Does anyone make a .50 caliber 500 grain gas check Spitzer mould?

[Linstrum]

For Christmas I just bought myself a new L.A.R. Grizzly Big Boar .50 BMG rifle, and it should be arriving shortly at my local mom & pop gun shop.

I've been a .50 BMG shooter for a few years already, I built a .50 BMG falling block carriage-mounted rifle in 2007 using a new 30-inch Lilja match grade barrel chambered in .50 BMG. It is a heavy son of a gun, and instead of lightening it up I decided to go ahead and get a purpose-built bipod rifle with a much longer 36-inch barrel. I'm still going to use my 30-inch BMG, though, it is also a lot of fun to shoot like a miniature field gun on its carriage.

I have been shooting the Lee 0.515" 500 grain boolit sized to 0.514", but this boolit is meant for the .50-70 Gov and does not have a gas check or a very good ballistic coefficient because of a large flat meplat. What I would like to find out is who currently makes a .50 caliber 500 grain gas check boolit that I can use for light load plinkers? I would prefer a Spitzer so I could get some long distance range. I've been making my own moulds since 1964, but the Spitzer shaped cavity is quite difficult to machine so that it has a high Ballistic Coefficient of 0.7 or higher, which is one thing I'm after.

Thanks!


rl894

[onondaga]

There have been several posts about using a bullet puller collet tool or a case trimmer collet to squeeze a gas check shank into plain based bullets so gas checks can be installed. This would work for you without buying a new bullet casting mold. and it sounds like fun to me too, but I haven't tried it yet.

Gary

[x101airborne]

I dont know much about custom molds, but it would seem a good idea to contact some of our vendor-sponsors or some of our private memebers about a single cavity custom mold. Never know, you may start something that takes off!

[45nut]

500grs is pretty light for that,, I have a NEI 725gr 2c GC mold I use for the 500A Square that is a bore filling boolit though.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/1003/45nut/boolits/100_1237.jpg

If you are interested I would loan it to you and send some Gator .510 GC's along to give you an testing medium.

[Landric]

Sounds to me like it time for a group buy interest thread.

[hansumtoad]

I was offered a custom .50 NEI 700 grain BMG Spitzer mold the other day. With everything else we're doing (almost 300 boolit offerins now), I couldn't see making the investment.

Do we want to offer this? Is there enough interest?

[AZ-Stew]

Note the first photo. Here's BruceB at last year's Nevada Cast Boolit Shoot with his .50 round. You might contact him regarding his mould.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showpost.php?p=909382&postcount=125

Regards,

Stew

[bbailey7821]

I don't have anything to shoot it in, but I sure would like to see one!

[exile]

Don't know much about the subject, but I sure would like to see pictures of a carriage mounted .50 BMG.

exile

[Linstrum]

Thanks for all the info and offers, for right now I'll probably go with the NEI #365 for starters. A 550 grain boolit in the .50 BMG is about like using the little 115 grain soup can in the .30-06. I want to use a light 550 grain boolit for just general messing around and "getting acquainted" with the new rifle to conserve both powder and lead since lead is getting awful scarce where I am and at 700 grains a pop the 50 BMG goes through components pretty fast compared to 150 grains in a .30-06 instead. The place where I shoot does not have a way to recover spent boolits, I sure wish it did. If I could I would haul my Cat D4D out to the range and build some berms to catch all the lead.

One thing I was curious about was working up an equivalent load to the universal .30-06 cast load of a 180 grain boolit with 13 grains Red Dot. I'm sure the .50 BMG can use a similar scaled-up plinker load using a rifle powder or even a small amount of slow shot shell powder like Blue Dot meant for a 12 gauge slug.

The material ratio between the .30-06 and the .50 BMG is 4.63, this number is arrived at by the fact that the .50 BMG is the .30-06 scaled up 1-2/3 times, John M Browning simply took the .30-06 and multiplied most of its dimensions by 1.6667 or 1-2/3. Being scaled up 1-2/3 does not mean that the amount of powder is also scaled up 1-2/3 times because the volume ratio of the two cartridges is a cubed function, mathematically meaning that 1-2/3 cubed or (1-2/3)^3, which is 4.6296. Rounded off that is 4.63. Looking at 13 grains Red Dot times 4.63 is about 60.2 grains, which when pushing a 500 grain projectile looks more like a disaster than a mild load! So the burning rate of the powder would probably have to be 4.63 times slower to accommodate the 4.63 times greater inertial resistance. Just taking a wild a-- guess that would put the plinking powder choice up somewhere around IMR4320 to IMR4350, which would also necessitate a bit of kapok or Dacron filler in the long and slender cartridge.


rl899

[PAT303]

CBE in Oz make BMG molds,ones about 950grns or so. Pat

[Linstrum]

Don't know much about the subject, but I sure would like to see pictures of a carriage mounted .50 BMG.

exile

Hey exile, here ya go with a photo. This canon shoots 12 gauge slugs and the barrel is a foot longer, but it is the exact set-up I have for my .50 BMG carriage mount, I just swap barrels and use the same receiver is all. Up on the high ground where the photo was taken I used to shoot to a mountain top a few miles away. Click on the image to enlarge it a little.


rl902