Gas checks and rifles

[curioushooter]

All rifles I have ever shot with CBs have used gas checks (or paper patching). I am therefore hesitant to go without a checked design. It's one thing cleaning lead out of a short handgun barrel and another chore entirely with a rifle.

Plus the at the greater pressures and smaller diameters (reduced lube) it seems like one should really err with the side of gas checks.

Are there examples though of shooting CBs in rifles at solid rifle velocities/pressures (like 2000 FPS and 40k PSI) without leading?

[sureYnot]

I've put thousands of plain base through my .223 at roughly that velocity/psi. No chrony. Just an educated guess by Quickload.

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[ShooterAZ]

If you use a good lube (such as WL 2500+), and your boolits are properly sized/fitted you can get to 16-1800 fps fairly easily without any leading. Beyond that, I personally will always use a gas check (not that you can't go faster though). On another note, my experiences with shooting gas check design boolits with no gas check have always been that applying the gas checks has always provided superior accuracy. Paper patching is a different animal altogether, and you can get very close to jacketed velocities with pretty darn good accuracy and of course no leading. My PP boolits do not wear gas checks. Gas checks are cheap enough so I usually just use them, unless of course if it's a plain based design. I do have several, but tend not to push them really hard.

[sureYnot]

I should clarify that pushing a gas check design that hard without a gas check resulted in poor accuracy. I did get the Lee 55gn gc design to work without a GC, but not much more effective than a .22lr, which is fine if that's your goal. Decent squirrel round.

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[Hick]

Yes-- but powder coated

[fatelk]

Powder coating changed it all for me. I load plain base powder-coated bullets to about 1800fps in my M1 carbine, works just fine.

[georgerkahn]

I agree, and pretty much think 100% same as ShooterAZ on this subject. I will add that I've had a few rifles, in years gone by, with "pretty bad" barrels in calibers for which I had no available gas checks. Albeit I employed smokeless powder, instead of a gas check or similar I used a gizmo called "Lube Ribbon Extruder" to make a 1/8" thick ribbon of lub, which I held over case as I seated cast bullet -- so this lub would be underneath it. If I recall, I was using mostly IMR3031 powder as my "go-to" propellant.
Yes -- I replaced "leading" with "lube-ing" -- notably, bion, a ring would often build up at the muzzle crown. But -- maybe I was lucky -- the lube ring worked well for me as a metal gas check substitute. I do NEED add, however, my shooting was exclusively short-range (e.g., 75 yards) for target) -- primarily to enable my shooting antiquish arms.
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