350 Legend and Cast Boolits

[Oldfeller]

What is next? I have two tools coming from China, the first one will be used as a simple round nose bullet form. I will take wooden block castings from that tooling and try to understand pure round nose loading issues better before going to the next step.

Round nose tool cast forms can get turned into round flat meplat slugs on my lathe for testing, with various sized
cut to true meplats so as to see the best size to avoid loading issues and loading damage.

This avoids the sin of "going too far" on the can't go back tooling changes, a sin I have committed twice now.

These simple round nose forms can also be machined into hollow points so I can understand the loading characteristics of those hollow point forms.

A simple view of things long term says I could make up a whole bunch of simple powder coated round nose forms into loaded rounds, then build a simple aluminum round tool to slip over the assembled bullet and quickly drill machine the PC'd bullet make the final hollow point bullet form, or else maybe use the old RCBS lubricizer to top punch size a shallow hollow point into a bunch of the PC'd bullets before loading them.

Accuracy destroying balance errors may well enter into these somewhat crude hollow point methods. not good

I suspect any form of post PC machining could hurt accuracy, so some "totally captive" die steel based nose forming machining that takes place at the actual final sizing operation might be better for keeping as much "on center and perfectly balanced" accuracy as possible. As would starting out with the simplest, best most "accuracy stable" cast bullet form that is found out of all the testing.

In the function of the LEE push through die there is a limited length tight zone that does all the sizing, so if I made up a pusher spud that goes into the ram that just happened to push the bullet into the sizing die and leave it on purpose in that tight zone (to park the unmachined undamaged PC'd bullet right at that perfect constriction zone) then I could then come in from the top with an aluminum bushed drill driven conical tool that could cut some very on-center very consistent depth hollow point forms into that captive, on-center bullet. Then I would swap out the short spud that is on the press ram and then finish the sizing stroke and ejecting the bullet by pushing it only from the bottom.

Machining tool would look a lot like this (less the shouldered aluminum rod it is inserted into, of course).


Run out in this cutter would simply make a balanced, on-center very slightly larger diameter hollow point cavity.

Not many hunting bullets are actually needed, so some mild gyrations to make them are OK by me.

[P Flados]

With PC, it is very practical to do final sizing and reshaping of boolits after PC is applied. Back in March of 2018, I made a post describing something I called "No Jacket Swaging (NJS)". The post is copied below.

I have been using it a lot since then. All of my 357AR 180s and 200s are sized and slightly reshaped with a single pass base first NJS.



I use NJS on my Lee tumble lube 158 RNs that drop at 0.356". With a single pass base first NJS I get improved shape boolits and the size is increased to 0.359"



I just finished loading a batch of 30 cal "long nose" Lee 150s. I used a nose first single pass NJS to size down the nose to 0.299", lengthen the nose (eliminate the bands on both sides of the crimp groove) and size the remaining two bands to 0.311"


Text from March 2018 post:

My current ongoing experiment includes "something entirely new" (where there is really little or nothing "new").

I am currently making my own low tech, soft steel dies that allow No Jacket Swaging (NJS).

With PC, a boolit can be made NJS style as follows:

- A no lube groove mold is used to drop boolits fast & easy.
- Neither the mold nor boolits need to be perfect.
- PC is applied (I use ASBB HF red) on the as cast boolit.
- The boolit is then formed to the final shape with one or more swaging passes.
- Swaging passes are pushing the boolit up into the die and then back out the way they went in instead of the push through process.
- One pass will be base first to get perfect, uniform, crisp, full circumference edge on the base.
- The base first pass can also increase or reduce the boolit diameter and do minor re-shaping of the nose at the same time.
- A second pass can be nose first to get a nose rider section that is just the right final OD and is perfectly concentric with the base.
- My current nose first die allows me to take a boolit that is 0.309" with no nose rider portion and "add" my desired 0.299" nose as the last step.

[Oldfeller]

What do you use for a swaging press?

[P Flados]

Since there are no jackets involves and re-shaping is minor, my old Lee manual turret works fine. It take less effort than re-sizing 44 mag cases.

[mehavey]

FWIW:

[Oldfeller]

Garden is in now, all the various plants are in place and the tape based drip irrigation system automatically waters all of them. Harvesting the garden is now the wife's job, walking around with her wicker basket picking stuff while not having to bend over to do it.

Gardens are a lot of spring time work, so I put all the gun stuff on the back burner for a while. I also needed to work through a considerable amount of disgust with the caliber in that you have to build so much from scratch, not being able to just go buy so much of what you need to pursue the caliber in the finer details.



So, I acknowledge my enthusiasm isn't what it used to be and that chasing this rifle and this caliber has dropped down in my ranking of best ways to spend my leisure hours.

But I am still interested in finishing cutting the mold blocks and seeing how consistently they cast the same slug out of four cavities .......

Will it work out or will it just turn into another 350 Legend hairball ????

Only one way to find out, really. We shall see, one step at a time.

[Dapaki]

Well, Oldfeller, thanks to your dogged determination on this thread, I too purchased a 350LGD upper from BCA and have been enjoying it a lot for the past few months, casting LEE boolits, PC, loading and now using surplus powders to duplex affordable loads for them has been a joy!

Once you find time and are ready to cut mold blocks, I sure would be interested in your findings. Be well.

[mehavey]

"... duplex...loads...."

Please elaborate.

[Dapaki]

Please elaborate.

I'll be posting the thread tomorrow but It's all about using cheap, slow military pulled powder in the LGD.

[Oldfeller]

Duplex loads start with a "too slow for the case / caliber base powder, generally a mil-surp pull down 50 cal or 20mm cannon powder. You put some faster powder under it to boost case pressure to get the slow stuff to burn completely. Generally, I use a pull down 5.56 powder for this booster job.

Key word is cheap as these wind up being very low pressure case filling loads that just barely stop leaving tons of trash around behind them.

And yes, they are potentially DANGEROUS to do and generally are only marginally safe in the hands of duplex masters, of which there are many on this board (most of whom won't even admit publicly to doing it any more).

As a matter of fact, even a single post on duplexing by me quickly becomes a controversy "hair-ball" with people both pro and con banging at my e-mail box with their "informative opinions" and simply reminding me why I took a short vacation from the list recently in the first place.

BTW, this is a bolt action rifle game for a newbie, newbies filling up an autoloader's gas system up with trash is NOT RECOMMENDED.

Nobody who isn't an old Shooters level experienced experimenter needs to be messing around with this stuff. And since I have heard from so many of you already today, just let it drop into silence again.

No, I have no intention of posting duplex loadings for anything -- although I seem to remember a right dandy one for 30-06, IMR 5010 and BLC-2 that only works out well for cast bullets over 192 grains. I hid behind a tree when I fired the first one of those off using a long string going to the trigger, if that gives you any thought of why I seem to think such things are "potentially dangerous" --- potentially they are.

[mehavey]

Having played the 10% duplex game -- ONLY in BP/very LARGE cases (45-3¼)/Very STRONG Falling-Block actions --
I wouldn't even dream of doing (much less see the need for) it in modern smokeless loadings

[FLINTNFIRE]

Well to some of us we can get a load that meets our needs much cheaper or by using what we have on hand , and it is nice to be able to make do with whats on shelf in times where stuff is short or price is high , to each their own .

[Oldfeller]

For those who were asking, it is an "automatic" garden now that it is built. Water and fertilizer come through the drip tape and all veggies are pole types who will grow up the mesh and run along the netting stretched over the top of the entire thing. My wife is short enough to walk into the tunnels and pick peas and beans on the sides and hanging down from the cross stretched netting without bending over and hurting her back.

I grow sugar snap peas (foreground), string beans, yardlong beans, King of the Garden pole lima beans, tomatoes and yellow zuccini and okra. 100 tomato plants go around the fence boundary so I have lots of big sandwich slicer 'maters and the excess get ground, drained and cooked into red spaghetti sauce.

What I don't have --- no weeds, no weeding, no watering and I don't have to mess with it now except to put an occasional sack of Miracle Grow into the fertilizer injector system.

[thraxx]

For those who were asking, it is an "automatic" garden now that it is built. Water and fertilizer come through the drip tape and all veggies are pole types who will grow up the mesh and run along the netting stretched over the top of the entire thing. My wife is short enough to walk into the tunnels and pick peas and beans on the sides and hanging down from the cross stretched netting without bending over and hurting her back.

I grow sugar snap peas (foreground), string beans, yardlong beans, King of the Garden pole lima beans, tomatoes and yellow zuccini and okra. 100 tomato plants go around the fence boundary so I have lots of big sandwich slicer 'maters and the excess get ground, drained and cooked into red spaghetti sauce.

What I don't have --- no weeds, no weeding, no watering and I don't have to mess with it now except to put an occasional sack of Miracle Grow into the fertilizer injector system.

^^ this guy has gardening figured out.

[Dapaki]

Duplex loads start with a "too slow for the case / caliber base powder, generally a mil-surp pull down 50 cal or 20mm cannon powder. You put some faster powder under it to boost case pressure to get the slow stuff to burn completely. Generally, I use a pull down 5.56 powder for this booster job.

Key word is cheap as these wind up being very low pressure case filling loads that just barely stop leaving tons of trash around behind them.

And yes, they are potentially DANGEROUS to do and generally are only marginally safe in the hands of duplex masters, of which there are many on this board (most of whom won't even admit publicly to doing it any more).

As a matter of fact, even a single post on duplexing by me quickly becomes a controversy "hair-ball" with people both pro and con banging at my e-mail box with their "informative opinions" and simply reminding me why I took a short vacation from the list recently in the first place.

BTW, this is a bolt action rifle game for a newbie, newbies filling up an autoloader's gas system up with trash is NOT RECOMMENDED.

Nobody who isn't an old Shooters level experienced experimenter needs to be messing around with this stuff. And since I have heard from so many of you already today, just let it drop into silence again.

No, I have no intention of posting duplex loadings for anything -- although I seem to remember a right dandy one for 30-06, IMR 5010 and BLC-2 that only works out well for cast bullets over 192 grains. I hid behind a tree when I fired the first one of those off using a long string going to the trigger, if that gives you any thought of why I seem to think such things are "potentially dangerous" --- potentially they are.

Not sure why all the alarm bells and such, I have completed my 350LGD workups SAFELY and am just now working on the thread post.

The term "Potentially Dangerous" applies to everything we do including casting and reloading, duplexing is no more 'dangerous' than reloading in general when you consider all the pitfalls that are involved with energetic materials. It's ALWAYS the best to help those who seek knowledge rather than dissuade the attempt since it rarely if ever produces a halt to the process but simply drives them underground to try their hypothesis without guidance.

[mehavey]

...duplexing is no more 'dangerous' than reloading in general....

Given there is no published data of any kind for Duplex loads -- that I'm aware of, what are your
procedures/tools/measuring devices for determining resultant pressure characteristics/curves ?

[Oldfeller]

Procedures = be cautious, timid and cowardly around anything home brewed. Remember the blown primers you got from playing with 7mm Remington Magnum loads with similar powders, remember all the internet talk talk of pressure induced speeds (the faster powder sets the first part of the powder pressure curve and the slower powder elevates things up from there keeping full pressure up and rising longer than you are used to seeing).

Exterior temperature is a variable to pay attention to. Powder position counts, so keep the loads oriented the same and make them tight enough to not get settled or migrated.

Write all the variables down in your load book. When it goes south, you will want enough records of the episode to try to figure out what did it, what caused this particular indigestion.

Castpics originally had some relatively safe duplex loads in it -- what happened that caused them to get them removed?

I know this current list is rife with some really ancient disagreements, and there are some current list norms against talking about certain topics, but if this is the last bastion of advanced cast boolit learning it sure seems like some things seem to be getting edited away over time.

[Oldfeller]

I have been watching the new 350 Legend video feeds on YouTube about multiple water jug tests and the very few gel block expansion tests of cast 350 Legend slugs.

My synopsis runs like this ...... 185 to 205 grain cast lead boolets will easily penetrate 16" of ballistics gel because they never really expand (and they are never really recovered either --- they go thataway right out the back of the backstop).

The gel test guy finally put a thick paperback book in front of the two gel blocks and a steel cookie pan between the two long blocks of 10% ballistic gelatin just to get some sort of hint about what is going on with the cast lead slugs ...... yep, them cast lead slugs that seem to breeze right on through the whole lot of it and ARE NOT EVER RECOVERED.

Added to this confusion are the repeated water jug tests of cast lead slugs that will penetrate at least 5 gallon jugs of water (normalized between 3 different tester people who use different ranges to shoot at) with me also noting in passing that the flat meplat equipped bullets do indeed seem to tend to veer off after the 4th jug and always exit out the sides of the string of jugs before they actually get stopped ----- yep, them devious & tricky cast slugs that have yet to be stopped cold and retained for analysis in any reliable fashion (unless they get carefully pre-expanded by the use of thick paperback books and/or steel cookie sheets).

(So, quick like a bunny rabbit, go run up and tape this thick paperback and this thick steel cookie sheet to the side of that deer over there so I can go shoot him effectively)

This new info has been rattling around inside my head for the last month or so as I had already figured I would need a flat meplat tipped bullet, but now I see that those flat meplat tipped bullets still DO NOT EXPAND effectively quickly enough and most of the 350 Legend's large impact power will still get wasted out on the dirt of the hillside on the far side of the game animal.



This leads to some errant thoughts about using things like this three bladed bodkin point to split the tip form of a powder coated cast bullet to enforce some very real very major VERY LARGE expansion and some amount of explosive fragmentation instantly upon initial impact ........

To do the trick you could take the long nosed bullet form of the P Flados Big 'Un and jack it open with this nitride hardened steel 3 blade bodkin arrowhead based tool, then resize it back down to get your diameter and bullet concentricity corrected back to correct caliber size again (collapsing the splits back together again in essence).

Realize that you can hurt your accuracy by inducing "unbalanced issues" so try to minimize these effects by using the balanced 3 flute piercing tool very carefully in a die controlled pierce & expansion followed by a carefully balanced repacking (resizing) of the expanded tip form into something akin to a round nose form with a residual deep "tri-round" hollow point splitting that leaves enough intact lead and solid polymer coating on the outer skin surface to keep the bullet flying round and intact until meat impact takes place.

The petals then split and fly open, expand outwards and bending over into the fully expanded form, occasionally breaking free to be secondary wound channels if bullet velocity remains high enough to do so.





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[cwlongshot]

Adam makes entertaining videos. But he self Proclaims little knowledge of what he does.
He was impressed with the penetration of the various 170g Jacketed until I imfprmed the reason for the penetration was because little Expansion was occurring and that bullet Mostly penciled thru. It was NOT a desirable thing on a Whitetail.

He doesn't hand load.

CW

[P Flados]

Before powder coat, it is my impression that decent performance from a rifle frequently required harder alloys. Most of this ammo had little hope for significant expansion.

Somehow or another a lot of game got harvested anyway.

Accuracy that enabled good shot placement may have had something to do with successful use of deep penetrating (negligible expansion) ammo.