Stupid lube question, 45 acp

[John Boy]

Martin, if what you are doing works ... why reinvent the wheel

[Petrol & Powder]

From the information provided, I'm not sure the lube is the variable that is responsible for the difference in accuracy.

You have a lot variables in play:
Hardness, lube, maybe the style of the base, consistency between bullets, etc.

[hk940]

Have you tried powder coating?
I was going to go the pan lube method, until I read about powder coating. I have not tried that yet as I just loaded up about 3,000 rounds and don't have any cases left!
I do have about 1,500 commercial heads left. some 185g and some 200g both SWC some are dry wax lubed and some with conventional (?) lube.

[243winxb]

Bevel base 200 gr more accurate. Its the BB. The base of the bullet has less distortion. A soft flat base will have lead pushed back to the base, make bumps.

Try a Lyman 200 gr lswc with the bevel base. Its my most accurate cast bullet of 4 different ones at 50 yards.

Up your bhn to 15. Add some linotype. Soft produces deformed nose on loading and my skid in the rifling.

[hk940]

I have the Lee 200g SWC mold, not Lyman. I have not used it yet as I had several thousand commercial cast heads I wanted to use up.
I have about 200 lbs of assorted lead, pure lead, wheel weights, some unknown and melted down bullets.
I have a hardness tester I made and will use that to check hardness

[David2011]

What are these “head” things some people are mentioning?

Martin, get a grasp on your variables. Steady temperature, steady pour/cut/drop cycles and a consistent alloy. Compare the diameter of your boolits to your commercial boolits. At your velocity I don’t believe hard lubes provide any benefit. I like to shoot low velocity .45 ACP too.

Common wisdom has it that commercial boolits are hard and use hard lube to withstand shipping and not for any functional reason.

[Larry Gibson]

Quite a few years back I had access to a ransom rest and did a lot of accuracy testing at 25 and 50 yards of various pistols and revolvers using both factory and my own loads. I also used jacketed and cast of my own and commercial.

I found with the 45 ACP in both M1911s and M1917s that hard cast bullets with a BHN of 14 - 15 or greater always shot more accurately than softer cast. That was regardless of the initial sizing or the lube used [several different 50/50 lubes, Lyman graphite lube or the hard wax lube in the commercial leaded bullets]. I also found that light 50 foot indoor 45 ACP loads (185 - 200 gr bullets at 700 - 750 fps) that shot very well at that range were poor performers at 25 and 50 yards when compared to hard cast 200 - 205 SWCs at 850 +/- fps. Numerous reasons for this, especially in semi-auto's. BTW, I never gat the accuracy at 500 yards with any cast 225-230 gr RN bullet that I got with the H&G's 205 gr FB'd SWC.

[Martin Luber]

Thanks all, at longer distances, I think velocity is a factor for operability, but not precision.

From a machine rest, l could get fantastic groups but I am not a machine rest hence any radial velocity in the hold pattern will have a stronger tendency to swing a slow bullet out of the group. Higher velocity reduces that factor. I also got good groups with dead soft swaged hp (Star or Zero) bullets but at 770 fps range. No fliers in RR groups and good results freehand...again velocity is helping me. Worse results freehand with those running slower.

So as others point out velocity helps operability. I will reexamine my loads, sort them, and perhaps, go faster to see what happens. I am guessing that consistency is the key to commercial.

[toallmy]

I have one particular 45acp that does its best with hard cast no matter what boolits and lube I try , it's a Colt and it seems the rifling is shallower .