today i decided to try softnose cast bullets again. My last attempt was with the 45-70 and it worked pretty well, i made the bullets having my father-inlaw help me and he would poor a measured amount of pure lead in and then i would immediatly follow up with wheel weight. this made a good bullet but had trouble with the sprue plate clogging with the first pour and then not getting good fill out with the WW so the reject rate was high. The bullets worked better than i ever thought, they mushroomed perfectly and in testing performed the same as the rem. 405 bullet. the difference between soft pointed bullets and plain bullets cast of the same alloy and fired into the same test medium was amazing. this morning i decided to try some out for my 348, a browning, i have been trying various cast bullet loads and did not have good luck with full power loads so i backed off the velocity and started to get some better results so i figured i would try soft pointing to get expansion at the lower speeds. this time around i did things a little different, i cast just some noses with pure lead by pouring in a measured amount into the mold with it held as level as possible, and then took the nose's and inserted them into a piece of 3/8" flat bar with a hole drilled in it to hold the bullet and then filed the base flat and square against the flat bar. then put the nose in the mold pushing it down with a pencil while closing the mold halfs to hold the nose in the proper position and then poured in the wheel weight, the resulting bullet came out great, better then the previous method i had tried. some were air cooled and then i water dropped some some as well. the few bullets i tried today worked really well even at reduced speeds, could not chronograph as the weather was really lousy here today but the load was 21gr of imr 4227 with a 195gr bullet. for the lack of anything better i shot them into some chunks of spruce, while not a realistic flesh test medium it does allow comparison between soft pointed bullets and non soft pointed bullets. the bullets work great retaining about 85% of their weight and expanding to .5 to .62, for comparison straight WW water dropped showed no expansion at all and a pure lead slug resulted in about .8 and a 200 grhornady fired at 2500fps was .60 and lost 50% of its weight. i can post pictures but not sure on how to do it, i still have the test bullets from the 45-70 experiment as well if people would be interested. sorry to be so long winded.
JW