Weight tolerance for casting bullets

[Capn Jack]

Yeah Ron, it would be nice to have a 100yd range outside my back door. I think then I would play with the 1gr. over and the 1gr. under to see if that's why I sometimes get vertical stringing on a few of my groups of purchased boolits.

Who knows, maybe it's just that third cup of coffee.

Jack

[splattersmith]

As noted, depends. On my 40-65s I weigh them all. Why? My wife shoots them and I ain't going to get "you sabotaged me you egregious cur poop". I have a defense.

45-70s. I weigh them. I have found in both calibers a few extra light ones that get culled. I do not want to shoot them in a match and weighing calms the mind. I separate into +- 1 grain above the 400 grain levels. I don't really see any difference and have shot mixed batches at steels in practice. But then a dirt digger or two gets kind of forgotten when not scored.

I do note - a couple voids can ruin a good score so I weigh them.

Cowboy pistols. Only the first 10 or so and the last ten or so.

[Capn Jack]

Thanks Splattersmith,

If it looks good, .38's go into the lube and down the tube. If they hit within 8" at 25yds I'm happy.

The rifle is another matter I shoot 325gr.GC and 420gr.GC in a .458 Socom AR.
and after a few hundred rounds and shooting two scopes apart, I'm still trying to "Tame" the beast. I want to be sure that if I don't see one ragged hole, it's me and not the rifle, or ammunition.

Jack

[williamwaco]

Very good additional discussion of this topic here:

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=131714

[ku4hx]

I stopped weighing pistol boolits decades ago. For my shooting habits it was a waste of time.

For rifle boolits I generally stick with + or - .5 grain ...... generally.

[311-200]

Hello JHinman,
I asked the same question 9 months ago - here are the answers!
Hope this will help!
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...ight+tolerance

[45-70 Chevroner]

If you buy non premium Jword bullits you will find that they will very by 1.0 grain or so. I would not worry about pistol boolits but I do weight my rifle boolits to with in 1 or two grains depending on the normal weight say 170 grain +- one gr. or 450 grain +- 2 gr.

[gerrycan]

I sell a l ot of my extra cast boolits and because they vary in weight so much [1-5 grs.] I sort them into batches of 50 by weight in 1 gr.increments [ as has been said 150-150.9]. I do this as a service to new CB shooters to eliminate the weight " variable" in their load development. I use the extremely varied weight castings myself and don,t see much inaccuracy. I,ve noticed commercially cast CB,s seem to vary a lot in weight,are very hard and mostly too small [diam.] but some shooters swear by them -go figure . Gerry.

[Bullet Caster]

So, then, IMHO the general concensus is don't worrying about weighing pistol boolits unless you're a new caster (like me) and you should weigh rifle boolits. I think that I'll weigh both pistol and rifle until I get better at casting. As previously mentioned this will help to develop a better casting technique and the ones in the middle are keepers and the extreme's + or - are then weeded out. Sounds like a good practice esp. for me. After all, I only have time on my hands and not $$. Respectively submitted by BC

[HammerMTB]

As some of the above, I usually weigh some boolits from a new mold. Weighing 1 or 2 doesn't tell me much, so I weigh 20-50, depending on how much time I want to waste on it and just how critical my needs.
If I am turning out big volumes from a 6-cav, I want to know how much variation I am getting. Because it's too much trouble to sort them as I cast, I just take the approach that the whole of the weighed bunch represents the variation.
Having weighed a bunch of lots of castings, I find they fall into a "modified bell curve"
That is, they will have a steep drop-off of the bell curve at the upper end, where the boolits are fully filled out and filling the mold properly.
If the mold is a good one and my PID controller and I are having a good day, weights will be pretty consistent and the tail at the lower weight end of the bell curve will be small like the upper end.
If something is going wrong, it will have a long tail and a high volume of boolits- rejects.
Once you've done this a few times, you will find you can identify the rejects visually for the most part.
I still marvel that now and then I get what looks like a perfect boolit, but is significantly light. This HAS TO BE an internal void. Shooting it would no doubt bring a flyer to the group. If yer willing to overlook that anomoly, I guess ya just smile and let it go.
If yer trying to find and eliminate that flyer, you may need to weigh to sort them.
I don't find any of my high volume pistol boolits need to be weighed.
I do have some hunnert and 2-hunnert yard pistols that benefit from weighing boolits. Volume of those is not so great it is much of an imposition.

[noylj]

Having weighed my own cast bullets in 9mm and .40, I had separated them by 0.3gn.
I found that if I took a mix of the very lightest and the very heaviest, I got the "same" groups size, on average, as I did from shooting just the low end, just shooting the high end, and just shooting the ones at the top of the bell curve. I only tested at 25 yards and would probably still sort by weight if I was in a major Bullseye competition, but the targets were quite clear--it just doesn't matter.
The biggest flaw at distances of 25 yards or less is the bullet base NOT being completely filled. It didn't seem to matter if the there were wrinkles along the ogive or the upper bearing section, but any flay at the bases corner caused groups to open up like a shotgun.
The thing about casting and reloading is experimentation and determining what works in your guns.

[vrh]

I cast for my .243 rifle. My mold is a 95 grain Lyman. I cast in lots of 100 bullets. After weighing each with a gas check, I seperate them into groups. One group of bullets that weigh 101.1 to 101.3 grains....one group that weigh 101.4 to 101.6 grains and a final group that weigh between 101.7 to 101.9 grains. All the lighter and heavier ones go back into the pot to be remelted. A little time involved but I feel that it is time well spent on getting the best bullets to shoot.

[TexasGrunt]

This is a six year old thread. I doubt the original posters even remember it. But thanks.

[OS OK]

You stick with whatever you need to do to understand...most have been there and done that, it is how you get a rock solid understanding of all the little nuances of this business.

Here's some extra information you might find interesting...

Attachment 191915


POST/post...TexasGrunt...I didn't even notice that..."Duuuh!"

[Tackleberry41]

Something like pistol bullets I don't concern myself with variations in weight. Blasting targets I don't worry to much. But I do go thru and weigh them when I want accuracy. Don't go nuts with it, but do get rid of the ones obviously heavy or light for whatever reason. Within a grain, grain and a half Im happy.