bevel base

[686]

is bevel base a bad 4 letter word on this sight? i ask this because i see so many fb bullets and so many nocking bb bullets.
i would think it is just another bullet shape that adds to the bullet ability for a giving use. i will execpt the thoughts that a fb bullet is more accurate but accurate to what amount more than a bb bullet at 50 yards? if you need to hit a 8 " target at 50 yrds and need to load 1-5000 rds in a short time, would a bb bullet be better? i do not think there are many that have loaded both , that would not agree that the bb bullet loads easer and you can load faster.
i understand the fact that the bb lets the heat hit the bb and can help to lead the barrel. i think if you use good lead, good fit, and good lube your leading will be very little. the same as with a fb bullet. most target loads are under 850 fps.

do not be to bad on me for asking about bb bullets. thanks charles

[Scrounger]

Hard on you? Your post makes a lot of sense. To me and no doubt some others, pure, as-much-as-I-can-get accuracy in a handgun that I will use for plinking only at 30 yards or much less, is quite unnecessary. I do know of some people who are seeking accuracy to 200 meters for target or hunting and I understand their needs. That is why they make molds with all three kinds of bases. Anyone with a BB mold can easily enough have it altered to flat base, just as those gas-check bullet molds can be turned into flat base if the owner so chooses. To touch upon another painful thread here, Viva Free Choice.

[44man]

is bevel base a bad 4 letter word on this sight? i ask this because i see so many fb bullets and so many nocking bb bullets.
i would think it is just another bullet shape that adds to the bullet ability for a giving use. i will execpt the thoughts that a fb bullet is more accurate but accurate to what amount more than a bb bullet at 50 yards? if you need to hit a 8 " target at 50 yrds and need to load 1-5000 rds in a short time, would a bb bullet be better? i do not think there are many that have loaded both , that would not agree that the bb bullet loads easer and you can load faster.
i understand the fact that the bb lets the heat hit the bb and can help to lead the barrel. i think if you use good lead, good fit, and good lube your leading will be very little. the same as with a fb bullet. most target loads are under 850 fps.

do not be to bad on me for asking about bb bullets. thanks charles
Depends on what you want to do. Load fast and make noise or hit the targets. Here is a Lee boolit before and after I removed the BB from the mold. Shot from a .357 at 50 yd's from a gun that is not very accurate to start with.
Same load and you can even see a difference in POI.

[Boerrancher]

I have a bb mould. I went from shooting MOA groups with my 357 mag rifle to 6 MOA groups when I went to the bb boolit. Other than the bb I liked the boolit design, so I contacted a friend of mine who is a machinist and had him make a set of tools to allow me to make and install a gas check on these boolits, turning them into flat base with a sharp edge. The rifle went back to shooting MOA and even some Sub MOA groups with that boolit.

For years I was of the thought that 1700 fps was as fast as you could push a cast boolit, and minute of paper plate was as good as you could expect to shoot. I started paying attention to the folks here and now all of the guns I shoot cast in, which is most of them, shoot cast just as fast and as or in some cases more accurately than jacketed bullets.

Good lead has nothing to do with heat, as all of our lead alloys melt at about the same temp. The only things the bevel does, is to allow the casting to drop easier from the mould, and give you an extra surface for the high temp and pressure gases to cut on, because it does not obturate sealing the bore like the flat bases do.

The major cause of leading is gas leaking past the side of the boolit. This is why often times you will get leading with harder alloys at lower velocities than you will softer ones. The only thing a harder alloy does is prevent the boolit from jumping the riflings, it doesn't withstand the heat any better as it is still a lead alloy. Harder boolits will stand a faster RPM as well as they have less of a tendency to sling themselves apart while in rout to the target. The bevel base boolit gives the gas a nice place to start leaking by the base toward the nose of the boolit, instead of sealing off like a flat base boolit does. Hope this helps.

Best wishes from the Boer Ranch,

Joe

[ddeaton]

I have both and for pistol plinking I prefer to load the bevel base. Dont have to flare the case mouth as much as loading flat base. I just started casting flat base because of what I have read on here. Dont have enough time on them to tell yet. Both boolits shoot better than me anyway. :Fire:

[Bret4207]

I've never gotten good grouping with a BB. I prefer to be as accurate as I can, that when when I miss the target at a certain range I know where to lay the blame. A gun that shoots an 8" group at 25 yards is useless to me and that's what I got with BB in 38/357 and 45ACP.

[mtgrs737]

Commercial casters favor bb bullets and hard alloys for the same reason: To make a bullet that looks good after bouncing around in a truck for hundreds of miles. Sharp 90 degree bases tend to get dinged making a bad impression on the buyer. Same reason for the hard alloy on pistol bullets, more for the ability to hold up to the rough treatment in shipping and handling, pretty bullets sell better. IMO as long as you flare your case mouth enough either bullet will load without shaving, even a bb will shave if you don't flare enough. I have made the mistake of casting too hard for pistol bullets, having taken the sales pitch of "hardcast" from the commercial casters as a plus instead of the negative that it mostly is. 90% of my casting for pistol boolits is done with wheel weight alloy. Commercialy swaged lead bullets loaded in magnum pistol cartridges have given the lead bullet a bad name via lots of leading in the past, we here are enlighten. Given the choice between flat base and bb, I always choose the flat base!

[686]

i shoot a 6" 686 s&w in ppc matches that you have to shoot a 158 gr bullet. eather rn or swc. when i first got the gun i started working up a load and using my ransom rest at 50 yrds to find the best load. i shot 3 different fb and 3 different bb bullets. one was the winner. the other 5 were 3"-8" groups. only 1 fb shot better than the other 2 bb bullets . the winer was from a nei 158 swc bb mold. it shot 1 1/2 " 24 shot groups. we fire 24 shots at 50 yrds so i wanted to do the best test. on a b27 target this is x ring groups.
the bb does give a angle or cornet for the gases to get traped in to soder the bullet to barrel. as compared to a fb , the bb bullet is the same diamter and seals the barrel the same at the top of the bevel. if you took a bb bullet and cut the bevel off the diamter of the bullet is the same and fits the bore just the same as it did with the bb.
i think some bullets will shoot better in some guns than others. this 158 gr swc bb bullet i use is used by 5 others that hope i never stop making them. i know a lot of bulls eye shooters use the h&g style 200 gr swc bb bullet.
i have the lyman 45 cal 200 gr fb and the old lee 190 gr swc fb copy of the lyman mold. they both shoot grate. i would like the same with a slight bb. i think it would also shoot better than i can while running 20-50 yrds while shooting 20-40 rds. i the action type matches i need to keep them in a 8" circle to get max score. i also need to load a lot of rds on a 550 press.
some types of shooting requires a tighter group than others. i think it was jerry meclick that said he only shoot as accret as he needs to for the target. if the target is 3' away he just points and rips the trigget 2 times. if it is at 30 yrds he will take longer and aim .
i guess it is like shoes , different styles for different jobs. thanks charles

[AZ-Stew]

I'm mostly a revolver shooter because I'm a handloader and hate hunting for brass slung from a bottom-feeder. For a number of years I shot Keith-style SWCs that I cast myself from my revolvers. Accuracy was excellent. Then, living circumstances changed and I had to quit casting for a while. I turned to commercial-cast to fill the gap. Almost all commercial-cast boolits are bevel base designs. I noticed a very definite reduction in accuracy with the commercial BB boolits. Leading wasn't an issue, despite the hard alloys and hard lubes.

In addition to the accuracy issues, if you use a lubricator/sizer to lube and size your home-cast BB boolits, you'll find the bevel base to be an unending source of irritation, due to the BB allowing lube to be forced in between the boolit and the ejector pin in the sizing die. This must be cleaned off prior to loading.

I just received a Lee .40 TC mould for one of my two bottom-feeders from Midway. It was NOT billed as BB on their web site. If it had been, I'd have looked elsewhere for a mould. I guess I didn't look carefully enough at the photo. It has a small BB and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it right now. I may go after it with a Dremel tool and remove the bevel. Even if I over-do it a bit, the sizer die will remove the slight imperfections I may create. Anyway, before I'll run it through my sizer, it will be square-base.

Regards,

Stew

[Larry Gibson]

Sometimes I don't mind 3-4 moa milsurp ammo but many times I demand better accuracy. Same with BB cast bullets. Sometimes they "do", most of the time they "don't".

Caveat; some BB bullets like Lee's 356-120-TCs have such a small BB that it is inconsequental. Others like many commercial pistol bullets have on them are abominations. They do make for a little quicker loading in progressive presses but not much.

Larry Gibson

[Calamity Jake]

All of my BB molds have been debeveled for all the reasons above plus I don't like lube sticking to the bevel.

[Bret4207]

i shoot a 6" 686 s&w in ppc matches that you have to shoot a 158 gr bullet. eather rn or swc. when i first got the gun i started working up a load and using my ransom rest at 50 yrds to find the best load. i shot 3 different fb and 3 different bb bullets. one was the winner. the other 5 were 3"-8" groups. only 1 fb shot better than the other 2 bb bullets . the winer was from a nei 158 swc bb mold. it shot 1 1/2 " 24 shot groups. we fire 24 shots at 50 yrds so i wanted to do the best test. on a b27 target this is x ring groups.
the bb does give a angle or cornet for the gases to get traped in to soder the bullet to barrel. as compared to a fb , the bb bullet is the same diamter and seals the barrel the same at the top of the bevel. if you took a bb bullet and cut the bevel off the diamter of the bullet is the same and fits the bore just the same as it did with the bb......



Charles- Could you please clue me in one what you are trying to say in he bold area? "Soder the bullet to the barrel"? I agree a well fitted BB should shoot well and if you got one of Walt Melanders NEI moulds you got a work of art. Fit is King with cast, it rises above all else as far as I can see. I've never found a BB that worked for me, and since I want every chance I can get, I avoid them. Your experience, if I follow it right, shows what good fit can do for what, IMO, is an inferior design.

[oso]

Yep, still looks like some have a problem with BB boolits and some don't. My lubri-sizers, guns and targets can't tell the difference, I can tell the difference though if I look at the boolit's base.

[Scrounger]

Minute of angle at 40 yards is about Four Tenths Of An Inch; a gun which shoots it's bevel based bullets into TEN MOA would be 4 Inches at 40 yards. That's better than I can hold with a handgun. Works for me...

[686]

BRET4207 the word is SOLDER ,
. i left out the L . and yes it is one of walts 2 cav. molds. i do have a new 6 cav. nei mold that will do 2" group of 24 shots. at 50 yrds that is still x ring.
i guess the question i am asking is , if you need to load a lots of bullets and a bb bullet will give you a group in the max. scoring area, why not cast bb bullets ?
as far as getting lube on the bb, i only use star sizers.

[Bret4207]

Solder the boolit to the barrel.....as in the base is melting and soldering itself to the barrel? Okay, we're on 2 different planets.

By all means, if you have good luck with BB go for it. Some guys like Ginger, some Mary Ann and some guys found Gilligan.... well, never mind. To each their own.

[Char-Gar]

I am not one to argue theory of what, why and when, because I don't have the knowledge to do this and won't pretend that I do. I try and stick to what I know from my own experience shooting real firearms.

Over the past 48 years, I have probably fired a million cast bullets through a wide variety of handguns. Most have been flat based, with a good supply of gas checked and bevel base bullet thrown in.

There is no doubt in my mind that a plain base or gas check bullet will shoot rings around a bb bullet in terms of accuracy and low leading. No doubt..none..zip..nada..nein..nix..no doubt whatsoever I will leave the why, why and when to others than know and I won't inflict my opinions on you, be they informed or uninformed. I have plenty of both.

[Echo]

And if the FB boolits shoot a 2" group @50 yds, and bb boolits shoot a 3" group @ 50 yds, all one has to do is make a little mistake that throws a 9 with the bb, that would have still been a 10 with the fb boolit. Unfortunately, I was, and still am, one of those who occasionally makes a mistake when shooting. For those who don't make mistakes when shooting, never mind...

[shooting on a shoestring]

My only BB mould is 358091. It shoots virtually the same as my 358156 wearing GCs, and much better than my group buy 358429 copy. I really can't tell any difference between my 358091 BB and 358089 FB.

I use a Lyman 45 and adjust it so the BB doesn't get lubed.

[Ron]

I cast the Lee 358 158 RF and used it for the first time yesterday in club competition. This is a BB boolit Prior to this I have used either the RCBS 148 grn SWC or the RCBS 158 grn RN, both of which are FB'd boolits.

I was delighted with the results from the RF, especially at 50 metres where I have great difficulty in getting shots in the 10 ring, with the Lee RF I scored more 10's than normal. Further 50 metre shooting will see if this is a fluke or otherwise.

My scores at 25/10 & 7 metres were a tad better than I usually shoot. Gun used was an S&W L Frame., standard factory iron sights., boolits lubed with FWFL, Winchester cases and PMU primers.

[Bret4207]

In both posts 19 and 20 I believe the good shooting is the result of better fit, not the superior accuracy of the BB design. I don't think the BB is any less accurate than the FB given best case dimensions, but the BB allows for more variables as the boolits leaves the muzzle and that is the part I think generally leads to slightly less accuracy with a BB.

If someone wants to do a side by side comparison of 10K or so shots then we'd ahve more to go on. For now- some like Ginger, some Mary Ann....

[Echo]

And some like both - not at the same time, but both have their plusses and minuses. If minute-of-paper plate @ 50 yds is satisfactory, then bb makes for easier reloading, and through a Star lube on the bb is a non-issue.

[Tom Herman]

Yep, still looks like some have a problem with BB boolits and some don't. My lubri-sizers, guns and targets can't tell the difference, I can tell the difference though if I look at the boolit's base.

I have the Lyman 452664, and my revolvers can't tell the difference between it and the flat base 452424.
That being said, I do prefer the flat base molds, as I don't have lube stuck around the base as I do on the bevel based bullet.

Happy Shootin'! -Tom