lead bullets coated with polymer paint

[leadman]

Here is a place coating bullets also. Don't know what the coating is though.
www.blackbulletsinternational.com

I have some white auto paint left over from a car I painted so I am going to dip some boolits and see what happens.

[deltaenterprizes]

I got a couple of Bayou bullets when I visited New Orleans last week. They have a green coating.

[Russel Nash]

a few years back when you could still get 1,000 j word bullets in .40 cal 180grains for USPSA/IPSC pistol competitions for jus about 80 bucks...well...those were the good ol' days....now they are up around $140 per 1K.... a buddy and I were thinking about going into the bullet swaging business and making our own IPSC bullets. we looked at that idea but it seemed like we would be slaves to the commodties market and maybe just one or two sources for copper sheet and lead wire.

at about that same time, word got around that the Master Blasters black bullet making company was going to sell off its equipment and go out of business.

my friend was emailing the guy back and forth and they agreed on a price for the equipment. and as the story was relayed to me...the Master Blasters seller sprung this on him: "that'll be an extra X thousands of dollars for the proprietary coating material and process tha my chemist wife came up with".

my friend called the deal off at that point.

Tom Drazy up in Wisconsin ended up buying the equipment instead and he started black bullets international.

then like a year later, I was browsing this forum right here and I think I discovered what that secret chemicaL was ....Sandstrom 27A. it was a post by westerman that caught my eye. just do a search for both westerman in the screenname window and sandstrom in the keyword window and his post should come.

so I bought a quart. it is expensive stuff.

I still have not quite figured out the application process yet. some "friends" on youtube clued me in as to how they think the bullets get coated. there is a video of how jelly beans are spun tumble coated to get their color. I think that s how the polymer or black bullets are coated...but for the bullets there is probably some heated added also.

supposedly, the black bullets smoke less than a traditional cast and lubed boolit. but I haven't seen it with my own two eyes....so I am not quick to believe everything I read on the internet...

along with the common misconception that it is the wax lube that causes all the smoke when you shoot a boolit.

I have shot UNlubed boolits before and they STILL SMOKE!!!

my guess it is the type of gunpowder more than anything.

[Russel Nash]

back on the 2nd page of this thread, somebody posted a youtube link for bayou bullets.

now...granted...I have a lot of experience videotaping people shooting matches and myself with my own hat mounted camera (click the link below in my signature line)....butttt....


..in the very first part of the video, I can actually hear the wind blowing into the microphone. he also shoots his bayou bullets slower...whereas...with the cast boolits it sounds like a machine gun and I do not hear any wind or breeze blowing into the microphone at all.

I'm not saying it was done intentionally...just noting some observations I made...and yes he does get the gun very close to his head when putting on his muffs. but he is jerry miculek's brother so he should know what he is doing.

oh....yeah....of special note to me...is if it was me I would have specifically mentioned that the same powder, charge weights, and primers were used and that it was just the bullets that were swapped out.

the bayou bullets are "poly coated" whereas the black bullets international, the bear creek, and the precisions are "moly coated".

[Windy City Kid]

Russel Nash,

I think you are right.

I did a google search and this is whar I found.

Sandstrom products makes a bullet coating.

Here is the link to their web site.

http://www.sandstromproducts.com/gun...t-coating.html

[CiDirkona]

it was a post by westerman that caught my eye.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...7&postcount=27

[Russel Nash]

a'yup...his name is Craig Westerman and he shoots 3gun/multigun and USPSA matches with his son in Kansas. I have sent him private messages via this forum and via the Brian Enos forum asking him how he knew it was the Sandstrom liquid and if he had any insider knowledge on how it gets applied to bullets.

I never did get a reply back.

my own experimentation with the liquid wasn't very fruitful.... ARRGHH!!

I am thinking that bullets...err...boolits have to be sized a thou or two under before they are coated. so like a .45 ACP boolit would normally be .451 or maybe even .452, you would be better off starting out with a boolit that was sized down to .449....then coating it.

my experience trying to load my dip coated boolits showed that even with a good bell on the mouth of the caSe that when the boolits were seated, the case mouth still liked to scrape the coating off. :-/

for me, since I have Star I wasn"t going to blow money on a .449 sizing die just to experiment with it.

also at the time, I was placing the dipped boolits onto a piece of brown craft paper. when I would go to pull the dried bullet off the paper, a glob of the coating would always come off the base end of the boolit .... argghhh..

which led me to believe even more that my youtube friends were correct about their jelly bean dye-ing tumbling process.

this is kind of a long video but just fast forward to the 6:47 mark :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2sHM...=youtube_gdata

my youtube friends and mechanical engineering friends all kinda agreed that would be the easiest and quickest way to coat boolits in bulk.

about the only other catch with me as far as this Sandstrom liquid goes is that it is very "hot". I mean like spraying plain ol' nitrocellulose lacquer in your house "hot". if it didn't give you a headache within the first 30 seconds of smelling it, the vapors would probably float across the floor until they found a pilot light and then KABOOOMMMM! :-O there goes your house.

so the tumbling part would be easy enough to do safely....just buy an el cheapo cement/concrete/mortar mixer from harbor freight. It is the adding heat part that has me worried...how to do that safely???

I do remember....however...seeing a pic on the brian enos forums about 5 years ago....somebody had received a shipment of black bullets ....in the pic the guy had his bullets all laid out on a table and maybe even under some incandescent bulbs (drop lights) as the instructions were that the
ebullets were still wet or damp and needed some additional drying time before they were to be loaded up.

[prickett]

a'yup...his name is Craig Westerman and he shoots 3gun/multigun and USPSA matches with his son in Kansas. I have sent him private messages via this forum and via the Brian Enos forum asking him how he knew it was the Sandstrom liquid and if he had any insider knowledge on how it gets applied to bullets.

I never did get a reply back.

my own experimentation with the liquid wasn't very fruitful.... ARRGHH!!

I am thinking that bullets...err...boolits have to be sized a thou or two under before they are coated. so like a .45 ACP boolit would normally be .451 or maybe even .452, you would be better off starting out with a boolit that was sized down to .449....then coating it.

my experience trying to load my dip coated boolits showed that even with a good bell on the mouth of the caSe that when the boolits were seated, the case mouth still liked to scrape the coating off. :-/

for me, since I have Star I wasn"t going to blow money on a .449 sizing die just to experiment with it.

also at the time, I was placing the dipped boolits onto a piece of brown craft paper. when I would go to pull the dried bullet off the paper, a glob of the coating would always come off the base end of the boolit .... argghhh..

which led me to believe even more that my youtube friends were correct about their jelly bean dye-ing tumbling process.

this is kind of a long video but just fast forward to the 6:47 mark :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2sHM...=youtube_gdata

my youtube friends and mechanical engineering friends all kinda agreed that would be the easiest and quickest way to coat boolits in bulk.

about the only other catch with me as far as this Sandstrom liquid goes is that it is very "hot". I mean like spraying plain ol' nitrocellulose lacquer in your house "hot". if it didn't give you a headache within the first 30 seconds of smelling it, the vapors would probably float across the floor until they found a pilot light and then KABOOOMMMM! :-O there goes your house.

so the tumbling part would be easy enough to do safely....just buy an el cheapo cement/concrete/mortar mixer from harbor freight. It is the adding heat part that has me worried...how to do that safely???

I do remember....however...seeing a pic on the brian enos forums about 5 years ago....somebody had received a shipment of black bullets ....in the pic the guy had his bullets all laid out on a table and maybe even under some incandescent bulbs (drop lights) as the instructions were that the
ebullets were still wet or damp and needed some additional drying time before they were to be loaded up.

By the time you do all that, what is the advantage of that over simply making moly coated bullets?

[Russel Nash]

we are talking about two different types of moly here. the moly you are most likely talking about is the molybendum disulfide powder that the benchrest shooters were all ga-ga about, about 5 years ago. they will tumble their jacketed rifle bullets in...it would turn the copper colored jacket into a silver-ish blue-ish color.

The "moly" I am talking about is the liquid coating that at least 3 different manufacturers are using to coat cast lead boolits. They cater mainly to the USPSA/IPSC crowd and the IDPA folks. Those "moly" bullets supposedly smoke less than traditional wax lubed cast boolits. That is one advantage of them, the other being that they tend to be cheaper than jacketed bullets by like Precision Delta, Montana Gold, or Zero bullets.

[pjh421]

Anyone ever heard of Billycoat? About 15 years ago we were loading these boolits (.40 S&W, 180 gr. TC) for a Glock. Didn't notice any undue fouling or smoking. They may have been a locally manufactured item (SF Bay area) but I don't know much about them as my friend bought and delivered them to me. The color of the coating was black and the boolits were clean-handling. Also I don't remember there having been a problem with shaving during seating.

Paul

[Russel Nash]

I'm thinking if it was a commerical bullet making company then they already knew to size their bullets a thou or two under. plus they probably tumbled them like in that jellybean video I posted up above and/or baked the finish on.

I think now where you get those black bullets from (black bullets intn'l vs. precisions vs. bear creek)...one of those outfits coats their bullets different so you will get black stuff all over your hand. then another outfit does it right and you won't get black stuff on you.

[Windy City Kid]

I have done a little research on the Moly coating for cast bullets.

There are a couple of different process to moly coat bullets.

One, is the NECO-COAT Moly plating, this is really meant for jacketed bullets. NECO use Moly and Carnauba wax.

Two, is the Sandstrom Poly-Moly coating. Sandstrom uses a moly and polymer coating. This is the process that most of the commerical bullet making companies are using. It is applied like Russel Nash said.

There are more moly coating processes then these two examples but these are two of the least messy.

I am not interested in the Poly-Moly coating or the other moly coatings.


I want to know what the Polymer Painted bullet coating is or where to get the coating.

This is what we have been talking about:

http://ammo.dynamic-arms.com/index.html

http://www.ares-gun.sk/?lang=english

http://www.rpgfirearms.com.au/WESTCASTINGS.htm

I think you can get the bullets in the USA from WESTCASTINGS.


Someone has to know what this coating is?

[63 Shiloh]

Well I have a large selection of westcasting and hawkesbury river bullets down here in Australia.

Colour of coating is blue, black and gold.

I will be more than happy to scratch the coating off to post to someone who has the equipment to identify the coating.

Mike

[jtwodogs]

Please someone who has access to a GC jump on this, so close to the answer. If I had access to one I would be all over this.
j

[Windy City Kid]

Please someone who has access to a GC jump on this, so close to the answer. If I had access to one I would be all over this.
j

jtwodogs,

What is a GC?

Is it some kind of an analyzer?

[Dannix]

I assume this is what he's referring to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography

[jtwodogs]

Sorry, I have not got back till now.
Ya, it basically heats the sample and breaks it down into idividual components or "spikes" which can tell us what the stuff is made of.

[Windy City Kid]

Is there any place that we can send a sample to have the Gas Chromatography service?

How much does this service cost?

If it isn't a crazy high price, I would be willing to send the sample in.

Even after we find out what the coating is, we still have to figure out the application process.

[Tom_et]

OK
I spoke to Sandstrom they have more than one Bullet coating avail and she even told me of the man out west that used 27a which was replaced by 28a but I didn't go further
than a Basic conversation and she told me that I would need to speak to the guy in the Lab
about the adhesion and what else was needed to have their product work on Lead bullet
So I would think you guys can come up with One of you calling (not me) and get the answers
I just think if we flood them with calls they will clam up because the chemist will be talking not working
I said (not me ) because I am not educated in the bullet lube theory enough to get the answers needed thats MHO on it anyway

Tommyt

[buck1]

http://sandstromproducts.com/msds.html