Third outing shooting cast in 1911, third time cleaning lead out. Thank goodness for copper chore boys
I want to go through my entire setup and procedure front to back, so if someone sees what I'm doing wrong, you can clue me in.
I am ladle casting into a 5 cavity aluminum mold from Accurate. The mold casts 200gr SWC. They drop at .455 (I ordered oversized intentionally and I size down). The boolits are fairly soft, cast of ebay sourced WW ingots.
After casting, I size them in a Lee push through sizer. I do this unlubed and I have never had an issue with leading in the sizer. The sizer was originally a Lee .452 sizer, which I opened up to .4528 at the widest dimension using a dowel rod and sand paper. At the base and front driving band, the boolits measure .4528 in the narrowest dimension and slightly above .453 at the widest dimension after sizing. For reference, the barrel of my 1911 slugs at .4515 which makes for a .0013 to .0015 interference fit.
These were tumbled lubed with 45 45 10 purchased from White Label Lubes. I used a single coat. The 45 45 10 is in a wal mart ketchup squeeze bottle. I place this bottle in a sink of hot water to get it flowing better. While the lube is warming, I place all boolits in a plastic container and I put a heat gun on them until they are just barely too hot to touch. Then I sparingly apply 45 45 10 (roughly 15 drops if you want to count it that way and IIRC), put the lid on, and tumble for about a minute or two. I did about 100 boolits this way. After lubing, boolits come out looking like this:
If they look a bit rough, they are. Most of the scratches were sustained when being dropped from the mold or banging into each other while tumble lubing.
I let these dry overnight. Because I don't have a proper workshop, I simply set them outside to dry overnight. SWMBO will not tolerate the funky smell in the basementThe temperature was relatively cold that night (around 35F).
I loaded them on my Hornady LnL AP progressive press. Utilized mixed range brass. Station 1 is a Lee sizing die for 45 ACP (the Lee has a wider chamfer at the mouth and works better in a progressive). Station 2 was powder charging. It uses a Hornady LnL measure and a .452-.454 powder through expander insert. I was very generous with the expansion because I've had issues with boolits being swaged down during seating before. The powder charge was Hodgdon's starting charge of Titegroup for 200gr LSWC boolits (4.8gr). Station 3 was empty (putting a bullet feeder here soon). Station 4 is a Hornady seater die configured with SWC seating stem. The die was doing no crimping at all, seating only. Station 5 was a Lee FCD backed out almost all the way...the FCD can swage boolits down, so I set it to size the cartridge only partially, and not down to the boolit base. Basically I used just enough FCD to get the rounds to chamber (swaged nose down some, not base).
I made three dummy cartridges first. One of them had a boolit seated without having been run through the partial FCD stage. The other two had a boolit seated and were run through the partial FCD stage. I pulled all three boolits and measured the base. Bases still measured .4528 in all cases.
I made and fired 50 rounds. Before cleaning, this was the condition of my barrel:
It actually didn't turn out to be as bad as it looks in the first pic. This is what I had after a patch and some Hoppes:
Still pretty bad, but not as apocalyptic as it seemed at first. Nevertheless, this level of leading is even worse than when I was shooting undersized boolits (.451 through a .4515 barrel was not this bad; I used LLA lube on those, and too much. They were sticky until the moment I fired them).
The leading was consistent down the length of the entire barrel. It was not prevalent near the chamber or the muzzle, it was evenly distributed.
Where do I go from here to correct this? I really only have vague ideas. I have proper boolit size for my barrel and my bases aren't being swaged down. There are three possibilities I am considering.
1) Titegroup is a very fast burner and has a spikey pressure curve; I suppose it's possible it spikes pressure too high for the lube or the alloy. If this is the case, I have some Hodgdon Universal I can try.
2) The alloy is clearly quite soft. The boolits get dinged and scratched readily just dropping them from molds and tumble lubing them. I don't have a hardness tester, but I suspect they are not above 10 BHN. I *can* scratch them with a fingernail, just barely and not deeply, but you can see and feel the scratch. I did not really consider this a problem as 45 ACP is suited to soft boolits and unsuited to hard ones anyway.
3) Lube. They say less is more with tumble lube. Maybe they're wrong. Shooting them today, there was smoke so it wasn't as if the lube somehow fell off or something weird like that. I don't recall the smoke being higher or lower volume compared to what I normally see, but I didn't really pay attention to that detail either. In any case, maybe one coat was not enough, though if that were the case, I would kind of expect to have no / less leading near the chamber and heavier leading at the muzzle. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.
FWIW, the accuracy remained surprisingly acceptable until about the last five rounds, but even then I was still holding 4 or 5 inches at 15 yards in poor weather and visibility.
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Originally Posted by popper
DougGuy
