Hello all,
I'm a noob at casting and PCing. As if you wouldn't have been able to tell. I've been casting/coating for a few weeks and have been completely happy. However, the other day I built a rubber mulch bullet trap to minimize lead loss and the captured bullets rasied a question. The bullets are missing their coating on about 85% of their bearing surface.
Research lead me to check some of my prepared bullets with the hammer test. They seemed to be fine. No flaking.
When shooting the PC bullets, I've always had a small amount of leading, starting at the chamber and tapering off to none at about halfway down the barrel.
I don't have a barrel slug kit, but I did push a coated bullet through with a wood dowel. The grooves appear to measure .357. Since I use the Lee 356-125-2r then PC, then size to .356, I'm wondering if the cause is too small of bullet.
Here's some more info that may be pertinent.
scrap junk lead - I didn't think hardness mattered with PC so I've been using anything I can find. Is this assumption wrong? I do water quench when casting.
Gun is a Taurus PT 92 AFS-D
PC is HF red - I know. I know. I will get better powder, but this was just to get me started, and I thought everything was fine until I recovered those bullets with missing coating.
No signs of bullet tumbling and accuracy is only slightly lower than FMJ. 2 1/2" groups for PC cast, and 1 1/2" groups for FMJ from 7yrds offhand. I'm just getting back into shooting if that sounds horrible.
Thank you for your input.