RE-Slugged my barrels!

[Willyp]

I've taken all the advice i got on here,last week,and used it?
As per MK42gunner[the first to say about getting it],a 1/4 inch brass rod! wow,that cost $10 at the hardware store!
As per PB2av,i got egg sinkers from a store. These were so hard i had a ruff time starting them down the bore.The bore was clean and i oiled it and greesed the sinker. It said lead on the package,but it was like Linotype hard!
I took some time and cast,in a board,a bunch of pipe soft lead slugs. These worked great and went down the tube nice.
My new readings are different from the 31 caliper roung ball ones. The Mic.read .308 on all 3 rifles,or very close to it. This would be the groove dia. Now i have a better idea of what to play with?

[Whitespider]

Egg sinkers, any fishing tackle sinkers really, used to be made of pure soft lead... you could pinch them to the line with your teeth and even bite them in half. Some years ago most became harder, some are extra hard... I don't know what the alloy is but I'm assuming it's whatever can be had cheap (heck, maybe the safety police got involved). There may still be soft lead fishing sinkers out there, but I ain't seen any for over a decade or more.

[gray wolf]

Last I looked, under a certain size had to be lead free, over that size could be lead, ( may have changed )
The package of new split shot and small sinkers should say lead free, they may be Tin/antimony as is the solder we use.

[Leslie Sapp]

I suspect that many of the sinkers sold here are cast from WW, which is why I cast my slugs from pure, using the board method.

[Pb2au]

It looks like you are getting some solid repeatable results. Strange that the sinkers were hard, but who knows what they are making them out of now.
.308 sounds about right, or at least what one would expect. Yes, that would be the groove diameter. So now you have a place to start.

[runfiverun]

if you really wanna see what you need to be looking at, read goodsteel's sticky 'this is how I do a pound cast'.
all you know now is that Remington etc can make a barrel the right size.

[MT Gianni]

South Bend used to be pure. If you have some .375" round balls you can swedge them up in a vise for 40 cal assuming you are doing cylinder throats. As R5R said Goodsteel has a great sticky for rifles.

[Mk42gunner]

As long as you put that brass rod up somewhere so it doesn't get bent, it should last you the rest of your life. I haven't intentionally put a wooden dowel down the bore of anything since sometime in 1988 when my striker and I were doing postfire cleanings on the ship's shotguns and we somehow got one of the issue 5/8" wooden cleaning rods stuck.

I don't remember which of us put too big a patch on it, but I remember it took both of us the rest of the day to get the dang thing out of the barrel. After knock-off that day we went to the closest gun store and bought with my money a sectional aluminum cleaning rod that the bore brushes would screw into.

We used that for quite awhile, then found out that the square M-60 receiver brush that fit a .30 caliber rod worked very well down a 12 gauge barrel.

Fishing sinkers have been getting harder for several years; so I usually use swaged balls meant for muzzle loaders when slugging a barrel.

Robert