lead bullets coated with polymer paint

[Hammer]

That is an eerily inconvenient drip right over the numbers...

In an earlier post, someone suggested a GC analysis of the poly lube. How about a GC check of the Bullet Master Lube?

I am willing to help with a share of the cost.....

[Hammer]

I finally got to the range with my sample bullets using the Sandstrom product and another spray on Moly coating, with added wax and polymer coatings over the moly.

First things first: Size does matter.... I spent an hour with several different sized bullets doing a detailed analysis of the bore sizes of each chamber in my cylinder and then went to the range.... The .356 bullets leaded like all the rest of my attempts. Having found two chambers over .356 in the cylinder and reading the many posts, I now expected those results.

The .357 bullets coated with the Sandstrom and other aerosol Moly spray did do well. I tried a further coating of Rooster Jacket on one batch and a polymer/carnauba wax on the other batch. Both shot well with good groups and left little leading in the chamber.

One side note: My effort with the Rooster Jacket and the Polymer Carnauba combination was intended to provide a hard coating over the Moly so as to limit the mess of the Moly. After loading the rounds, my hands were a mess, regardless the combionaion of coatings. The only bullets which didn't make a mess were the NECO coated with impact carnauba coating. They also tended to lead a little more than the Rooster Jacket.

Don't know if this info is of any value, but hopefully it will stir some brain cells and more ideas.

For what it is worth, my chambers in the eight shot .38 Super range from .354 to .3565 and .356 sized bullets will drop straight through two of the chambers.....

[seppos]

I dont know, but have anybody tried the copper spray..?
http://permatex.carshopinc.com/produ...id/42287/80697

S

[Rooster]

I found a US Patent #4465883 using some polyethylene and ethylene-vinyl acetate in a wax base. IDK if this is even close to the spray paint composition but I would think a bit of tweaking it could be on the right track. HTH, Rooster.

[watto]

Hi,

Has anyone looked any furhter into this???

I am a IPSC shooter in Australia and all we use are coated bullets, from either westcastings or Top Score, or one of the others.

I have never seen anyone using non coated bulltes in OZ.

They are good, no lead build up and shoot straght. However there are only a few companys who make them and they are un reliable.

I am looking at casring my own but need to nail down the coating first... Any one got ay new ideas??

Cheers

[Ausglock]

Watto.
I still use Topscores in my G35 357Sig STD Div gun.
But I run cast and lubed in the G34 9mm and the Kimber 38 Super.
I am now just starting to load for the 45ACP.
Running Lyman 230gr RN with Jakes Ceresin purple lube.

Topscore guards his coating and process very well. I have been to his shop a few times and tried to pry it out of him, but to no avail.

I have played with high temp brake caliper paint on my cast bullets. it works. but not as good as I want.

[watto]

Thanks Trevor,

If you dont mind me asking, what do you load for your 17, ie weight/lube and lead mix??

Cheers

[zxcvbob]

Has anyone tried Future® floor wax as a boolit lube/coating? (it's not really a wax, it's a water-based strippable acrylic) It also goes by the names "Klear", and "Pledge Premium Finish".

[Ausglock]

Watto.
9mm
I run Lee 356 2R 125 mold. sized .356 lubed with Jakes Purple Ceresin
Alloy is Range lead about 10 BHN water dropped to about 15-16 BHN.

Load is 4.0gr WST with Magtech SP primers.

[Viagrow]

I think what your looking at could be KG Bullet Kote, it's spray on coating that is cured by baking . Bullet Kote is normally available in a blackish gray finish.

About 1O years ago, I spoke with a man who said he was the owner of KG industries, we had a conversation regarding salt spray endurance testing of his firearms finish being considered for the US Military. During our conversation we spoke about Bullet Kote and he said he could make it in almost any color. The coating could be applied to cast bullets if needed.

The preferred method for the application of Bullet Kote was to apply it with an airbrush (fine mist or fog) then baked it to cure. KG makes various color coatings for firearms, back when I spoke with the owner he told me he could make the bullet coating in several colors if need be. I believe the coating was a mixture of MolyD and some sort of Poly. Some of the benefits of the coating were increased bullet speeds, almost no barrel fouling, and minimal smoke.


From the Manufacture: Bullet Coat is a solid film lubricant, which will produce a thin, dry lubricative film on bullets. The appearance of Bullet Coat is charcoal gray and can be dipped, sprayed and sprayed/baked, allowing all shooters the advantages and benefits of coating their rounds with Moly not just reloaders.

Hope this helps. It is not my intention to reveal any trade secrets, I am simply providing information and my own opinion.

[bruce381]

try tumble lube with a water or solvent based auto enamel, dump on a window sceen to dry and then size? seems to me that with all the colors if has to be a readily avalible paint like car paint.

[Wills Point Pete]

Some years back I "spaypainted" a bunch of cast boolits in .30 caliber for my .30-06 and in .357 for my .38s and .357s. I used Midway"s Dropout graphite mold release. I used every load in the .38s and .357s, from mild to wild, including max loads with the slow powders in a Marlin carbine. I never saw any leading.

In the .30-06 I pushed those 190 grain gas check boolits to a tad over 2,000 fps and the loads shot fairly well with no leading. I am convinced that if I had done a little intelligent experimentation with the alloys I could have tightened the groups. My experiments were in a different direction, though, I was looking for a small game load and got real fond of those slugs at around 1400 fps.

None of this is original. Phil Sharpe was painting lead slugs back in the '20s and '30s, using artist's paintbrushes. It worked then, my experiments with the spay cans worked in the '90s.

Try picking up a can of Dropout and spraypainting a few hundred boolits. The graphite dries hard and quickly. As with the other sprays, there is less smoke than regular lubes. Of course, now that I'm shooting black powder ca'tridges, smoke doesn't bother me but, it might you.

There is really nothing much new. Shortly after I read Phil Sharpe's Complete Guide to Handloading, written back in the '30s and decided to try Dropout, thinking how smart I was I read a blurb about it in Handloader Magazine. Nope, nothing new.

[leftiye]

That Bullet Kote stuff sounds a lot like Bullet Master lube, with the exception of having to airbrush it on, and maybe cook it for 2 hours. They say you don't have to cook it, and cooking at 300 degrees would anneal your boolits, so, I don't like the cooking idea.

Googled it. The places selling it say it will stand alone which I never tried with bullet master. I'd still lube with C-Red after BK-ing boolits myself. This might just be what's needed to obviate the damage to boolit surfaces when traveling down a bore. $30 pint, can be ordered over telephone. Guess I'll have to go to Harbor fart, and get an airbrush.

[Four Fingers of Death]

Commercial casters (ands there are a lot of them) in Australia pretty much only offer coated bullets. Most shooters refuse to use anything else.

They are not sticky, your dies stay clean and they can be driven flat out with no leading. There is significanltly less smoke, which is an advantage, especially on cold mornings. These first reared their head in the early 90s when service pistol shooters were experimenting with coatings to reduce smoke. One of the stages in Service Pistol requires 6 shots at 10 yards in 4 seconds. No biggie, but on a cold foggy morning the last thre shots were being aimed from memory, because you couldn't see the target.

I have used many, many thousands of these bullets and have never had a problem, guns get cleaned every few years whether they need it or not. I was shooting service at one stage virtually every saturday and fired a minimum ot two hundred rounds through my 586 and most times more, with one or two praactice sessions during the week where I shot one full match as a minimum (90 rounds). I didn't clean the gun for two years and the barrel looked as good at the end as it did at the start.

If you are shooting smokless and buying commercial bullets, I cannot see why you buy the traditional cast bullets, performance wise, they are way behind the coated bullets.

If you find traditional lubed commercial bullets in a shop here, you can always get a good deal as the shop will be glad to get rid of them. I have bought heaps like this.

Hawkesbury River Bullets were the first I think, they still sell excellent bullets, turquoise for general, black for something else and silver for cowboy shooting, as they look like lead.

The tooughest coating I have seen is on Mr Lone Colt's bullets, his are jungle green coloured. He uses a Westcastings bullet on his concrete floor and whacks it with a ball peen hammer, which always knocks a bit of coating off. Then he repeats it on one of his and the finish remains 100% intact, even thought the bullet is bent out of shape. I don't think his coating is all that superior, but he is a small operator and isn't as skimpy. He also offers choice in sizing.

I have seen the following colours black, reddy brown, brown, gold, silver, turqoise, Green, jungle green, olive. I would probably have 10000 of these in my reloading room at the moment.

The turqoise 405Gn 45/70 bullets work a treat out of my Trapdoor, with BP lube pushed into the lube grooves or a lube cookie underneath. I must try them unlubed, I'm sure they would stand the heat and not lead.

I have shot lots and lots of 240Gn coated bullets out of my 44mag at 1500fps+ velocities with no leading. Great stuff.

I find it hard to believe that American shooters don't use them. Maybe it is to do with perception of the 'Teflon Bullets' which is what we used to call them in the early days, 'teflon bullets'. I don't think they were teflon coated, but thats what we used to call them.

Mr Lone Colt uses a cement mixer and pours the coating in from a container and keeps adding it until the 'look right.' I can't say that I have seen an oven in his garage, so I don't know if he drys them using heat.

[Ausglock]

FFOD.
I use Topscore projectiles with the gold coating. I find them better than Hawksbury river.
I have also tried some Vindicator out of Darwin. They are good too.
Never heard of "lone colt"
Where are they based?

[Four Fingers of Death]

FFOD.
I use Topscore projectiles with the gold coating. I find them better than Hawksbury river.
I have also tried some Vindicator out of Darwin. They are good too.
Never heard of "lone colt"
Where are they based?

I have since updated the above post.

Darren Bennets is the guy behind Lone Colt. He shoots under the alias of Mr Long Colt in cowboy action (his main customer base). He is at Lithgow in NSW. Our club see a lot of IPSC shooters and they pretty much use his bullets exclusively.

He is an interesting guy. He is almost deaf and is a bit crippled up. He had a car reverse over him when he was a baby. Consequently if its not a personal visit or an email order forget it. He doesn't bother with the phone as he cannot hear well enough. He's a great guy, making the best out of a bad deal he was handed as a baby. He does all right and has a loyal customer base. He works all sorts of hours filling his orders. When you see him driving to a shoot, he crawls along with his little caravan on the back and a ton or so of bullets and shot in his little Jap pickup truck.

[Ausglock]

FFOD.
He sounds a lot like John Conners at Beenleigh in QLD.
John goes to all the IPSC matches with his van loaded to the hilt with projectiles.

[Four Fingers of Death]

Thems boolits or bullets, they ain't per-jeckt-tiles until they are airborne (or being projected towards the target), lol

[Bullwolf]

I have been curious how spray painted boolits would perform for quite a while now.

I did most of this after reading the Pink Bullets thread:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=122461

So, I spray painted a batch of 9mm tumble lube boolits all over, using a can of VHT roll bar and chassis spray paint.



I loaded up 50 or so of the black painted 9mm cast lead boolits using my standby load of Unique, minus a few tenths of a grain.





I took the boolits to the range, and ran them all through my Tanfoglio TZ-75. They functioned a lot like my usual 9mm load does.

Accuracy was the same as my standard 9mm 124 grain tumble lube load at 25 yards. The painted boolits did not smoke excessively, lead, or foul the barrel with paint. Clean up was simple and easy. The fired rounds showed no signs of excess pressure, and the velocity in FPS was not that far off of my normal 9mm loading.

The boolits sure looked pretty, and they felt quite slick but the spray paint coating was far from what I would call durable when it came to handling. The paint was somewhat delicate. It was easy to chip the paint off the top of a boolit during seating, or on the feed ramp of the gun when chambering a round. I went back over the few little nicks that I made when assembling the boolits, with a Birchwood Casey touch up paint pen when I was all finished.

I didn't have the confidence to polish or tumble the painted rounds after that either, so they only received a gentle cloth wipe down after loading.

I don't think I would bother doing it all over again, unless I wanted to be able to easily identify my ammunition.

While the results were not especially negative, they were not overly positive either. It wasn't all that easy to get an even application of paint all over the entire boolit, and the delicate coating of paint took a lot longer to dry and cure than a light coat of Allox or 45-45-10 does.

The painted boolits did work, and shoot just fine, I just didn't think that they were worth the extra effort for me at the hobbyist level.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After seeing what another board member had done with jig paint, I also tried coating a few boolits with some Pro-Tec powder paint that I bought at Cabelas.



You can check the stuff out here:
http://www.csipaint.com/index.asp

It's a fishing lure and jig paint, and it made an extremely hard and durable coating. I heated up some 9mm boolits in the oven, and dipped them in the powder paint, then I baked the coating on for a while and let it cool. Perhaps I did it wrong, as I have never coated my own fishing lures before. I noticed that the boolits were quite a bit larger after the coating was applied.

The coated boolits went from .358 to around .370 or larger. I ran 3-4 of the coated boolits through a Lee push through sizer. It took a LOT of effort to size them, and in some cases I ended up shearing off the coating doing so.

I had a couple of keepers, but the coating was so hard that I chickened out and did not shoot the Pro-Tec powder coated boolits. I still have a couple of them sitting on my loading bench. They sure are glossy and slick to handle though.


- Bullwolf

[Spanners]

Anymore on this topic?

Would love to be able to purchase the "HY-TEK SUPERCOAT" used in Ozzie for my own personal use, but cant find too much about it