This is going to be a long thread so I'm going to post it in a couple of segments. By learning and mixing together different techniques that people on this site have pioneered, I've come up with something that's both familiar and a little different at the same time. It's a powder coated boolit, but not powder coated in the usual way, and it's a lubricated boolit, but not lubricated in the usual way. I didn't invent this process as a whole, I just took pieces of techniques that other casters were doing and used them together.
I've been experimenting over the last 6 months with methods to fix the problem of powder coating causing the noses of bore riding cast bullets from getting too fat. I've got several 30 caliber rifles that I load for, but when I try the traditional shake and bake method of powder coating with these bullets they will no longer chamber. Luckily I have a 7.65x53, so they don't go to waste, but what I really needed was a way to get my existing molds to work.
There have been several different methods used to attempt to fix this problem: coating the molds with high temp paint to decrease the nose diameter, masking the nose while powder coating, sizing the nose, etc. The first thing I attempted was to machine a nose sizing die that would screw into a single stage reloading press just like a regular reloading die. This "nose die" is able to accept neck bushings from almost any manufacturer, and in any diameter. I chose Redding neck bushings. I read through Buckshot's threads about making nose sizing dies that work in lubricator/sizers for some insights. I also machined a boolit ejector that's similar to the one that BTsniper uses for his swage dies. It was a complete failure. The die would resize the nose, but it was impossible to maintain concentricity between the nose and the driving bands. Mechanical solutions to this were getting close to crossing the line into swaging, which is fine, but I'm looking for a fix for the cast boolits and that would be too big of a step.
The next fiasco was to attempt to just use the cast boolits in the way that they were designed and lube them. I've been casting and reloading for over 40 years. When powder coating came along it was a God send. I had forgotten how much of a mess lubed bullets were. I know, most of the casters on this site use and prefer lubricated bullets. I used them for decades, but I find many more benefits from powder coating. PC works amazingly well for pistol bullets: bore riding rifle bullets are the only ones that have given me any problems. I'll spare the details, but after several weeks of trying, lubricated rifle bullets just aren't for me. I did learn some valuable information along the way though, and applied it to the process that I'm using.
The first good idea that worked really well came from this thread: https://castboolits.gunloads.com/sho...g-cast-boolits
Using an empty cartridge casing and inserting the boolit into it backwards worked great. It's not necessary to have the casing mouth grip the boolit, and is actually better if the boolit can just slide out after the driving bands are coated. The first thing that I do is drill out the primer hole. Once in a while a boolit gets slightly stuck in the case, and won't slide out. When that happens I just insert a small dowel or rod into the case through the enlarged primer hole and use that to seperate the case and boolit. In the photo I've run a 270 case up a little way into a 7x57 resizing die to create a "holder" for 7mm boolits (I don't own a 270)
I use boolits cast from water quenched COWW alloy, and run them through a Lee push through sizer before powder coating to size the driving bands and seat the gas check. In my experience it's been better to seat the gas check before powder coating. On this first sizing I give the boolits a small squirt of the lanolin/isopropyl alcohol that I use for resizing brass, but that may not be necessary for others, and for me it adds a step because then I have to de-grease the boolits before powder coating.
When I do the powder coat I hold the empty case so that the boolit won't slide out of it, then when I put the base of the boolit into the tub full of powder and airsoft BB's I gently hold the base of the boolit against the bottom of the tub to hold it in the casing. It only takes about 5 seconds of swirling in the powder & BB's and the driving bands are coated. I add a little more powder to the tub fro this process than I usually would for the standard shake-n-bake. Two or three taps of the casing against the edge of the tub knocks off any excess powder. Then I just let the boolits slide out of the case mouth and onto a piece of parchment paper that's going into the powder coating toaster oven. stand them up in rows and bake just like normal. The result is that just the driving bands and the gas check get powder coated, and the nose stays bare. That's half of the process; the rest in the next post.