It has always been a goal of mine to streamline the operation and steps necessary for making bullets. I like to spend more time shooting them and less time making them so I am always experimenting with what may work to reduce a few steps of the bullet making process.
Many of us make 22 cal bullets from 22lr brass and are familiar with the steps involved to make good quality bullets from scrap brass and lead. The process is not difficult but there are a few steps to ensuring you get the most potential accuracy wise from these awesome bullets. I'm not going to go into all the steps now, what I will do is share some of my experiments in what has and has not worked.
Many people have thought the molten lead could be pored directly into the 22lr jacket, if successful this would potentially eliminate several steps .......... casting cores, swaging cores, cleaning cores and annealing the brass case as the hot lead would take care of it all. So I attempted it..... first just trying the ladle to poor it directly into the case.... unsuccessful, then I got closer by taking one of my 11 cavity molds and boring it out to the same diameter and length as the derimed 22lr jacket. This process was slow but almost worked, I think I almost got 50% success rate this way but loading the hot 11 cavity mold with the jackets was slow and I always got a good number of jackets with trapped air pockets making for light bullets but..... when it worked and there was no trapped air pocket it did successfully make a 70 grain bullet that was able to go straight to the point form die. So the steps involved was 1. derim 2. clean jacket 3. use mold to cast lead directly into core 4. form bullet. Of course this made a nice lead tip bullet for which my dies where able to form nicely without the need of a lead tipping die. I still may work on this technique a bit and have a few more ideas in the back of my mind in how this could work and may someday again give it a try, maybe a piston of some sort to dispense an exact amount of lead, it has to work, Speer "hot cores" figured it out!
After the direct hot core mold attempt I was left with a few hundred decent quality 70 grain 22 cal bullets and another couple hundred culled bullets of weights drastically less then that with obvious air pockets and wrinkled jackets. But!......... I loaded them all up anyway and took them to the ground squirrel testing fields. I loaded all these bullets up with 23.5 grains of H335 (no load development at all) and to my surprise a high majority of them performed exceptionally well. I had separated them out to three grades of quality, 1st, 2nd and the last was simply labeled cr@p I was plesently surprised that even the lowest grade of these bullets where making hits easily out to 100 yrds on the little critters and these bullets...... they where ugly, deformed nose, dimples on the barring surface worse then a golf ball, weights varied from 50-70 grains, everything that would make one think they shouldn't even come close yet......! May of them did come close and many did connect. The 1st grade bullets at 70 grains where evening connecting with high percentages and ranges out a lot farther to nearly 300 yrds or more. What I really was impressed with was how dramatic the results where when the varmint was hit! A load THAWP! Awesome areal performance and lots of mist! After shooting lots of 55 grain 22 cal bullets from 22lr brass and even 20-223 with 32 grain bullets at 4200 FPS these 70 grain lead tip pills at an estimated 2800 fps where ......... AWESOME!
That was a few years ago now but the surprising and awesome results made a lasting memory and I vowed to try out the 70 grain pills again. Fast forward to this winter, I spent two weekends and made me over 3000 of these bullets but now they where all grade 1 or better and I was able to skip a few steps and this time achieve 100% results.
Here is a break down of the steps I used and worked for me, I don't advise my customers or anyone to attempt this just yet but I'm simply here to let you all know I am continuously experimenting in attempting improve and learn how to make the process and product potentially better.
1. Bored 11 cavity mold to drop cores all at exactly 60 grains using 50/50 mix of pure and COWW lead
2. Used clean derimed brass that had NOT been annealed. Saved at least two steps in annealing and additional cleaning of brass.
3. Seated core directly from mold to jacket (used the Hydraulic press set at a certain PSI so it would seat the core and stop before too much pressure was applied, this would require it to be all done by "feel" on a manual press in case a potentially heavy core slipped in). This saved two steps in swaging and cleaning cores.
4. Formed bullet, again in the hydraulic press at lowest PSI possible yet still formed bullet 100% to the tip. This took a little experimenting, had to find the right PSI that would form the bullet 100% all the way to the tip yet not over pressure anything. Had to work with all the weight variances of both brass and cores as I did not sort anything. We know the Federal case is 7 tenths of a grain heavier and my cores where all within a half of grain or so but that still equaled a possible full 1 grain swing in possible weights so I had to be able to fully form a 69 grain bullet but not over pressure the die forming a 70 or potentially 71 grain bullet. At the right pressure everything formed with a perfect lead tip. The heavy bullets would simply stop the press a bit short of full stroke once the PSI reached the predetermined setting. Sure a 69 grain bullet will now be a slightly shorter bullet then a 71 grain bullet but I could live with that especially for the time I saved in making these bullets. I am quite certain I will be able to achieve minute of ground squirrel accuracy out of these bullets and probably 80% or more of the bullets are well with in probably +/- .3 or .4 tenths of a grain of each other. I can again certainly live with that.
Now for some pics! Oh yeah, forgot..... I made them all boat tail too and not just boat tail but a concaved beveled base to the boat tail so I'll see if that makes a difference.
I forgot to take a picture.... but these bullets are a near exact match to size and shape of the Sierra 69 grain Match King bullets. I'll get a pic of that soon!
Once I get a nice day over here I will be testing these in all my 22 cal rifles, 223rem with both 9 and 12 twist, the 12 twist did well in the fields back then so we shall see if the 9 twist will do any better, 22-250 with 12 twist, a 22-6.5x55AI with both a 9 and 12 twist. The 6.5x55AI necked down to 22 cal is a monster! I got it primarily to test the extreme upper limits of our bullets made from 22lr brass I have already tested the Sierra 52 grain MK bullets at over 4300 fps out of this gun!!! We shall see how it does with these 70 grain pills I have made, if I can get it to ..... ???????? 3400 fps ?????? off the top of my head? or more with good accuracy I would call it a success! We shall see as soon as weather improves!
I don't have a pic of the 22-55AI yet so I'll have to post one of those soon too in this thread!
Lots of fun to be had and all with the reward that comes from making your own!
Keep posted, Happy New year and swage on!
Brian