Soft nose shank alloy

[kirill]

Hello,

I read BruceB's excellent description for casting softnose boolits (lead nose and WW/tin shank) and tried it.

They ended up looking pretty good. Then got distracted. Never shot them or used them hunting.

Some other post I read lately suggest using lead, WW, and some tin for higher velocity loads to prevent fragmentation.

Does this hold for softnose also? I'd like to try a softnose Lee 309-200 for deer and pigs out of a .308. Should I stick to WW shank or add lead to the WW/2%tin shank?

Thanks.

Kirill

[Buckshot]

...............What's your desired velocity for these loads?

.................Buckshot

[kirill]

Well,

I would desire 2100 or so, but, I've never used cast boolits for hunting so, really don't know what I need or at what speed that accuracy would start to fall off.

I've shot deer and pigs with jacketed 308's at 2400 to 2700 fps mv. That worked fine.

Thanks.

Kirill

[44man]

I sure don't think you need that fast. I would stay with WW shanks and a pure nose then water drop them. If they show too much skid on recovered boolits, I would then make the shanks harder.
I have to wonder if a pure nose would slump too much if driven too fast. You might wind up with a fully expanded boolit before it leaves the bore! How would you know? Anything used to recover boolits will damage the nose so you sure can't tell when the damage occurred.
You can duplicate accuracy of jacketed with cast but it is hard to duplicate results on game if you shoot too fast.
Big bores are easier but I am stupid when it comes to small calibers in rifles using cast for hunting.
I am just trying to picture things and the boolits.

[kirill]

Hmm,

I never thought about the nose slumping...

Maybe one could tell that was happening by shooting the softnose/WW's at a distant target. Say 200 or 300 yds. Then shooting some cast without the softnose at the same target. It there was a lot of slumping, hence a change in the BC, the softnose/WW's should hit the target in a different place than the ones without the soft noses.

Your probably right. I should just load to a lower velocity....

Kirill

[Bullshop]

I have messed quite some with hard cast soft nose. My preference for the shank is something on the order of WW. I want an alloy that will quench to 20+ bhn but not be brittle. The percentage of pure to hard took some time to adjust and I found it takes little pure to initiate expansion. In a 360 gn 375 cal boolit I use 40gn of pure lead for the nose to get what I want. I have tested it at impact velocities between 2200 and 1500 fps. In each case there was left a frontal area larger in diameter than starting out showing a nice but perhaps small mushroom. The lower impact velocity lost only the weight of the pure, 40gn while the higher velocity lost a total of 100gn.
I have taken game with these and they work well. As I said I had to find a good balance between soft and hard to work to my liking. I shot one moose with a 405 Win shooting a 410gn boolit at 2000 fps using a hard cast soft nose with a 100 gn nose. With that I felt there was too much meat loss as that boolit acted like a varmint boolit and exploded on a shoulder. I now think about 15% of the total weight is about right to get enough frontal area for the splash effect we want on game and not act like a varmint grenade.
Using our 375 cal design which is a flat nose I found that I can produce either flat nose or round nose boolits with soft nose. For the flat nose I use a 40gn swagged core from a 22 cal swag. For the round nose I use a 40gn 32 cal RB mold. When lube/sizing the RN I use a RN top punch and set the depth to bump the noses to a uniform semi round shape. The reason was that the flat nose will not reliably feed from all my 375's but the round nose will. These look much like the old Kynoch cupronickel RN bullets being shiny on the shank and dull colored on the nose.
I have an idea to make some molds that will cast a cone with specific meplate diameters to mate to certain molds with that same meplate diameter. These cones can then be placed in the mold meplate down/point up then the hard shank poured. This will produce a soft nose that tapers toward the center of the boolit and should have the same effect on expansion as does a tapered jacket on a jacketed bullet controlling or reducing rate of expansion as it progresses down the shank. Just some thoughts I have been dwelling on. Hope there is something helpful here for you.
Blessings

[Larry Gibson]

I use several .30/.30 cal cast bullets for hunting and load them to 2,000 - 2,200 fps depending on the cartridge and twist. If your .308W has a 10" twist then 2000 fps is easily doable while maintaining excellent hunting accuracy. If it has a 12' twist then the 2,100 fps you are looking for should be attainable also with excellent hunting accuracy.

I have messed with a lot of alloys and 2 part bullets and have found it is much easier to cast with one alloy. I use a 50/50 alloy of WWs/lead with 2% additional tin (based on the weight of WWs) added to the WWs before the lead is added. This alloy casts well and if the bullet has a flat meplat expansion is excellent to 200 yards. The alloy is soft and malleable and does not shatter like harder alloys. It expands even better ith a 1/8" HP about 2/3 the length of the nose is made after loading with the Forster HP tool.

The only drawback is you must clean the barrel every 7 - 8 shots to maintain excent accuracy. With my hunting rifles I get 2 moa accuracy or less with these bullets at 200 yards when i clean the barrel every 7 - 8 shots. If not accuracy goes to 4 -5 moa for shots after the first 7 - 8. I really do not consider that a drawback because if I've not got the deer/pig/whatever in 7 shots I might as well go home and clean the rifle anyways:-)

Larry Gibson

[45 2.1]

I have messed quite some with hard cast soft nose. My preference for the shank is something on the order of WW. I want an alloy that will quench to 20+ bhn but not be brittle. The percentage of pure to hard took some time to adjust and I found it takes little pure to initiate expansion.
Blessings

Dan-
You might want to read some of Paco Kelleys articles. He uses hard antimony shot, casts it straight and water drops it. He nose anneals the boolits with a torch in a pan of water. These do quite well and are quite a bit less work.

[Bullshop]

"Dan-
You might want to read some of Paco Kelleys articles. He uses hard antimony shot, casts it straight and water drops it. He nose anneals the boolits with a torch in a pan of water. These do quite well and are quite a bit less work."

Very interesting!
I have a couple hundred pounds of recovered shot I could try. I may go that way at some point but for now I am having too much fun and learning much playing with hard/soft boolits.

[BruceB]

It may help to know that I did a test with my .416 Rigby, wherein I fired a dozen or so PURE LEAD RCBS 416-350s at 2050 fps. Point of impact at 100 yards was unchanged, and (as I now recall) the holes looked normal. Accuracy was just a bit "looser" than with the WW bullets, and I found no visible leading in the barrel.

A skinnier bullet might have more tendency to slump,its softnose but I really don't think so.

[Von Gruff]

I have had great sucess with a softnosed boolit but with differing specs to those already offered.

For a 160gn 7mm boolit I have a 65gn 50/50 ww pb soft nose on a lino shank and drive it at 2400fps. Have 100% weight retention and spectacular results on goat out to 185yds so far.

This recovered sample was taken from the berm (wet dirt - clay mix that had many rounds into the same area so was broken ground) behind target.



http://i667.photobucket.com/albums/vv39/VonGruff/006.jpg

Incidently I also found Bruce's tutorial on softnosing particularly enlightening when I started to go down this path but have refined the procedure somewhat for my own use in that I cast a bunch of boolits in the 50/50 and cut nose to required length to get my 65gn. Put that in the mold and at this stage I put the mold into the lino pot to heat for 15 sec, wait 15 then pour the lino shank. Took a bit to get the timing sorted but found it easier to re-melt the nose at this stage than after the shank had been poured. Also found there were less heat frosting on the finished boolit.

Von Gruff.

[Bullshop]

WOW way nice!!!

[kirill]

It looks like a perfect mushroom .

It seems that impact velocity very much determine how the projectile acts.

I was looking for an easy way out, but guess I'll have to experiment.

Kirill

[44man]

This post should be a sticky! Great info.