Wrinkles are good for...

[barrybrice]

Are wrinkles good for nothing and should be remelted or perhaps used for target practice?

[MtGun44]

In my house, melted, although you might be surprised at how well they will shoot.

Bill

[RED333]

Depends on how I feel, if I feel good I keep them, If I am a bit PI&&ed, remelt.
They do shoot well, just look bad.

[runfiverun]

it's different so it goes back.
you are gonna make more anyway.

[waco]

If they have good,sharp bases, and driving bands, wrinkles on the nose don't bother me a bit. A pop can at 25 yards won't care.

[gunoil]

glad i read this!

[Ben]

The more " ruthless and stringent " you become in visually culling your poor quality cast boolits, ( particularly impt. with rifle bullets ), the better groups you're going to shoot. Bases that don't completely fill out ( sharp edges ), drive bands that are rounded, wrinkled noses, etc should all go back into the pot.

If I'm going to go to the trouble of casting, adding a gas check ( which I also have to invest time in making ), weighing the charge, going through all the loading steps, you can bet it is going the be the VERY BEST cast boolit that I can come up with !

Why spend your time ( and your $ ) knowingly loading B grade or C grade cast boolits?

Ben

[GT27]

Part of the casting learning curve,still searching for the perfectly cast boolit myself,Galina Nirvana!:veryconfu

[reloader28]

I shot lots when I first started. They shoot fine, but now I'm casting to make perfect, good looking, excellent performing boolits. If its not as perfect as I can make it, it goes back in the pot.
Otherwise, I'm wasting my time IMO.

[303Guy]

If I'm going to go to the trouble of casting, adding a gas check ( which I also have to invest time in making ), weighing the charge, going through all the loading steps, you can bet it is going the be the VERY BEST cast boolit that I can come up with !Well yes, but it does depend. If one wants to do some snap shot practice which is close range anyway and takes quite a lot of less than precise shooting then they have a use. As for developing load pressures? Perfect. For chronographing too. But once one starts to take deliberate aim for accuracy then good is not enough! (But often just has do do).

[GLL]

Why spend your time knowingly loading B grade or C grade cast boolits?

Ben

Agreed !

Jerry

[41 mag fan]

Started out being anal about the casts looks. Guess I'm on the right road then

[dale2242]

I have to agree with Ben.
For my hand guns, which are used for casual plinking, I want visually perfect boolits. I do not weigh them.
I n my rifles and bottle necked Tender rounds I want them visually perfect and weighed to a reasonable consistency.....dale

[root]

I cull mine out when I size them and recast them.

I figure If I don't have time to do it right the 1st time why bother?

My reloads look and work good. So good in fact that I have two friends that are always trying to trade me stuff for them.
Current offer is a set of commercial smoke wrenches ( torches) 100% complete and full for a 250 round can of 30-06.

I'm not sure I want to trade. I put so much love, time, and care, into my reloads.

I'm pretty sure if they were wrinkled and he had never shot my reloads he wouldn't want them.

[rond]

If you were buying boolits would you settle for wrinkles? I cull mine when sizing and remelt.

[popper]

When the wrinkles disappear so do other imperfections.

[rr2241tx]

Visually perfect or immediately back in the pot. What's the purpose of going to all the trouble and expense of making a bad boolit when there are companies out there who will do that for you and most of them will throw in some flaking off rock hard lube for the same price?

[DeanWinchester]

Any wrinkled bullets, deformed in ANY way, go straight back in the pot. I ain't shootin' no wrinkled bullets. This is a labor intensive hobby that I really enjoy but I won't spend my time to make turds. I don't care if they do shoot well. As time has progressed I have gotten exponentially worse about being picky. I separate ALL cast bullet into +/- .5g lots. Sometimes less. My 9mm mold falls pretty darn consistent so I only shoot bullets that weigh 124.0-124.9g any over or under get remelted. One bullet in particular that I use in my bolt action .300 BLK get separated into lots of +/- .1g and I fire them in lots. What does my pain get me? one ragged hole and loaded rounds that look nicer than factory rounds.

[MBTcustom]

I have a slightly different view on this.
If you are getting wrinkly boolits and are asking if they are OK to shoot, then I assume that you are a new caster who has made a significant investment to get to the point of being able to make even wrinkled boolits. An experienced caster knows very well how to prep the mold in order to get good results right off the bat.
Because of this, I say shoot them babies! If they are the right size (.001-.002 over groove) and they are your first try, then go shoot 'em! I made and shot thousands of boolits that looked like dog turds before I learned how to make em look purdy. Even now, I am much more anal about my rifle boolits and only about 25-30% of the ones that drop from the mold will ever traverse the interior surface of my barrels, but auto pistol boolits get run unless they are seriously messed up somehow.
However, I do not shoot targets with my pistols. When I do shoot pistols (rarely), I run hundreds of rounds in one afternoon shooting in a defensive style, so it makes little diferance to me if a group that would have been .75 at 25yds with perfect boolits is 1.5" instead.

[1Shirt]

I don't mind slight nost wrinkles on big heavy blts like for 45-70, 44 Mag, and 357s, other than that, they go back in the pot.
I am particularly careful and examine closely the little 22's for any(even the slightest) defect.
1Shirt!

[badgeredd]

I can't really add anything except to whole heartedly agree with Ben,

Goodsteel makes a valid point for the new caster though. I am inclined to say get them as perfect as you can if you expect some real accuracy from rifle boolits. Pistol boolits not so much.

Edd

[Wolfer]

Odd, I'm with goodsteel and Ben on this, boolits for my 60 year old 45 acp my only concern is the base. Since most of the boolits I hunt with are HP they will be visibly perfect some of the others just need good drive bands and bases.
The truth is I have been at it long enough that I don't have much trouble with wrinkles except on my face, well most everywhere else too.

[rsrocket1]

I deliberately tried shooting some wrinkled boolits this week and found that so long as the rest of the boolit looks good and the wrinkle is cosmetic (not deep where you cannot see the bottom of the crease), the rounds shot just as accurately as the others. Mind you this is at 12 and 25 yards out of a pistol and not long range rifle loads.

I was originally culling all my wrinkled boolits as they dropped when I was air cooling them on a towel, but lately I have been casting until "no more wrinkles", then dropping them into a water bucket more for convenience than for hardness so I wasn't able to inspect the boolits immediately when they came out of the mold. After getting them dried out, a handful would have very slight wrinkles (probably no more than a dozen in 750). Normally I would have put them in the pot the next time for recasting, but I instead loaded them.

With the scratches and small dents from tumble lubing, even if I wiped off the 45/45/10 after loading its difficult to see the wrinkles and impossible to tell when shooting them.

[mpmarty]

Inasmuch as I never look at my boolits when casting them they get inspected at the sizing operation. I've got a can of rejects which go back into the pot eventually. I also have a large can of reject brass such as berdan primed 7.62 NATO and worn out/split 45acp which will be recycled some day. When casting I strive for consistency in speed and like to get up to a speed where boolits fall out of the mold when I open it.

[williamwaco]

Several comments:

As a general rule the closer any defect is to the base the worse it is.

Many people for many years have tested defective bullets and determined that defects near the point have very little effect on accuracy.

Many years ago I tested .22LR with deliberately mangled points and discovered they need to be really bad to cause a miss.

The first hunting rifle I owned was a .270 Winchester. It seriously mangled the points of the bullets loaded in the magazine but they still hit POI. Minute of prairie dog at 300 yd.

Back to point one. Base band defects of any kind, of any size, of any shape, if they are visible, should be rejected. The base band MUST be perfect. The base must be perfect. The sprue cut should be flat and centered.

I used to grade A,B,C. I couldn't keep up with my loaded or my unloaded bullets so I started grading Match, Plinker. After a few years I have determined that plinkers in general produce groups about twice the size of perfects.

Now I only keep perfects.

As to inspecting:

I inspect them with a tea spoon when they hit the drop pad, imperfects go back into the pot, others go into the keeper box.

I inspect them again after they have cooled enough to be handled easily by bare hands. Imperfects go to the remelt box, perfects go into the next keeper box.

I inspect them again when I size them, yes I still find flaws even at this stage.

I inspect them again before seating them in the case mouth, yes, I still find a few flaws even at this stage.

You be the judge,
If you are happy with "plinkers" save them and use them.
Eventually, you will become dissatisfied with them and want smaller groups.

[Gibson]

Try Retinoic acid. :)

I re-melt.

[MtGun44]

I agree with Ben, relentlessly toss back subpar boolits. But, still - as goodsteel
points out, a newbie may be OK with mediocre accuracy and still have fun and
save money. I just threw out that they often can shoot fairly well, depending
on the bases, mostly, and then what your personal skills and standards
are.

Bill

[ItZaLLgooD]

I only cast for 45 ACP and 40 S+W(no rifles). Sometimes I get a little bit of the wrinkles when I lube the sprue plate up. It fades as I cast. The really ugly ones go back in. The not so obvious ones that make it through the initial visual inspection get loaded up. Perfection is a relative term. My boolits work perfectly for me and my USPSA practice.

[geargnasher]

Everyone has their own standards, just as everyone has their own end goal. Truth is, Bill and William Waco are right about defects, often you can't tell the difference.

Personally, it's as much about doing everything as well as I can as it is about shooting (as well as I can). Just like I don't "waste" shots at the range, I don't "waste" components on sub-par boolits, even when I know the defects I'm culling won't matter for the application.

Also, once you get the hang of it, it's actually easier to cast pretty near perfect boolits than it is to cast defective ones, so why not do the best you can and cull the few bad ones right out of the mould?

Gear

[HARRYMPOPE]

I dont weigh bullets and rely and good cadence casting sessions for quality.If i get too many visual imperfections my session isn't trusted very much.I have kept many of the initial casts for "foulers" for my rifle match shooting and more often than not they go right in the group.The wost cull i kept was a bullet that was 5g light that had a big hole on a driving band.It shot 1.5" up and right of a 3/4" group.Poor wind reading and inconsistent bench technique will cause much larger groups(more flyers) than well filed out but externally wrinkled bullets.(i am talking rifles here)


George

[1Shirt]

I weigh and segregrate (ya, I know that is not a p.c.word now), by weight all of the 22's that I cast, with emphasis on the HP's.
I tend to also weigh and segregrate the majority of my 30's that I will be shooting in my 308's for postal matches. Could not agree more with inspection with emphasis on boolit base for both plain base and gas checks being a major key to accuracy. That said, if the base is perfect, chances are that the rest of the boolit will also be perfect, and will be very close weight wise when scale weighed.
1Shirt!

[ofreen]

This thread reminds me of something I did when I first started casting back in the early '70s. I was lucky to live in a house where the nearest neighbor was a mile away in any direction. I had a 12" gong hanging on a tree 100 yards away from the back steps. Most days I'd load up a cylinder of one of the revolvers and shoot at the gong for a little practice. I just started casting some 358427s one day and the mold wasn't up to temperature, so the bullets were looking bad. I decided to do a little experiment and kept six that had big voids and wrinkles. The only criteria was that the base band had to be filled out full diameter. I sized them, loaded them up, and went out to the back porch with the 8 3/8" M27. Six shots resulted in six hits on the 100 yards gong. I thought that was interesting, but even after that I've culled the wrinkled ones all these years.