Alloy for hp rifle boolits

[wilddog45]

What is the best alloy to use for cast hollowpoint rifle boolits. I use 15:1 for hp pistol but would you use straight air cooled ww's or what? Does higher velocity make a differance in expansion without disintegration? In other words, what hardness is required without making it too brittle?:cbpour:

[BABore]

It depends on boolit diameter, nose profile, HP pin diameter, depth, velocity, and what your intended target is. A good place to start is 50% WW's and 50% Pb and water drop it. Lowering the antimony level will allow for more of a mushroom instead of fragments. Lots of testing are in order if hunting is your goal.

[runfiverun]

ba's alloy is a good one, if you want a nice mushroom then set the boolits in a pan of water and anneal the nose, [like you would brass] that will take the hardness from the water dropping out, and leave the soft alloy behind. like a partition boolit.

[wilddog45]

How would you anneal lead without melting it?

[outdoorfan]

Like R5R said, stand those suckers up in a pan of water. Use a propane torch (I use MAP gas) to heat the nose up. When it is just about ready to slump, it will change color. That's when you have to pull the flame off the boolit, or else it will deform the boolit. You'll probably want to practice on a few rejects before you hit your good boolits with it.

[wilddog45]

Wow, you learn something everyday. I have done this with brass but had no idea you could do this with the boolit tips.

[runfiverun]

you can also scribe notches in the tip of the h-point to help it expand more evenly and consistantly.

[geargnasher]

Erik at Hollowpointmold has made some faceted pins to pre-weaken the tip and make petals like some j-word commercial bullets, but none of that will work well if the alloy is too brittle. I only have a couple of hp moulds and one is a Lyman Devastator hp version of the old 452374 withe the extra-wide mouth designed, supposedly, to work better with antimonial alloys such as wheel weights. I find it works best with 20:1 at less than 900 fps and ww/pure lead/1% added tin or average indoor range scrap/2% added tin between 800-1050 fps. Anything more brittle and I really get fragmentation.

The other mould has a narrow pin and it only works with 20:1 or 16:1 in .357 under 1400fps.

I haven't tried anything in rifle velocities but I would imagine one would need a little antimony and a very shallow, wide "pock" of a hp cavity to make things work. I have a suspicion that a wide-meplat boolit made out of an appropiate-for-velocity alloy would do as well or better than any kind of hp design for hunting.

[qajaq59]

For my 30-30 I use 50/50 ww and pb, and a gas check. It mushrooms well at roughly 1800 fps. That's book vaue but not chonographed so take it with a grain of salt.

[wilddog45]

The 50/50 ww and pb mix water dropped worked well in my 30-30 using my new NOE 311-165 RD mold.The hollowpoints weighed in roughly at 157gr gas checked and lubed with lars red carnuba. Using 17grs of 2400 it chronied at 1847 fps average.And shot in a 6" circle sandbagged with iron sites at 100 yards out of my pre 64 Winchester model 94. I did a crush test in my vise and it all seemed to hold together.I dug around but did not find any of the fired boolits yet.