Long range boolits for 30-06 and 270 Needed

[Blammer]

Linepipe, the "case prep" you'll need to be aware of is neck flaring. It's done on pistol brass quite commonly, but not on rifle brass.

The case mouth needs to be flaired so that when seating the boolit you don't shave the boolit. If you shave the boolit accuracy will suffer.

[Linepipe]

Blammer, thanks for the info. Yup, already having to doing that with my marlin 30-30.

That means at least new dies. Good info.

[Blammer]

na, just get the Lee universal case flaring tool, works great!

[Nora]

Linepipe, the "case prep" you'll need to be aware of is neck flaring. It's done on pistol brass quite commonly, but not on rifle brass.

The case mouth needs to be flared so that when seating the boolit you don't shave the boolit. If you shave the boolit accuracy will suffer.

Agreed. In my loading practices I've found that if I flair the neck enough to allow the gas check to enter half way up it's just right.

Nora

[geargnasher]

See attached diagram.

Attachment 58293

Get on 45 2.1's triple-crimp-groove group buy, several people out there have done exceptional things with that boolit. The Lyman 311299 might work for you, too, it has worked very well in one rifle of mine with a similar throat in the past. Cast boolits from 50/50 wheel weights/pure with a pinch of tin, less than 1% total, alloy temp at 725F and mould temp hot enough for a very light, uniform, satin "frost", cut the sprue while just soft enough to leave a tiny crater in the base but not so soft as to smear, and immediately get them straight from the mould and into a bucket of cold water. Put them in a warm place for a month before trying to shoot them.

Size boolits to an actual .3103-5", then apply Hornady gas checks and size to .312" while lubing in a base-first die. Do not anneal the checks. I'll explain more in a minute so you understand what this accomplishes.

If you're buying lube rather than making it, I'd recommend simply using NRA 50/50 and clean lightly every 20 shots or so, sooner when you see groups just begin to open up slightly. There are far better lubes you can make, and better ones you can buy, but that formula will do what you need and is consistent and predictable from 40-95F. I don't know where you live or what conditions you shoot in or I'd make some other recommendations.

Hopefully you can find some brass with .0145" necks. Uniform them and tune thickness so that loaded necks clear the chamber at the small end with a ballpark goal of half a thousandth total.

Bushing size fireformed brass to an ID of .308 or so, and use a .309" RCBS cast bullet expander spud to uniform the tension preload to about .3088" or so, set the expander deep enough for the case mouth to swallow 3/4 or so of the check just by placing a boolit on top with your fingers.

Use a standard LR primer, whatever you like.

Purchase a Wilson seating die, the $50 one, and hone the neck of the sliding sleeve to your smallest chamber neck dimension, or a bit larger. Pay close attention to whether or not the neck binds in the sleeve, if it does you may want to re-check your boolit size and brass neck thickness. Mic loaded ammo near the mouth to ensure a .0003" (yes, TENTHS) minimum chamber neck clearance. The gas check needs room to get past the mouth while the neck is supported by the sleeve, if it didn't you could simply leave the sleeve a few tenths smaller than the chamber neck and use it for a no-go gauge. The idea is the gas check expands the base of the neck when seated to match the neck taper when chambered. You may or may not need to crimp, it depends on the load. I mostly do not crimp, others always crimp, your rifle will tell you if the load needs it or not. If you need to, roll crimp with a production seat/crimp die, but you may have to hone the crimp collar to not shave your bullets.

Seating depth and powder type/charge are your next challenges. You might start with some flavor of 4350, or slower, the goal being consistent ignition and complete burn with the components, techniques, boolit weight, and barrel you're using. Initially tune the load to a primary lateral barrel vibration node, then fine-tune to the fourth-order longitudinal node so it's just a fuzz past the muzzle. If you have Quickload, there is another program available that works with it to predict both of these and will likely save you some components. Seating depth you'll have to play with in .005" increments, starting with firm engraving marks on the nose and backing off from there. If your ammunition is absolutely concentric, you will not need to seat to engrave the nose and can crimp in a groove if it doesn't coincide with the boolit touching. There is more than one right way to go about this, and you'll develop your own way that works best for you and your rifle, I'm just giving you an idea of a way to go about it based on what works for me.

If the rifle is thoroughly de-coppered, has proper bedding, a good crown, good bore, and you are consistent in everything you do, this will get you started. There's a lot more to it, but you can only really learn that stuff by actually doing, changing one small thing, and doing some more.

Gear

[runfiverun]

i'll pitch in here.
i'd start with a powder slightly slower than the 4350 [aa 4350 not the others]
as you seat deeper to get out of the lands you can then swap to a slightly faster powder to re-gain the nodule.
if you continue to have slight horizontal stringing them a primer brisance change becomes necessary.
pay particular attention to the anneal of the case necks you will find a happy tension where the springback of the casemouth is minimal between re-loads of the case [this is the one you want to maintain]
you wil also want your cases to fit your rifle as close to he end of the chamber as possible.
nevermind what saami says or what some drawing shows.
measure this area and get the brass to fill both ends of the chamber.
note what gear said about case neck thickness and concentricity.
i know gear touched on the alloy and once you have established a baseline load tweaking and manipulating the alloy with copper,sulpher and/or zinc may gain you a few more fps or 10ths.
if you see the poof or notice groups wandering vertically you'll need them
your lube will need to be brought up to snuff also at about three steps ago..

after all this your rifle might not be up to the accuracy tasks and all you have done is make ammo better than the rifle.
hope this helps.

[geargnasher]

Powder is one place where some tricks may be needed to achieve the contradictory goals of slow pressure rise, low muzzle pressure, high enough peak pressure to achieve desired velocity, and clean, uniform, repeatable burn curve. With 200+ grain boolits in the 2100-2300 fps range, 4350-ish powder does ok by itself, although we want slower effective burn rate. Some monkey business may be required to get some of the slower powders to light correctly, such as duplexing and putting things in the cases other than powder. Some slower powders work ok by themselves, RX 19 and 22 are fun to play with sometimes, as are some double-base progressives like Hybrid 100V and WW780.

If you want to get jacketed accuracy beyond the "normal" cast boolit velocities, forget everything you thought you knew about loading and shooting jacketed bullets. Basically quit thinking that your projectile is tough and when the powder lights can rattle around in the throat until it finally jams into the bore centerline, or that it can take .005" case tension without a hitch, or that it's base won't collapse off-center following the weakest spot in the case neck which is unsupported by the chamber for a good ways when the powder hits it in the butt. Start thinking that your boolit is a gecko egg that must be secured in a brass tube and launched to a couple thousand FPS with nearly 40K psi in less than two feet without disturbing the embryo's nap. Also remember that a cast boolit must fit dynamically through the entire firing event well enough that no gas leaks past it, especially after the point that the first full driving band is fully engraved. You're effectively trying to achieve a breech-seating condition with fixed ammunition here by crafting things so that the boolit makes it straight into the bore, up the tube, and out the muzzle without being damaged. Doing so requires a combination of tooling, components, and techniques that work in harmony to keep the dynamic balance of pressure and movement smooth, controlled, and in the right directions at all times.

Gear

Edit to add: None of us have addressed the .270 yet. I'll say that if your chamber neck is larger than .304" at the front (and it will be around .310-11" if it's a factory barrel) you're going to be wasting your time with it at anything above very modest velocities. Don't get me wrong, you can build a 1600 fps tack-driver that will shoot quite a way, but probably not up to the standards you seek. I have a trick to fix that, but it is extraordinarily difficult and tedious to pull off, and makes spending the bucks for a custom reamer and barrel seem very worth while. If you were going to rebarrel, there might be some better choices to consider for cast-friendly chamberings.

[runfiverun]

did you almost mention falsley bumping a pressure spike to increase the pressure rise of the slower powder after the boolit was past the throat.
was the static and mechanical fit mentioned in there somewhere i may have missed it.
it's worth mentioning again.
that should be enough to get started with anyway.

[Linepipe]

Get on 45 2.1's triple-crimp-groove group buy, several people out there have done exceptional things with that boolit. The Lyman 311299 might work for you, too, it has worked very well in one rifle of mine with a similar throat in the past. Cast boolits from 50/50 wheel weights/pure with a pinch of tin, less than 1% total, alloy temp at 725F and mould temp hot enough for a very light, uniform, satin "frost", cut the sprue while just soft enough to leave a tiny crater in the base but not so soft as to smear, and immediately get them straight from the mould and into a bucket of cold water. Put them in a warm place for a month before trying to shoot them.

Size boolits to an actual .3103-5", then apply Hornady gas checks and size to .312" while lubing in a base-first die. Do not anneal the checks. I'll explain more in a minute so you understand what this accomplishes.

If you're buying lube rather than making it, I'd recommend simply using NRA 50/50 and clean lightly every 20 shots or so, sooner when you see groups just begin to open up slightly. There are far better lubes you can make, and better ones you can buy, but that formula will do what you need and is consistent and predictable from 40-95F. I don't know where you live or what conditions you shoot in or I'd make some other recommendations.

OK. All this makes sense and I have the lubrisizer for it so we are good to go there.

Hopefully you can find some brass with .0145" necks. Uniform them and tune thickness so that loaded necks clear the chamber at the small end with a ballpark goal of half a thousandth total.

Uniform thickness at .0145” is a pretty tall order. I have a lot number of Lapua that does this, but even then not all of them. Still have some that dip down into the 13’s every so often and up into the 15’s. Norma might get there, but for all the others this is a lot of rejects in each new bag. That lot of Lapua is already reserved for a certain load so I will try some other. I several hundred 1940’s 30-06 cases that are unfired – I will measure those and see what I have in there for this. I have the tools to neck turn, so we are good.

Bushing size fireformed brass to an ID of .308 or so, and use a .309" RCBS cast bullet expander spud to uniform the tension preload to about .3088" or so, set the expander deep enough for the case mouth to swallow 3/4 or so of the check just by placing a boolit on top with your fingers.

Use a standard LR primer, whatever you like.

Purchase a Wilson seating die, the $50 one, and hone the neck of the sliding sleeve to your smallest chamber neck dimension, or a bit larger. Pay close attention to whether or not the neck binds in the sleeve, if it does you may want to re-check your boolit size and brass neck thickness. Mic loaded ammo near the mouth to ensure a .0003" (yes, TENTHS) minimum chamber neck clearance. The gas check needs room to get past the mouth while the neck is supported by the sleeve, if it didn't you could simply leave the sleeve a few tenths smaller than the chamber neck and use it for a no-go gauge. The idea is the gas check expands the base of the neck when seated to match the neck taper when chambered.

If I am reading this correctly what you are effectively doing is expanding the lower part of the neck to be at or just under the ID of the chamber at the case neck. This appears to be the same thing as a partial neck-only sizing with jacketed bullets, which I have done in the past on certain loads. When used with a crush fit of the brass it is a final alignment of bullet to bore. Is this correct?

You may or may not need to crimp, it depends on the load. I mostly do not crimp, others always crimp, your rifle will tell you if the load needs it or not. If you need to, roll crimp with a production seat/crimp die, but you may have to hone the crimp collar to not shave your bullets.

Seating depth and powder type/charge are your next challenges. You might start with some flavor of 4350, or slower, the goal being consistent ignition and complete burn with the components, techniques, boolit weight, and barrel you're using. Initially tune the load to a primary lateral barrel vibration node, then fine-tune to the fourth-order longitudinal node so it's just a fuzz past the muzzle. If you have Quickload, there is another program available that works with it to predict both of these and will likely save you some components. Seating depth you'll have to play with in .005" increments, starting with firm engraving marks on the nose and backing off from there. If your ammunition is absolutely concentric, you will not need to seat to engrave the nose and can crimp in a groove if it doesn't coincide with the boolit touching. There is more than one right way to go about this, and you'll develop your own way that works best for you and your rifle, I'm just giving you an idea of a way to go about it based on what works for me.

My barrel is 28", so I have some room to work with som different powders, and both flavors of 4350 are in stock.

If the rifle is thoroughly de-coppered, has proper bedding, a good crown, good bore, and you are consistent in everything you do, this will get you started. There's a lot more to it, but you can only really learn that stuff by actually doing, changing one small thing, and doing some more.

Gear

Thanks for the help.

[Linepipe]

i'll pitch in here.
i'd start with a powder slightly slower than the 4350 [aa 4350 not the others]
as you seat deeper to get out of the lands you can then swap to a slightly faster powder to re-gain the nodule.
if you continue to have slight horizontal stringing them a primer brisance change becomes necessary.
pay particular attention to the anneal of the case necks you will find a happy tension where the springback of the casemouth is minimal between re-loads of the case [this is the one you want to maintain]


you wil also want your cases to fit your rifle as close to he end of the chamber as possible.
nevermind what saami says or what some drawing shows.
measure this area and get the brass to fill both ends of the chamber.
note what gear said about case neck thickness and concentricity.
i know gear touched on the alloy and once you have established a baseline load tweaking and manipulating the alloy with copper,sulpher and/or zinc may gain you a few more fps or 10ths.
if you see the poof or notice groups wandering vertically you'll need them
your lube will need to be brought up to snuff also at about three steps ago..

after all this your rifle might not be up to the accuracy tasks and all you have done is make ammo better than the rifle.
hope this helps.

How many shots are you getting in between your annealing sessions? Wondering about the flaring really shortening the case life. I am annealing after every 2 or 3 shots (depending on load used, etc), and am up to 15 shots with no signs of fatigue yet. But - I am only neck sizing and not using an expander ball. Just wondering if the extra flaring is reason enough to anneal after every shot. Currently annealing with my lead pot, temping and keeping notes so that each case is within a 25 degree range (trying to get consistent neck tension and this is the only way I have found to measure it for each case to ensure consistency. If you know of a better way, let me know).

When you are saying to fit cases to the chamber you are referring to a chamber dim. match or a slight crush fit, right? Currently this is standard practice with all of my reloads. All brass is at a crush fit.

Thanks.

[runfiverun]

stop thinking like lead and jaxketed are the same.
you don't want a soft anneal you want a nearly hard anneal.
when you just lose the spring back is about right,you fit the thickness of the case to the chamber with the .015-16 thick necks the boolit is filling everything else and you are only using .001-.0005 neck tension.
the gas check is helping keep the case tapered to fit the chamber [yeah they are not straight]
this is where the powder pressure blip comes into play, the boolit isn't there to take the pressure up into the burn zone the buffer blip is what does it.
remember the protect the boolit at all times mantra, this is from the mold all the way to the end of the barell,and a little bit past it.

[geargnasher]

Yup, hard necks. You need to get that boolit into the bore and as fully supported as it's going to get before the pressure peaks. Using slow-burning powder helps this, and hard necks will take the initial pressure of getting the boolit out of the case without fully expanding, so it acts as a better guide than soft necks and high initial chamber pressure which can allow the boolit base to get pushed to one side and damaged beyond repair when it finally does get squeezed into the barrel. Don't give it anywhere to go but straight, and launch it gently. New brass needs to be run through a standard sizing die (Lee is good for this) about four or five times to work-harden it before shooting. Use a narrow strip of Scotch tape in front of the extractor groove to center the case head in the chamber for the first firing, then yes, it's "crush fit" after that. That's why God invented the bolt-action repeater with a strong extractor and lug cam. For other types of actions, dies can be modified to just "kiss" the case in all the right places so it will plunk right in there but not wiggle.

When you get your chamber neck clearance down to less than half a thousandth total difference between loaded neck diameter and chamber neck diameter (somewhere in the middle of the neck), and have sufficiently hard necks, you will find that it is unnecessary to resize the brass, and also unnecessary to bellmouth the necks. My advice previously about using a bushing sizer and expander is for initial case prep and periodic touch-up only. If your clearances are tight and necks hard, the brass will spring back to what it was before the boolit was seated, i.e. will be smaller after firing than when ready to fire, and will maintain this thousandth to thousandth and a half interference fit with the boolit for many firings. When the tension begins to slack off after several reloads, you will know that the necks are beginning to get too brittle and will need a very, very slight draw, not an anneal, to keep going. You just want to undo a tiny bit of the work hardening. This method works in part because you aren't working the brass very much at all after the initial prep, so it takes a while for it to get too hard just from loading and firing.

I know how difficult it is to get '06 brass that's thicker in the neck area than about .0135" after knocking off the high spots. The other option you have here (for higher velocity shooting, there are other tricks for shooting at 1600 fps), and that is to use larger boolits to make up the gap left by the thin brass. If you ream the throat entrance to accept .312" boolits (most .311 Lymans will not cast this large on the bands with the alloy I specified, but some custom ones will), and sort through your brass only using the stuff that comes out .0140", you'll get there. You might try shooting .312" boolits with the .3106" throat entrance, sometimes that works if the barrel has had a few hot jacketed rounds through it to smooth off the rough edges and let the oversized boolit swage through there without scraping off lead shavings which, unfortunately, will tend to deposit in the bore and muck up the works. You want your boolit's bearing bands to be just a few tenths smaller than the very first part of the throat so as to have perfect alignment (nowhere to go but straight up the pipe) but no shaving and minimal gas leakage around the boolit prior to it's getting fully corked in the bore.

See what Runfiverun meant by quit thinking in Jaxketed terms? This is a whole different ball of wax, and most of your processes are aimed at different ends than jacketed, because the mechanics is different and a lot more challenging. I suspect most cast boolit shooters keep things down below about 1800 fps and are happy with two-inch groups at 100 yards, which is about what you can expect with standard dies and following conventional wisdom, and there's nothing wrong with that for general fun shooting and most hunting, but if you want to up the ante then you're going to have to do things like the jacketed benchrest shooters do, because a cast boolit turns to putty at the pressures required to get above 2k fps, and putty won't shoot straight if it's deformed.

All this, and probably some more in the powder department (your long barrel really helps), should get you into at least 2300 fps territory with sub-moa accuracy. I've done this with an un-modified Winchester model 70 sporter, turning in 3/4" ten-shot groups on demand at 100 yards and up to 2350 fps. I had another one that would shoot holes at 1600 fps, and 1-1/2" or less for ten-shot strings all day any day at 2025 fps, but never could keep it under 2" faster than that because the chamber was sooooo sloppy in the neck. Manipulating the little things can make or break the delicate balance, but once you finally get it dialed in, you GET IT. Like riding a bike.

Gear

[nanuk]

Start thinking that your boolit is a gecko egg that must be secured in a brass tube and launched to a couple thousand FPS with nearly 40K psi in less than two feet without disturbing the embryo's nap.

We don't have Geckoes up here.
We don't even have that insurance company.

Would bullfrog eggs work OK in this instance?
Or should I look around for Salamander eggs to compare to?

[runfiverun]

think of ddt ridden bald eagle eggs then.

[Wolfer]

Gear and r5r
I'm one of those 1800 fps / 2" group guys but I'm still impressed with these posts!

[wmitty]

geargnasher,

ref #27

what chamberings would be more cast friendly?

[geargnasher]

Mitty, I asked that very question a while back, maybe a year ago here in this sub-forum. Some interesting responses, it would be worth digging up and reading.

Gear

[runfiverun]

that was before the change over, you'll probably never find it.
i'd start with the 35's no those are too easy. [unless you use winchester brass grr]
pick anything between the 223 and the 35 cal..

i was hoping someone would read all this typing.

[geargnasher]

Gear and r5r
I'm one of those 1800 fps / 2" group guys but I'm still impressed with these posts!

I've killed a lot of deer, turtles, spoiled fruit/veggies, and soda cans with cast boolits in loadings that didn't quite shoot as well as that, had fun and put meat on the table. Heck, I still do. My posts here are directed at the guy who wants to have varmint accuracy at 600 yards with his cast boolits, and that's a whole 'nuther situation.

Gear

[geargnasher]

HA! got it on the first try with advanced. Not as many options, but it's smarter than the old software.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...=cast-friendly

Gear