How consistent are you?

[Lead melter]

The reason I ask this question is a result of a happenstance occurrence today. I'm not one to get altogether too obsessed with the weight variance with a cast boolit, but just by chance I weighed some recently cast boolits.

The RD TLC359-190-RF was used to cast some trials of water quenched 50/50 pure/WW. Average weight was 192.1 grains. The widest variance I foiund was .8 grains which is less than 1/2 of 1%. To my mind that is pretty consistent.

Do you guys keep your weight parameters looser or closer. Just curious.

[sundog]

I weigh match boolits. I separate them by .1 grain and depending on how many I have the keepers will remain in those batches or maybe combined by .5% or 1% of average weight. The mainest thing is culling the light weights. Before I had a digital scale, I didn't bother as it was too much trouble. Culling light weights pretty much rids groups of unexplained flyers.

[mpmarty]

Funny this thread comes up now.
I just cast some 170gr 309 gas check bullets in a single cavity mold.
I normally only cast pistol bullets and just lube, size and shoot without much more than a visual inspection looking for folds and other reasons to remelt them.
Now I'm starting to cast for my 7.62 Nato semi auto and decided to weigh each boolit on my Ohaus scale.

All cast from WW metal

All weighed before lubing, sizing or applying gas checks.

Results:

<171.5 grs 4 boolits (remelt culls)
171.5grs 18 boolits
172.0 grs 3 boolits
172.3 grs 14 boolits
172.7 grs 6 boolits

This is my first time weighing cast boolits and I'm hoping someone will tell me these variations are OK or to keep the 171.5s and dump the rest back in the pot.

What say you?

Thanks for any input or comment,

Marty in Oregon

[jforwel]

Interesting thread. I randomly weighed about 15 boolits out of about 250 Lyman 429421s that I cast last week. I also have a balance beam scale so I wasn't about to weigh them all. The weight averaged 254.5 +/- one grain, which means a two grain spread. It doesn't sound good from what I have read but they are going in a revolver so I'll wait and see how the accuracy is. Might have to break down and finally get a digital scale.

Darryl Hedges wrote an article on the LongrangeBPCR website about casting. And in the article there is a picture of a board he made up with several rows to place bullets and each row has a weight at the top in .1 gr increments. It's interesting to see the bell curve. The majority of the boolits are within .6grs, +/-.3, with others further out on either end. He culls the odd balls. But his method is rythmic and I think he's casting for match grade bullets.

[JSnover]

Funny this thread comes up now.
I just cast some 170gr 309 gas check bullets in a single cavity mold.
I normally only cast pistol bullets and just lube, size and shoot without much more than a visual inspection looking for folds and other reasons to remelt them.
Now I'm starting to cast for my 7.62 Nato semi auto and decided to weigh each boolit on my Ohaus scale.

All cast from WW metal

All weighed before lubing, sizing or applying gas checks.

Results:

<171.5 grs 4 boolits (remelt culls)
171.5grs 18 boolits
172.0 grs 3 boolits
172.3 grs 14 boolits
172.7 grs 6 boolits

This is my first time weighing cast boolits and I'm hoping someone will tell me these variations are OK or to keep the 171.5s and dump the rest back in the pot.

What say you?

Thanks for any input or comment,

Marty in Oregon

Is there a reason you'd like them to weigh exactly 170? Why not go for a nominal weight of 172 +/- .5? At that weight, .5 gr is just over .25% That sounds pretty consistent to me and you'll end up remelting less of them.

[mpmarty]

I don't want them to weigh any specific weight.
The majority weighed 171.5 or more so I dumped the lighter ones (<171.5) as probably having VVSI as the diamond folks call them Very Very Small Inclusions. I just want these to be as uniform as possible and fear an off axis inclusion would raise cain with the accuracy.

I just ran a brinnell type hardness test on this batch and they look good for around 2100 to 2150fps. BH is 17.2

I'm gonna start with 33grs of BLC2 and work up in half grain increments to 35grs.

Using my Chrono first and then I'll try some 100yard accuracy testing over a bench.

[JSnover]

Makes sense. Looks like your mold and your alloy wants to throw most of your boolits to that weight. You could tweak it up or down by changing the content but it sounds like you won't need to. A friend of mine whos been casting for at least twenty years claims he is often able shake out a small bubble by lightly tapping the mold as soon as it's filled. I dunno. Never tried that but if it's true it would effect accuracy since every bubble would be in a different place and a different size.
There's always something to think about.....

[quack1]

The only boolets I weigh are .22 caliber. I usually cast a couple hundred at a time and weigh them all to .1gr on a digital scale and separate them into piles. I then take the pile that has the most boolets in it and call that my good weight for that casting session/batch of alloy (for example 52.6gr). I also take the 52.7gr pile and the 52.5gr pile and keep them too. Everything else gets remelted. I still keep the 3 different weights separated in plastic bags,and whenever I use up one bag and start another I go to the range and check my zero. Hardly ever need to make any scope adjustments, though.
Probably not the best method, but when I get in the casting "groove" the boolets come out pretty uniform.
For boolets I hunt with, I weigh to eliminate any light ones.
Other calibers, all I ever do is cull the visible defects and have fun shooting.

[mpmarty]

OK, went to the range today and shot the 171.5 gr boolits. Tumble lubed w/ LLA and gas checked/sized 309 then tumbled in motor mica.

Five rounds over the Chrony and they varied from 1897 to 1954 fps out of my 16" barrel Saiga.

Iron sights with fifteen rounds for group size at fifty yards (come on guys, I'm seventy years old and still don't wear glasses to see) If I had the scope with me today I'd have shot at a hundred as I could see the holes then. As it was I shot at fifty so I could spot my flyers. First five were six inches low in a 2" group. Cleaned the barrel (pushed a tight patch through it) and moved the battle sight to 300 meters and shot another group of 2.5" six inches high. Reset battle sight to 200 meters and placed a vertical string of 2.5" in the center of the target. Horizontal dispersion was less than an inch. I'm thinking of changing to mag primers next time. The load was 34.5grs of BLC2 with WLR primers.

Saiga functioned flawlessly. I did less well in the accuracy department. I'll bring the 8X scope next time and shoot at a hundred yards.

[Gohon]

I just cast, weigh a dozen or so and load according to average weight. You would find the same thing with store bought bullets. For example I just took ten bullets/boolits from a box of 180 grain WFNGC bought from Cast Performance. They ranged from 176.1 up to 177.5 grains. With all the variables that can affect accuracy, this is the least I worry about if at all.

[HeavyMetal]

For years I just cast and loaded. Had a beam scale and, as previously noted, weighing a butt load of boolits on a beam scale is a very large pain.

Enter Pact in about 1990 or so with thier first digital scale. ( the one that worked !) Suddenly weighing boolits was not a time consuming task! Figured as long as I seperated boolits into several groups that didn't span more than one grain in weight spread how could I go wrong?

The cool part was actually finding the ocasional light boolit ( like 5 grains light!) that would have caused a flyer for sure! Groups, when load testing, became much more uniform, less prone to vertical stringing and just plain old fashioned better!

Now for the good part! I bought a 500 round batch of 30 cal. 150 grain soft points and weighed them , all of them! Think they were Winchester but might have been Remingtons.

A Two grain spread was average, with some of these J bullets actually weighing Four grains under 150!


So I figure if my cast are better than that how can I go wrong and, more importantly, why should I worry about it!

I can, and do, use those old figures as my guage. Buy some jacketed bullets and check them out, you might just be surprised at what gets sold over the counter!

[Calamity Jake]

I think me and sundog are buddies, we do about the same thing, course I have to shoot againem once a year, he's a toughun beat when it come to shooten them match pills.

I just weighed about 300 22's last night RCBC 22-055's on a digital scale, I put them in 2 groups(2 cav mold), 53.9-54.1 and 54.2-54.4, anything ▲ or ▼(3-4%)will go back in the pot.