Well I guess I’m headed back to the drawing board again. Just got a new toy and loaded up some bullets I’ve had sitting a while. I had thought they had passed all the test back when I made them but maybe not. It looks like they are failing the smash test now.
I had a little leading after about 100 rounds and so I cleaned the barrel completely and pushed a few bullets through to check the diameter. I saw that the coating was rubbing off on two of the riflings. So I tried the smash test and sure enough I had small flakes coming off.
My lead is kind of unknown as it is a mixture of coww and soft lead with tin and antimony added at a 2% 5% rate. So not sure which ingots were in the pot when these were cast but the lead is at least about 12 bh. I am getting about 950 fps average with the load developed.
Since I have unknown lead, I might try some Muratic acid on a few and coat and see if I can pass the smash test.
I seem to get excited about shooting for a while, run into a leading issue, try to fix it and before everything gets ironed out I have something else that comes up and I forget about the problem until next time. I may just get it figured out this time before giving up. The leading isn’t that bad and a good hour after shooting it’s all gone again but it would be nice to get it down to a quick wipe down the barrel cleaning like the .45.
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