the sights for the Millets.

I also had someone film me "fixing" a Belkin Omniport (4 port KVM switch) using only my Deagle and some H-110 loads, but I have not upped that yet. It only took 1-2 shots to fix the switch completely... ;)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGGySKStvm4


Hey wait a second... I see what you got me to do there. This is not supposed to be a fapping thread! :D

[Stilly]

Today I used this mold more and I am starting to think that it is NOT a real boolit mold. I am starting to think that it started off as something else and then was modified. The boolits it drops do not seem to have lube grooves or crimp grooves that are very well defined. They are just GROOVES that have been placed there.

I wonder if I were to have someone else modify it and remove the grooves altogether and then just have nothing but a smooth bearing surface to ride down the barrel.

Oh yeah, the mold also looks warped. But even though the corners were not squared off together and there were gaps all over, it still drops 280gr boolits that look kind of neat and they seem to roll decently. Just my thoughts. I really detest making them 1 at a time though.

[Stilly]

Tonight I measured this bullet.

I measured it at .495.


Now that I have over 200 of these made, I am kind of irritated that I did not measure this sooner.

Besides giving it three layers of PC, is there anything else that I can do to make it drop larger boolits?

This was with COWW and slight linotype added in.

I will contact hollowpointmolds.com and see if they can slightly enlarge the bullet, maybe remove the bottom grooves, but allow a crimp groove to be there and also make the top more rounded with a larger hollowpoint instead of it being bee-hive shaped.

:(

[pretzelxx]

Glue boolit and lapping compound with a wood tip on a cordless drill may do the trick.

[rintinglen]

Take a look at the Stickie on the "WEET" method. That is an extraordinarily good tutorial on modifying boolit molds. A fellow from New Zealand wrote it and it is excellent.

[runfiverun]

the mold block is definitely lyman.

the only mold number I can find that looks like that boolit is a 290ish gr hollow point that has a 515 designation.

looking at your nose I suspect you have a block that has been modified by either cutting down a longer boolit and the nose modified.
or someone cut it themselves with their own cherry.
@495 would make it an excellent candidate for a 50 cal black powder rifle with a thicker patch.

[Stilly]

Thank you for the extra information. I want this to succeed to be around .501 and work for the .50 AE so I will have a look at the stickie. I was not aware of a WEET method.

I am starting to think that this might have been sold as an ideal/lyman mold without the name on it and the guy did the work himself as others have said.

Bummer. I wish he had more clearly defined the grooves at least...

[runfiverun]

it's hard to judge from the pictures but the cavity's look like they are full of mold release.
if they have a heavy coat of that in there It will make the diameter smaller.
one word of advice:
if you need .006 more boolit diameter I would send the mold off to Erick ohlen, and have him re-cut the drive bands to the proper diameter.
http://www.hollowpointmold.com/

I wouldn't worry about the lube grooves size too much if you add them together you got about 10 times more lube than you need for a 10" barrel.
I'd try just filling one with a quality lube myself.

[Frank46]

Didn't lyman make a 360 grain or so 50 caliber mold for the 50-70 or 56-50 spencer or peabody rifles or carbines?. Frank

[Stilly]

Thanks runfiverun.

I asked and it was very affordable. $35 setup fee and $5 per band. I measured the ID of the mold tonight and I got around .4928-.493x depending on where I looked. I think I can do this.

Really I just want a boolit that I can cast and PC to shoot out of the bird. Plain and simple. My problem is that many times when I get something in my head I get tunnelvision and just go for it totally oblivious to the costs involved.

When, for $150 or less I can get a 4 cavity Accurate Aluminum Mold made with 2 different .50 boolit profiles in it brand new. Not HP, but I can have that work done later on.

So yeah, I am just here kicking around ideas to see what I can do. I know that there are a lot of guys here that are way more all-knowing with this stuff so I figured I would come to the source of all cast info on the internets and see what everyone else says.

I guess that now since I am casting, I should probably learn (and I will) the proper terms and nomenclature so that I can better communicate my needs with the mold makers.

Thanks for the information so far. I have no interest in black powder anything. I am a conventional firearm guy (not an arf lover either) so if I can not get this mold to work for me then I will be either modifying it or tossing it. It DOES look exactly like the Accurate mold the 50-350E or whatever it is that is the only one that says 50 AE on it. (The profile I mean) so maybe it was undercut, who knows. I will have a closer look at it. I THOUGHT I had cleaned it out pretty good, but maybe I missed something. I know that I got .492 and .495 and .497 on various boolits, but I did not think to rotate them, I just measured 3 different ones. So maybe there is still some **** in it that needs to get cleaned out.

[snuffy]

Stilly, since you simply want that mold to work for an every day boolit, you don't need it to expand, then casting with a very hard alloy like Linotype would result in a bigger diameter. Also a good thorough cleaning of the whole cavity and the driving bands might gain you some added diameter. If you could gain even 1 thousandth on the .497, then a .002 coating of PC would be right on .502.

I'm sure that the PC would run just fine through the bird as far as the gas system goes.

I have the mighty 500 Smithy. IK wanted a boolit that I could load from powder puff loads all the way up to OMG loads. I selected a RCBS 375 SWC mold. It threw undersized boolits @ .499 with my usual range lead that I have over 1K of, that would be pretty close to wheel weight in hardness, averages around 12 BHN. A couple of runs with the leementing process rewarded me with .500, not much of a gain. Lubed with white label Carnuba red, the shot just okay but the .501 Lyman sizer hardly touched the driving bands.

I had just started the PC process, so I coated some of the .500 boolits. Ended up with .503-4, then run through a lee .501 sizer brought them down to .501. But it wasn't easy to push them through. (Much harder than a 9mm, .40 or 45 boolits). But that's okay, got-er-done! They shoot just short of fantastic, all the way from a trail boss load all the way to a case full of H-110. I finally found a red-dot sight that will stay put on the beast, and not fail, get killed internally. Trashed 2 tru-glow sights, then a Burris 3X9 LER pistol scope. Now a Vortex spitfire is on top, it has stood up to the recoil pulse for 30 rounds.

[Stilly]

Before I send it in I will have another go at it. Thankfully I have a lot of lino sitting around. I am going to clean it good and soak it in some kroil or eds red and hopefully it will loosen up some crud that is in it that I apparently am not seeing. I had miscalculated at first. I was seeing .497 or .496 and .492 and it turns out When I measured it I was in a hurry and did not pay attention to the base where I was measuring. Turns out that .492 is the norm here. The mold measured .4925-.493 at some points, but The reason why the bullets hit .495+ was because the bases were kind of messed up/dirty/had marks on them. That little piece of nubbin made it look bigger.

When I put these in the .501 sizer, one or two came back down on the punch. Most stayed up there but man they felt like nothing.

Maybe this mold is damaged or warped too. I noticed after looking at it that first time that the corners and sides were not flat against each other, there are gaps all over it. It sucks though if that is the case because it throws solid boolits, but they are just not the right size. Well, I really should PC them and see what I get then. I will do that to about 5 of them. Then I will load up a dummy round and see what they look like or how they feel.

Is it possible they warped this mold by pouring something very hot in it?

[Ola]

The mold is iron, so it would take some seriously hot stuff to warp it.

Did you find out what "AE" stand for? Is it for sure "Action Express"?

Hmmm, maybe it is a specialty boat-tail hollow base WFN bullet :-D. You know, "extremely accurate boat-tail design, hollow base for extra powder capacity and reliable expansion to the bore, extreme wide meplat for devastating effect in the target"...:)

[Stilly]

RCBS said they had no clue.

Lyman did not get back to me. BUT based on what I have seen here, from what folks said, and from looking around online, I am thinking that this started out as a Lyman or Ideal bullet mold 350gr AE.

Maybe it did not shoot right, I do not know but I am thinking that they had it converted to a hollow point. Why they did that and not fix the undersized issue I do not know, unless it was not meant for a 50 AE but for black powder. It DOES follow this profile though:http://www.accuratemolds.com/bullet_detail.php?bullet=50-350E-D.png

The sad thing is that it is only .010 smaller in diameter. Oh well. I will get it taken care of in time. I DO want to PC a boolit or two though and see how they fit in the 50 AE shells.