Weighing Cast Bullets

[colt 357]

My shooting isn't that good yet to waste time segregating. But I do weigh each boolit for quality. I do plus or minus one grain from average weight of that pour. Make sure there is no super light or heavy boolits. My shooting is getting better though I knocked the orange dot out my my target this weekend in 50 rounds. Thats a first for me. Casting is paying off now....

[Lizard333]

For my pistols that I shoot "plinker" rounds through, I don't weigh. Rifle for more than 100 yards, I do +- a grain and shoot the most consistant group. Helps to weed out any voids. Most of my shooting is not that accurate that the boolit is the deciding factor. I am usally the bigger varible, not the boolit.

[dverna]

Weighing pistol bullets is a waste of time for the vast majority of shooters and/or applications. This assumes you have good casting technique.

I weigh bullets for rifle use. I use a lot fewer so the time needed is not a huge factor. I feel better about getting accuracy at longer ranges but have never done the testing to prove it.

Don

[TXGunNut]

Since I'm a relative newbie @ casting I think weighing rifle boolits is a good diagnostic tool for me. Have felt like it was a waste of time after a good casting session because I have no culls. Other than hunting boolits I don't bother much with weighing pistol boolits. I'll do it for initial sessions to establish a baseline but most of my culls never leave the casting bench.
Has anybody else weighed off-the-shelf j-word bullets? Percentage-wise they have more variation than my rifle boolits, betting you will find (or have found) the same thing. Last box of 165gr 30-06 bullets had an extreme spread of just under 2 grains. My last batch of rifle boolits also had an extreme spread of just under 2 grains...for a 405 grain boolit!

[vrh]

I weigh both cast bullets for my 30-06 and my 243 rifles. I put all bullets weighing the same grain into separate piles (example.. one pile weighing 178 gr and the other pile weighing 179 gr.) . Then I go back and weigh each bullet in the pile to a tenth of a grain. I decide which bullets that I will keep from each pile. The ones that I don't pick are usually put back into the pot. That gets me intp a 1/2 grain difference in the selected bullets.

[vzerone]

When sometimes you have a really good target group except for a flyer or two, they get all kinds of blames. Most often it's not casting good bullets. Just weighting bullets isn't good enough. Think about it, you have all these bullets with weight variances, but you actually don't see anything wrong about them. Yet they don't all weigh the same. Besides bad casting differences between the cavities in multiple cavity moulds is the culprit, but when it's not it's the casting. I learned how to cast good bullets and I don't have to weigh them. Gone are the fliers.

[FAsmus]

Gentlemen;

I'll stand on what I said in post #20.

I'm a long range cast bullet shooter - our closest target is 350 yards and we work on out to 1000 ~ bullet performance is critical.

Still how do you check for all the factors? Sure, weigh them is one, measure them, pet them, stroke them -- all that. I maintain that since the variations begin at the casting bench start there! Weigh each bullet as cast, figure out what is the most consistent technique and stick with it - then and only then work on efficiency to increase production as seems needed.

- Forrest

[Hickory]

I am basically a plinker, so I do not weigh boolits.
However, I do weigh them when I'm target shooting, sometimes for hunting.

[KenH]

Gentlemen;

I'll stand on what I said in post #20.

I'm a long range cast bullet shooter - our closest target is 350 yards and we work on out to 1000 ~ bullet performance is critical.- Forrest

Forrest, when you're shooting cast bullets at the 350 yd range - just how much would ±1 grain on your 45-70 bullets open up a group? Wait, you didn't say the caliber - what are you shooting and weight of bullet?

[FAsmus]

Ken H:

I shoot lots of calibers way out there. In the beginning it was a 40/65, moving to 45/70, to 444 Marlin, and for the purpose-built 1000 a 50/90.

Now, for ease and convenience I shoot 30'06 and 7x57 as well..

All of these with the heaviest bullets that I can either stand the recoil (50/90) or will stabilize in the rifling twist(40/65). Big to small, the 50 690gr, the 45 530gr, the 44 480gr, the 40 370gr, the 30 shoots best with RCBS 200gr Silhouette, the 7mm RCBS 168gr "SP".

I learned by means of the scale and the heavy stuff. Making the 50's and 45's +/- 1 grain for general shooting. For a match I'd select +/- 0.5 gr for the record shooting. The lighter bullets were easier to cast consistently and after a year or so I figured I could dispense with the weighing as they were cast since runs were showing satisfactorily small variations and shooting was ruled more by conditions and the lowest Standard Deviation you can manage than group size anyway.

In ways this is a 'head' game: Being confident in your components such that things 'feel' better on the firing line.

One thing I'm convinced of is that casting as well as you can requires practice and concentration - but once learned you can count on excellent results.

Good evening, Forrest

[Walter Laich]

Depends on your definition of accuracy. For most informal paper punching and plinking 1/2gror even 10% is fine. Of course this is dependent on caliber and overall weight. I usually weigh my 22 cal boolits to within 1/10th of a grain. Some calibers I don't even weigh at all like 45LC if I get a flyer, oh well my fault for not weighing them.

+1 since I'm shooting at cowboy sized targets 12 x 12" targets at 5-7 yards I don't worry about this. long range is an entirely different story.

[FAsmus]

Walter;

I've done the Cowboy shooting too.

You're right-on! Who cares at 7 yards in rapid fire?

- FAsmus

[Tom W.]

I shoot my 9mm pistols 98% of the time. Every now and then I'll weigh a boolit when I'm sizing them just to see how much different they are from the listed weight. The defective boolits go back into the pot, or if I just don't like the way it looks it's going to get another chance, but shooting @25 yards or less doesn't warrant fretting about tiny deviations in weight. My .44 RemMag usually is a bit heavier than what the mold advertises , but not enough to worry with. We're going to see how it shoots steel at 100 yards the 2nd Saturday of the month with the 310 gr.cast Lee boolits. I haven't fired it that far in years. But weigh boolits to .5 grain difference? No thanks....

[Arkansas Paul]

If it makes you feel better and doesn't take away from your enjoyment of the hobby, it is not a waste of your time.

Personally, I only cast for pistol boolits, so I don't weight them. The one exception is when I get a new mold. I weigh a few the first casting to see what my alloy is dropping them at. If I change alloys (very uncommon), I'll do it again.

That's it for me though.

If something is working for you, don't let someone else saying that it is a waste of time make you change how you do it.

Happy loading and shooting.

[beagle]

Okay, now for a story on my experience with weighing. One winter I cast over 2,000 RCBS 22-55-SPs for my .223 Number 1, Keplinger set trigger and 6-24X Weaver. I had an RCBS e-scale for weighing. I labeled 100 round .22 plastic boxes in .1 grain increments. Over several weeks, I separated those suckers into lots of .1 grain. I ended up with a bunch of "lighties" and a bunch of "heavies that I placed into containers kind of like "others" with a .3 grain spread. I figured to use these as fouling shots in my .223. I selected the mid-range weights as my most potentially accurate bullets and loaded them using a set of RCBS Competition dies. They shot just a bit better than my average unweighed lots. Surprising to me, the light and heavy lots shot almost as well as my "good" stuff. As a matter of interest, I plotted the numbers of various weights and got an almost perfect "Bell curve".

The experiment was worth it to me but also proved to me that there was no magic or reason for weighing. Cast your bullets, be ruthless in culling any defects and you'll get probably as good results as you will by weighing.

Your results may differ from mine./beagle