Curious of your barrel length and if you were shooting suppressed or not.
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16 inch 1:8. I don’t own a suppressor.
I have an AR that appears to have a burr at the gas port hole in the barrel. It gets lead there but still cycles with lubed and checked boolits. It is a .223.
Nice and useful thread. I just received a 16-inch 1:8 twist upper from Palmetto yesterday. Now to just find some RL-7 and the Lee mold.
You guys sizing to .309 or .310?
I size at .310 and expand cases first with the lyman .310 expander..
But they only chamber in 2 of 3 blackouts I have.
My PSA 10.5" pistol seems to have a tight neck and wont take .310 expanded brass or anything over a .308" bullet before the neck fit gets very sticky.
Different brass might make it possible, but I have and use strictly reformed LC.
The Lee C312-155-2R drops at .314 from my buddy’s mold. My rifle slugs .3075 with 5 very wide grooves and skinny little lands almost as if it was purpose designed for cast. I sized to .310.
There is a seller on eBay that has the mold at a reasonable price. I have never dealt with them and make no endorsement. The RL7… good luck!
i size to 309, powder coat and then resize to 311, runs thru all the 4 blackouts (rem 700 AAC and 3 ARs) i load for with converted LC brass
Attached are pics of 50yds groups I quickly shot in initial testing of
conventionally lubed bullets in my 8 twist /16" AR. Pistol length gas system.
These are first loading at 15 gr IMR 4227 for function and initial zeros. 2-7x old Weaver.
Bullets were sized to .309 and lubed with MTL.
Note I was shooting off a bipod from bench. You can see I lost one here and there out of groups. Function, ejection and hold open were good.
beltfed/arnie
Attachment 287464Attachment 287465
Arnie, there is always one wise guy with a mind of his own when shooting for group, eh?
Like others have said, I would get leading around the tail of the bolt. Powder coating is kind of a PITA but if its setup right its much faster than convetional lubing
I don't own a 300 BLK, but do own several .30 Carbines, and I think it and the .300 are close enough to make the comparison.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool lube buy. I own a Star lubrisizer which not only lubes/sizes bullets incredibly fast, but because of its push-thru design, makes for concentric, accurate bullets. But earlier this year I found a company offering a 115 gr. cast RN plain-base bullet, Hi-Tek coated for less than $40 per 500, and I figured "what the heck", and ordered some.
They came in a few weeks ago....
https://i.imgur.com/0Lx5zFHm.jpg
....and I immediately set about testing them. First of all, I ran them up to a bit over 1900 fps with zero, zilcho, NO leading whatsoever. Impressive. I'll say here and now that every carbine I've tested, and that'd be at least a half-dozen, and probably more, shoot cast better than jacketed. So when I tested these in a couple of carbines for accuracy at 100 yds., they did pretty well-
https://i.imgur.com/QGLlgybl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/lAO0tn0l.jpg
But things fell apart at 200 yds. My 200 yd. target is a 24" gong and the best I could do is keep 5 of 10 shots on the steel. With some 5 shot strings, I did good to keep 1 of 5 on the target. Close examination of the bullets showed two potential problems; an off-center sprue, and more importantly, inconsistent coating on the beveled portion of the base of the bullets-
https://i.imgur.com/DlKrckul.jpg
I've always wondered how a person could roll bullets around in powder and get consistent thickness of the coating. As a comparison, these same carbines pretty easily groups traditionally lubed/sized/checked bullets into 6" at 200 yds., with the commercial examples often grouping tighter.
I will definitely continue to use these bullets for 100 yd. and less plinking, but that's it.
So there's my 2¢ on the subject.
35W
I’m not even remotely interested in buying coated boolits. The whole point of the exercise is low cost and ease of manufacture.
I wasn't even remotely trying to sell you on coated bullets, just passing along my experience. I'll continue to use my own traditionally cast lubed & sized bullets. The coated bullets, at $35.00 per 500, are simply an inexpensive, but less accurate alternative.
35W