Boat Tail PP Bullets

[Reverend Recoil]

Just wondering. Has anyone ever made a boat tail paper patch bullet? One 30 caliber, 180 gr. might work well for 600 yd F-class shooting. It would be challenging to compete against Sierra Match Kings. It should be easy to swage. A mold would have to be lathe cut.

[longbow]

It has been done. Article here:

http://www.bpcr.net/site_docs-results_schedules/documents/Dan_Theodore_Boattails_for_BPCR.htm

And here:

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jessie/PPB/PPB_files/Page1187.htm

Also, just as a comment, I have been shooting gas check boolits without gas checks over COW filler in my .303. I recently recovered a boolit that went through several feet of snow then popped up to the surface and lay on the snow at 100 yards. It was virtually undamaged by impact. I noticed though that the gas check shank had been somewhat reformed by the filler compressing around it and looked much like a boattail.

Not sure if there was enough "boattail" to reduce drag or not and of course this depends on even and consistent reforming for it to work but so far accuracy is good so I have to try longer ranges to see if it holds up.

A good boolit for high balistic coefficient would be be NOE 311365 spire point group buy in progress now. Not a boattail but I bet better ballistic coefficient than most other cast boolits.

If I could afford another mould I would be in on that buy too but I just got two NOE moulds for the .303.

Longbow

[303Guy]

I've made a sort of boat-tail boolit. Apart from being harder to patch because there is no sharp edge to fold the tail over. (Tail twisting might solve that but it's not too bad anyway). My recovered boolits didn't show any base deformation. The nose portions were destroyed by impact. Thing is with paper patching is there is no real limit to alloy hardness (in my case, softness) so a hard enough base section can be made to suite. And of course there is the trick of seating the boat tail in a wax cup (made by dipping the base into molten wax (in my case, that would be waxy-lube). A boat tail carrying wax or 'waxy-lube' has the additional advantage of coating the bore with lube for the next shot. I get good accuracy and zero copper fouling when using waxy-lubed boat tail J-words.

Since your objective is long range shooting, you might consider a smooth sided surface lube boolit (with boat tail of course).

Harder alloy swaging would work as long as that swaging is more along the lines of final shaping and sizing after casting. Mind you, the hardening can be done after swaging!