Yeah, maybe. I would say pressures must be pretty darn high. Those slugs are beastly, and don't appreciate being swaged down like that!
I've never seen powder coating wiped off like that, not even on bullets sized WAY down more than normal.
Vettepilot
"Those who sacrifice freedom for security, have neither."
Benjamin Franklin. (A very wise man!)
Powder coating is hard, durable, and flexible. You can hammer a PC'd bullet flat and the powder coat will be fine. His is gone!
Jeez, the driving bands are swaged down so far the grooves are nearly gone too. A lot of metal got moved there. Extraordinary...
Choke? I think those are 12 gauge slugs, shot out of a 20 gauge! (Kidding.)
Vettepilot
Last edited by Vettepilot; 10-22-2021 at 05:04 PM.
"Those who sacrifice freedom for security, have neither."
Benjamin Franklin. (A very wise man!)
That is not powder coating. It looks like Hi-Tek coating which is not the same as PC. PC is stuck on the lead alot better.
Randy
"It's not how well you do what you know how to do,,,It's how well you do what you DON'T know how to do!"
www.buchananprecisionmachine.com
Maybe it is trick photography, but it looks pretty clear to me that the recovered slugs have a short front driving band, then the bottom two are at least twice as wide as the front. To me it is clear that the reason they are deformed like that has nothing to do with bore diameter, it is likely the wad being shoved in and expanding the slug. The only Benelli I own is s spot on at .729".
Nope, don't agree with that asessment at all. Sorry, JMHO.
We're not going to know more until/unless he can provide us with a measurement on the fired slugs...
Vettepilot
Last edited by Vettepilot; 10-23-2021 at 12:50 AM.
"Those who sacrifice freedom for security, have neither."
Benjamin Franklin. (A very wise man!)
Average .729, these are not completely round. I wonder what all that travel in snow / ice has done?
This coating has clearly failed bonding. My alloy has a Niobium contaminant, Hi Tek Zombie Green just doesn't work for me. I started with ZG and have a kilo of it. Other HT colours like TMG Gold (in my profile pic) can be smashed, hammered and fired 2000+ fps from rifles, plain base.
But my idea was just to show how these wads do get seated deeper when fired. Those slugs can be loaded and fired again.
EDIT: I can't find chrono pics nor load data for this... all that info is in some memory card somewhere... need to open one of these rounds.
Last edited by Petander; 10-23-2021 at 06:19 AM.
Snow alone is usually very gentle to bullets, but who knows what else is in there. You can shoot into very pristine looking clay backstops, and you can bet your bullet will strike a stone more often than not. As I said, my only Benelli is a Nova from 2002-2003ish, and that barrel is spot on at .729". I really doubt yours is significantly different other than usual tolerance.
Thanks for the pictures with the wads. I don't shoot these Russian slugs, but I used to shoot the Gulandi slugs, the DSG, thunderbolt, and LBC sabot. They did about like what you have pictured, not 100% down, but it seemed to me that any I recovered stayed that way. I have to wonder if the problem with these Azot wads is that their post is too short for the hollow cavity of the slugs. I don't think they were ever meant to be all the way down so the skirt was flush with the shoulder like that.
This was one of the loads that I planned to send for pressure testing.
There is a tungsten shot company that provides pressure tests, they are not advertising it as a service but I asked and it's okay. Just send five cartridges. I figured they must have test barrels because they publish their own loads.
I was planning to send more than one load so it never happened... I shoot 20 a lot more, that Benelli M3 is my one and only 12 gauge. I used to shoot an M1 a LOT , timed practise etc, so I like to keep one "Riot Benelli" just in case. M3 is a step forward, you can manually pump if you like.
But this is a classic example of not writing data on paper. I can open a round and measure the powder but is it 3N37 or N340 after all...
This is what my Brenneke copy looks like after passing through a modified choke and into a pile of sand. Notice how the wad (made in high-density polyethylene) has been compressed, compared to the slug on the left. Also notice how the skirt of the slug has been deformed and set into the wad between the wad's ribs.
The slugs were sitting on top of an x12x seal with a 3/8 felt wad between. It's hard to tell from the picture, but both the middle wad (HDPE) and the wad on the right (polycarbonate)has a significant dent in the bottom from the felt wad being pushed into them. I should probably have added a hard card.
This is another couple of wads I made for a sabot-slug. It was made from regular polyethylene, and it's quite obvious it could not stand the pressure during launch. The "floor" has been squeezed to half the original height. One thing I learned during my many tests was that only the strongest plastics, like HDPE and polycarbonate, would stand up to the more than two tons of pressure the wad will be subjected to at the top of the pressure curve.
As for Petander's slug; I agree with MegaMag. They must have been expanded from the inside out. Maybe a combination of the wad expanding and pressure somehow leaking into the cavity between the slug and the not fully seated wad? It probably happened before the slug entered the forcing cone, that would explain why the grooves are almost completely ironed out.
Cap'n Morgan
Originally Posted by longbow
Congrats Longbow, you win a beer for noticing that!
I intentionally set the slugs to show this in the picture.
You'll get the beer when I come to Canada to hunt elephant.
Well, I guess I was wrong, though I'm still throughly puzzled by the sides of those slugs. Grooves are all but gone and driving bands smoothed over.
The slugs have a post cast into the interior that the wad post slides over. Plus, the wad has a flange that the slugs seat against. I cannot fathom how the wad would "expand the slug" at all.
Vettepilot
"Those who sacrifice freedom for security, have neither."
Benjamin Franklin. (A very wise man!)
I agree. The wad is not solid where it goes into the cavity so I can't see how it would swell to fill the cavity so expanding the slug skirt against the bore.
I can accept that the wad slamming into the skirt could cause skirt collapse and expansion that way.
I have several recovered rifled Foster slugs (so factory slug loads) with very obviously collapsed/compressed skirts, some showing wad impression embedded in the skirt.
I've also recovered Lyman Foster slugs that were shot into snow that were much shorter and fatter than when they started out... as in they obturated to fill the bore from their starting point of 0.705".
I have also recovered some of my finned slugs with failed fins all compressed and commercial Rocket Slugs which were 4 finned and totally collapsed.
Point being that if there is enough pressure and acceleration a soft lead slug will be over stressed and yield. There is not a lot of cross sectional area in a slug skirt and soft lead has a very low yield strength.
It would be interesting to know the pressure of that load, or load details/powder and charge.
The Paradox slugs I tested were not powder puff loads but they weren't 12,000 PSI either.
Longbow
Last edited by longbow; 10-23-2021 at 06:31 PM. Reason: correcting spell check
Petander:
I'll be looking forward to that beer. Now about the elephants... I'll have to start calling zoo's and circuses!
Good thing there hasn't been much thread wander...
As Longbow says, it's possible it isn't the post, and just simple collapsing of the hollow base. Every hollow base slug I've ever recovered has shown significant expansion, some more than others. Here's an example, a Lyman 525 sabot slug, and that's even with the hollow base filled with hot glue. The Lee 7/8 oz shows a bit less. Back when I was shooting the Buckbuster slugs, which are hollow based, they expanded such that you could see the lines where the wad was slit. Even solid slugs like a .735" round ball show significant deformation. It's almost impossible to catch a factory rifled slug without it flattening, but you can tell they expand greatly by the fact the rifling is nearly wiped off of them.
There we go! That's even more collapse than the Lyman sabot slugs I have found (other people's) but yes even ACWW skirts collapse some at normal high end pressures in my experience.
I made a mould for a TC HB wad slug at 525 grs. in ACWW so I could use Lyman sabot slug data. I used thick skirts so I didn't have to fill. Well that didn't go as planned! I put a nitro card wad under but the pressure pushed the plastic wad and nitro card wad up into the cavity causing a "dome" which flared the skirt and damaged wads. Oven heat treating stopped the flaring. Hot melt glue filler should work too.
I also tried a slug with very thick short skirt similar to a Russian Nessler Ball and used a hot melt glue skirt/filler. Again ACWW and the skirt flared enough to shear wad petals off!! That surprised me!
I suspect that is why Lyman has a bit of a reverse bevel on the bottom of the sabot slug skirt and a widish band so as the skirt expands it doesn't cut the petals. I'm guessing msm's pic of the expanded slug is soft lead. A harder alloy like ACWW shouldn't expand that much but I'm betting it will still collapse and expand some.
My experience.
Longbow
It's not that soft. 96-2-2 alloy. COWW is generally considered around 96.75% lead, 3% antimony, and 0.25% tin, so really not that much different. If you heat treated or water dropped them, it might make a difference. I've heard enough comments about hard alloys like Hardball cracking to say it's best to just avoid the hard alloys on hollow slugs, but a heat treated COWW would work.
On the other hand, the expansion/deformation sure seems like a good thing to me. In the right design it allows sloppy fits to fit any bore. That Lyman 525 is an example. With the unfired skirt around .668", it has no business shooting well at all from my 16 gauge with .674" bore, yet the thing shoots lights out because it expands like that.
If that alloy is equivalent to ACWW it seems like a lot of collapse/expansion but the skirt isn't really thick so not surprising I guess. That's one slug I haven't tried but probably should.
I try to keep skirt thickness no less than 0.100" for my moulds but even then they collapse/expand. If the hollow cavity is filled they do better and oven heat treated their good but brittle so tend to break up on impact. I'd rather not heat treat.
I like the Brenneke approach... make the slugs big and let them swage to suit the bore.
Expanding to fill the bore works too as long as it is consistent.
ots of variables and black magic in loading accurate slug rounds!
Longbow
I found my data and pics!
This is the fastest I loaded, about 1400 fps. These are most probably the recovered ones in the previous pics. Too much. A 1200 fps load says "ok' in the pic data.
I will not give my (Vihtavuori N340) charges because... well, you know.
Bro, is that snow?!I found my data and pics!
This is the fastest I loaded, about 1400 fps. These are most probably the recovered ones in the previous pics. Too much. A 1200 fps load says "ok' in the pic data.
I will not give my (Vihtavuori N340) charges because... well, you know.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Sure. But not today - we had some snow but it melted away...pic is from winter of 2020. This is how I find some slugs and bullets. When you get a couple of feet of snow, shoot low and the slugs travel a long way in snow.
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