Is there a way?

[dk17hmr]

I was thinkin tonight that for hunting purposes if a guy could make a bullet that was hard cast but just the end was soft lead, think pure, that would make a heck of a hunting bullet, for light skinned animals mainly whitetail deer.

My thinking is the tip would deform on impact and it would still have the hard cast punch behind it, maybe with the tip deformed it would cause the bullet to tumble causing serious internal damage.

Is there a way to do this?

[BruceB]

Do a search here for "softpoint" and "softnose". Plenty of reading.

[floodgate]

dk:

That's an OLD idea that goes back at least as far as the 1840's. Both a hard body and a soft nose for hunting, and a soft body (for obturation) and a hard tip (to avoid slumping) for long range target shooting with heavy loads. Before WW I, Ideal made two-part mould sets for just this purpose. You cast a tip section with a little golf-tee like stub at the back, then dropped it into the other, full-body mould and poured the rest of the alloy around it. Lyman tried it again in the '90's for soft-nose pistol bullets, with the tip epoxied to the base. Both types turn up from time to time on eBay.

floodgate

[dk17hmr]

I figured it wasnt my idea...lol
It was confusing me as to why the WW and Pure doesnt mix in the mold.

I might have to try it with some 45-70 bullets.

[floodgate]

It was confusing me as to why the WW and Pure doesnt mix in the mold.

dk:

In this particular case (pure lead tip / WW body), there is no problem, since the lead tip has a higher melting point than the WW body. But even the other way around, the tip starts out cooler and won't heat above mould temperature, which is usually less than the melting temperature of the WW. The lead body will set up before it has a chance to melt the tip. Actually, the old-time target shooters from the BP period usually swaged the two parts together.

For the .45-70, Ideal made a RN soft tip mould #457194 that would fit most of the .45-70 body moulds; but this seems to be a scarce one, and I have never been able to locate a copy. There are several other ways to tackle the problem, though; one would be to use a pure lead .44 round ball for the tip - another is to pour a .22 case full of lead into the mould first, then follow it with a dose of WW. Etc., etc.

Doug

[Bucks Owin]

I think it's Paco Kelly who has a good article about doing what you suggest too....(over at the leverguns forum)

Involves standing the boolits upright in a pan of water and using a torch on the tips to "detemper" them...

FWIW,

Dennis

[Leftoverdj]

Using the two pot and calibrated dipper method, you have to cast hot and fast to get a seamless join. Even at that, the reject rate will run over 50%. Fortunately, the two alloy bullets shoot close enough to the one alloy bullets from the same mould so you don't have to resight. 20-30 softnose bullets is plenty for a season. I cast up a batch of Lyman 31141 using a dipper made from a .32 ACP case for the lead nose and WW+2% for the body. Results on a medium sized doe with a quartering shot could not have been better.

[BruceB]

The reject rate using the method I dreamed-up last year is ZERO.

I believe the secret lies in heating the mould itself for five full minutes in the molten lead. This ensures that everything stays liquid until I decide it's time to cool the assembly.

There is also NO visible joint either in the interior of the (sectioned) boolit or on the outside. The sole indication of the different alloys is that the coloration on the exterior of the boolit may vary somewhat between nose and base.

The mould is typically so hot that it takes a full 30 seconds or more with the mould resting on a wet cloth pad before the sprue puddle even starts to show any indication of starting to freeze.

Production is slow, but as mentioned, one doesn't need many cast softpoints to get through a hunting season. I'm about to cast up some .45 softpoints for a friend's Marlin .45-70, which is going with him on an Arizona elk outing in November....the lucky dog!

[Dale53]

The easiest method for me to have a soft nose and a hard body is to float a casting dipper on top of my lead. I drop a round ball (for example a .45-.50 round ball - use whatever gives you the proportions that YOU prefer). Cast enough bullets to get the mould up to heat and then pour the dipper in first (melted pure lead round ball) then IMMEDIATELY fill the rest of the mould with your bottom pour pot. Done quick, the reject rate is quite low. The results are good. No special equipment (other than the dipper mould) is required.

FWIW
Dale53

[44man]

LBT used to have a small pot made by Lee that would throw a set amount of pure lead in the mould, then you pour full with hard lead from the normal pot. I still have one and it works like a charm. I'm going to make some up for my revolvers for the coming deer season.

[Dutch4122]

Beartooth Bullets has a trick for softening the nose of boolits using a torch on boolit noses while they are standing upright in a pan of water. Here's the link: http://www.beartoothbullets.com/tips/archive_tips.htm/21

They start with boolits at a BHN of 21 and this process softens them to a BHN of 11 or so. Probably wont do much if anything for air cooled wheelweight. But it should work on anything above the BHN of ACWW. You might try water dropping your boolits from the mold and then annealing the noses with this method.

At any rate, you wont get a boolit nose softer than your alloys air cooled BHN.

Hope this helps,

[BruceB]

[QUOTE=Dutch4122] "At any rate, you wont get a boolit nose softer than your alloy's air cooled BHN." [QUOTE]

EXACTLY! And that's also exactly why I went the way I did, because it deals with KNOWN qualities of the alloys. Pure lead is a known element with equally well-known properties of expansion, malleability, etc etc.

While many writers here have reported good results with straight WW bullets on game, usually aircooled, I am not prepared to use large game animals (elk) as test subjects for MY particular alloy of wheelweights. I do know from experience on game that pure lead DOES hold together, and it DOES expand reliably even at rather low speed. Hence, my "need" for essentially pure-lead noses and harder shanks on the hunting bullet. I will repeat: straight (pure) lead is a KNOWN QUANTITY.

Torch-softening is likely all well-and-good, but as Dutch noted, the bullet never gets softer than the base alloy, and that's not good enough for my peace of mind. I'll point out, too, that casting such lead softnoses as I did requires no extra equipment at all, beyond a piece of wire and an empty pistol-caliber case of suitable capacity with which to make a dipper, plus a metal cup small enough to fit in the top of the pot.

I didn't arrive at the concept lightly, or without knowledge of a lot of previous experimenters' work. Heat-softening of boolit noses has been used for many years, and so have pre-cast noses of softer metal etc. The shortcomings of the various soft-nose methods were also known to me when I started, hence my experiment in something a tad different from what I'd seen. The results were good enough that I was perfectly prepared to shoot an elk with one of these boolits. Unfortunately, the elk were having other ideas on the subject. Maybe, someday....

[45 2.1]

There are a lot of ways to achieve a softnose boolit. The simple way is to pick an alloy that is butter soft air cooled that can be water dropped to 18 BHN that will get you to 2200 fps if you want to go that high. It expands easily also. Less work involved that way.

[jhalcott]

no body has mentioned the act of lubing or gas check seating in this. If you run your soft nose thru a base first lubrisizer/gas checker, you will damage that nose. If you run a hard bullet thru ,then a soft one you will feel the difference it takes. You need a plajn base bullet or a nose first luber & gas check seater.

[Dale53]

jhalcott;
As Paul Harvey says, "That is the rest of the story".

You are, of course, correct. Push through dies after pan lubing works for me.

Dale53

[BruceB]

Durn it, I HATE being the one who always says "It ain't necessarily so..."

Gents, I DID cast my .416s with pure-lead noses, and I DID gascheck and size and lube them base-first in a Lyman 450, and I did NOT damage the nose in any way. Of course, I used the correct top punch from RCBS which undoubtedly helped.

[StarMetal]

I'll help out Bruce....Bruce is right, it ain't necessarily so. I too have a Lyman 450 luber/sizer and I've never bent or ruined noses on any caliber or alloy bullet I've sized with it. I'll also out shoot most you fellows that think sizing nose first thinking it gives you an accuracy edge. Pure ********

Joe

[wills]

Someone makes, or made, a mold with a separate cavity for the nose/point, to be cast with soft alloy, which would then be placed in the cavity for the entire boolit so the rest of the boolit could be poured with harder alloy. Can’t remember where I saw it.

Also there was an article a couple of years ago in Handloader about first pouring the nose/point with a softer alloy, which started a lot of discussion here.

(Corrected, thanks to BruceB)

[44man]

Joe and Bruce are right. You will not damage the nose with the proper punch. If you punch does not fit, form it up with epoxy on a greased boolit.

[BruceB]

The extensive discussion (actually several of them, now) was held HERE, on Cast Boolits.

Again...go to the "search" function above, and type in "softnose" as the topic. There is a three-page discussion on my thread titled "Successful Casting of Softnose Bullets with Conventional Equipment", or something like that.

There are a lot of other threads that touch on the topic, as well.

[jar-wv]

Check out this article. http://www.riflemagazine.com/magazine/article.cfm?tocid=974&magid=71

jar

[ron brooks]

Willis,

I remember, want to say form the 80's the Lyman Composite bullet. Yo cast the nose and body seperatley, the nose out of a softer material, preferably pure lead I would imagine and then epoxied the two parts togeter.

Ron