There was a thread recently about lubing coated bullets which is something I had never intentionally done or seen the need to do. I am an avid pistol competitive shooter, going through 15-20K rounds a year. Shooting production and open with Smoke’s powder paint has always done a great job for me. I do get a small bit of residue in the first inch and leade of the barrel but the rest remains clean as do my comps on my open pistols. If I could change anything it would be to get rid of the carbon or paint smearing in the leade of my barrels.
After reading the thread about lubing PC’d boolits I decided to give it a try. After I had sized my pills, I liberally sprayed them with my home made case lube of 12:1 of HEET and lanolin, shookem in a Cool Whip bowl and spread them out to dry. I loaded them up and ran them over my Chrono. Then went home to clean my pistols and review the data.
After inspecting my barrels, to my surprise, they were clean as a whistle from chamber to crown. My comps were equally clean as well.
Now, to the second surprise ... Chrono results were even more unusual. The numbers were all over the map with extremely high SD and spreads wider than I have ever seen. I loaded 95 NLG, 115 NLG, 120 LG and 124 tumble LG bullets. All single coated with Smoke’s powder, sized to .357, all the same alloy mix and aged for 2 months. Same alloy, paint, size and aging that I normally run in my pistols. I have run these loads multiple times over my Chrono with very similar numbers. The only change to the recipe was the addition of the lanolin. ALL of the average velocities were down significantly, at least 100 FPS and some as much as 190 FPS on my open loads. The spreads were very inconsistent and as I was shooting it was like shooting puppy fart loads mixed with some hot loads. I knew something was amiss as I was shooting based on sound and felt recoil. ALL of the loads exhibited the same tendency with extremely wide variation.
I coated the bullets pretty heavy with the lanolin but it was completely dry when I loaded them. I used multiple powders (TG, BE, Sport Pistol, WSF and SW Major Pistol) so it’s not unique to only 1 powder. I went through about 800 rounds during testing. I’ve used the same 12:1 mix as case lube and never experienced anything like this before. Since only the base of the bullets were exposed to the lanolin, I find it hard to believe it’s reacting with the powder.
I considered that I might be experiencing bullet set back, due to more lube on the bullets but I ruled that out after reviewing the Chrono data. If it would have been set back then the higher velocity would likely have been always after the first shot but I did have some spikes in high velocity on the first shot but not consistently.
Anyone have any ideas what is going on?