Successful casting of Softnose Boolits in Conventional Moulds

[carpetman]

ben 1025--Better be careful leaving those hot plates on,you might burn your house down.

[MT Gianni]

I have dippered pure lead [from a piece of 2" pipe setting inside the 20 lb pot and having had the end peened and welded shut] into a 180 gr rcbs 30 cal mould and given it a 20-30 seconds to settle in then bottom poured ww into the cavity and water dropped. My rejects were well over 50% due to not being perfectly level with the lead line and insufficient cohesion between the lead and alloy. The ones that passed inspection grouped well but haven't seen meat yet. Too many projects I guess. Gianni.

[buck1]

I was all set to try this myself a wile back I even bought a small lee dipper furnace for the pure lead.
But I found something else that worked so well I all but abandoned the soft nose idea.

I did this with a 44 mag, ww+2%tin, and a 4 cav mold.
I cut onion skin paper to many sizes, then put them between the blocks at the nose.
Then other than that , I cast as I always do. I tested them in my redhawk at 30 yds in to wet news print.
The more paper in the nose, the bigger the mushroom and the faster it would hapen.
I used a GC mold so I could keep my speed up with out leading.
These shot with the normal slugs.
All kinds of bullet expanshions are posiable with this method. The mushroom is egg shaped and not round. And harder alloys can break in to 3 pices. With one depth I was getting 3" wound cavitys from the 240 gr 44 cal SWC ( in wet news paper)

I make these 4 at a time fast as I can cast.
But if there is too much paper ,the boolit can open in the air and never reach the target.
A heavier bullet would be better as it would still have more shank left to push through.
I think it would be good for deer on down, but I would think hard before I took them after Elk and would most likely pass on the idea. Instead I would use the soft nose Idea. FWIW....Buck

[45 2.1]

I was all set to try this myself a wile back I even bought a small lee dipper furnace for the pure lead.
But I found something else that worked so well I all but abandoned the soft nose idea.

I did this with a 44 mag, ww+2%tin, and a 4 cav mold.
I cut onion skin paper to many sizes, then put them between the blocks at the nose.
Then other than that , I cast as I always do. I tested them in my redhawk at 30 yds in to wet news print.
The more paper in the nose, the bigger the mushroom and the faster it would hapen.
I used a GC mold so I could keep my speed up with out leading.
These shot with the normal slugs.
All kinds of bullet expanshions are posiable with this method. The mushroom is egg shaped and not round. And harder alloys can break in to 3 pices. With one depth I was getting 3" wound cavitys from the 240 gr 44 cal SWC ( in wet news paper)

I make these 4 at a time fast as I can cast.
But if there is too much paper ,the boolit can open in the air and never reach the target.
A heavier bullet would be better as it would still have more shank left to push through.
I think it would be good for deer on down, but I would think hard before I took them after Elk and would most likely pass on the idea. Instead I would use the soft nose Idea. FWIW....Buck

One added note. This was done for rifle calibers in the past. What they did to keep it from blowing open in the air was to not put the paper past the nose, but leave the nose solid for a little ways so it was not split. They had no problems with velocity then and the bullet mushroomed as Buck said when it hit game.

[BruceB]

A further refinement or variation to this high-temp routine has occurred to me.

Instead of messing with dippers and melted pure lead, a caster could run off some pure-lead bullets of an appropriate weight-and-size to fit into his mould, and just drop one of these into the cavity BEFORE each heating-up of the mould in the melt. It would be easy to find out how long the melting of the lead bullet would take. Once the melting/heating time has elapsed, just fill 'er up with the harder shank alloy and we're done! For an example, a .357-160 SWC would work well in this .416 mould..

Any number of smaller-diameter rifle bullets of suitable weight would serve equally well. . Since we're going to melt them in the mold anyway, the shape is immaterial. Only the weight matters. My thinking now is that something less than 1/2 of the finished weight should be pure lead, but this could change depending on the shape of the bullet and how much of its length is in bore contact. It seems likely as well, that two softnose boolits could be cast at the same time from a 2-cavity mould, if using pure lead bullets as the source for the nose metal. Just drop a Pb bullet into each cavity before re-heating, and fill both with harder alloy when the melting time is up. Voila'....TWO nice softpoints! (4-cavities might be a bit cumbersome, and awkward to get heated-up sufficiently, too. If anyone tries it, please report!)

This use of a pure-lead bullet as the "donor" would have the (rather slight, I think) advantage of a very precisely measured amount of pure lead, compared to the dipper method. The disadvantage, very slight as well, is the extra time needed for casting the Pb bullets. I do think the time is essentially meaningless, because we will only need a very few softponts for our actual shots at game.

Regardless of the method of assembly, I strongly believe that the high-temp routine is superior to many others I've seen or heard of over the years. It allows for an absolutely PERFECT physical structure without any weak point in the resulting bullet, while also giving the desired shift in hardness from shank to nose. This is THE critical point, in my estimation.....the perfect homogeneity of the resulting bullet. It literally does not have a joint!

From prior reading, I've found that it's not uncommon, when using two-alloy cast boolits on animals, for the soft nose to expand so radically that the edges of the mushroom form become thin enough that the base of the bullet simply drives "through" the expanded nose, either leaving a ring of soft lead behind or breaking the nose into large chunks during its passage. This of course leaves the base intact and it continues to penetrate. This process reminds me of a few of my Nosler Partitions which encountered hard sledding and ended up with the nose part of the jacket folded tightly against the shank, and the front core gone. If my softpoints behave anything like a Partition, I'll be very content indeed. The WW base portion of my 416-350s weighs about 180 grains and should keep on motoring quite well if the nose is gone. In any case, there'll be a lot of destruction in the wake of that bullet!

[buck1]

Thats a good idea!! Hard sides and bottom, but a soft nose & center! ,,,Buck

[BruceB]

Now Buck, you've raised a different concept.

All I'm using the pure-lead bullet for, in the above post, is a source of lead to be MELTED to form the softnose. The pure-lead bullet just becomes a puddle of lead in the cavity's nose area.

What you're suggesting is actually where I started out yesterday, intending to find one of my moulds which would supply pure lead bullets to be inserted in the .416 mould and then have the harder metal cast AROUND them.

This technique would require that the pure-lead bullets be kept as hot as possible without actually melting. Tweezers or some such would be needed to place these hot bullets in the cavity.

The 357-160 SWC was my best prospect, but it looked like there might not be enough clearance around the nose for the WW metal to flow around the pure-lead bullet and fill the nose area. In addition, there's the problem of keeping the hot bullet centered while casting the WW around it. So, as I continued to think about the problem, the dipper method came to the fore and worked very well.

One other way to achieve a softpoint, although a rather small one, is to cast some pure-lead roundballs of a suitable diameter to more-or-less fill the nose area of the mould. Put a hot ball in the cavity and fill it with very hot harder alloy, and with any luck you may just have enough heat to melt that ball and create a smallish softnose. If it doen't work that way, then consider heating the daylights out of the mould in the molten alloy AFTER it's been filled. That should reduce everything to liquid form in a couple of minutes and create a well-filled-out bullet..

[buck1]

oops..I was thinking along the lines of the lbt soft nose but with a diff cal and a whole slug.

It seems like it would be hard on the mold. I would have bet $$$ that it would have warped. It sure seems too hot??
But It seems to work fine.
I have read but have not tryed, That the nose/shank lines dont hurt anything, exept the looks. But wheres the fun in that!
I might mention that I get a cardboard box line it with two trash bags, Then I fill it90%full of paper and fill it with water the night before. Makes good test targets. If you fill the box too full before the water ,it will get to tight for the paper to get wet in the middle. ....Buck

[BruceB]

Getting impatient with the slow growth of the newsprint pile for "wet-pack" testing, I went downtown and bought 16 1-gallon jugs of drinking water. Yes, this was a fairly-expensive bullet test. I took along one 6"-thick bundle of dry newsprint for a backstop, sitting in one of the plastic crates used for 5-gallon jugs around water coolers.

I placed eight jugs on an eight-foot fir 2x6 across a benchrest, with the crate and upright newsprint bundle at the far end. The loads were, first, an aircooled cast softpoint, and second, a water-dropped cast softpoint, made yesterday. The load chronographs right at 2100 fps with the 365-grain bullets, and I fired from twenty feet. Might's well call it muzzle velocity at impact. I got wet....TWICE, because I didn't want to change the conditions between the tests. Water and jugs were flying everywhere.

The aircooled bullet penetrated six jugs (found in the sixth one). It had retained its gascheck, and it expanded to 0.859" at the widest point to 0.664" at the smallest diameter, and the recovered weight is 242 grains. It has the classic mushroom shape, and is expanded right to the base band ahead of the gascheck.

The water-dropped bullet penetrated much further, going through all eight jugs and bouncing off the newsprint to rest on a cross-member of the plastic crate. It lost the gascheck in the sixth jug, and I found small pieces of bullet along the track and laying on the benchrest. One of the jugs showed several small "exit wounds" from these pieces. The weight, without the pieces I found, is 205 grains, with expanded diameters of 0.652 x 0.583", widest and narrowest. WITH the recovered pieces, it's 303 grains total, and these pieces stayed attached until the fifth jug in the row. The baseband appears to be close to its original diameter, and this bullet exhibits a good mushroom form as well...just a smaller diameter.

OH, yeah...that eight-foot fir 2x6 was split for five feet of its length from the impact forces!

I'm calling my hot-cast softpoints a success, and I will likely be using the aircooled version for hunting this fall in Alberta. At longer distances, the impact forces will be less severe, and I expect the bullet to perform beautifully.

In casting these bullets, I find it's best to have some other job on the go so there's no urgency involved. Yesterday, I was trimming about 400 .30-06 cases....a perfect sort of job for times like this. I hate trimming MORE than sizing-and-lubing! In casting the newest batch, I just looked at my watch when the latest bullet dropped from the mould, and made note of when five minutes would be elapsed. With the mould and dipper both IN the melt, that gives ample time for everything to assume a stable HOT temperature. When the time was up, I picked up the mould, dropped in a dipperful of pure lead, and filled it with harder metal from the pot. There's plenty of time to do it, because I'm sure the lead nose will stay liquid for over a minute if not artificially cooled.

Place the mould bottom on the wet pad and watch until the sprue solidifies, about thirty seconds, then do a quick five-count with the sprue on the wet pad, and dump the bullet. These are among the crispest-looking bullets I've ever seen. Talk about perfect fill-out and razor-sharp base edges!

The charm of this method of making softpoints...WORKABLE softpoints... is that there's no messing with new equipment or techniques, and by using only stuff found in our shops, I have discoverd that I can produce excellent softpoint bullets. There are no special temperatures needed, except for running everything as hot as you can....that's an easy condition to meet.

The option of using a lighter pure-lead bullet to supply the material for the softnose by melting it in the larger-caliber mould still looks good to me. In five minutes' of sitting in the melt INSIDE the bigger mould, I'm sure the smaller bullet will be melted. One can also keep the pure-lead "nose" bullets hot somehow, which would help stabilize temperatures a bit.

This project is hereby declared a success. Now, if some unfortunate Alberta critter can be persuaded to stand still juuuuust long enuff, I will give y'all a field test report. I'm a happy rifleman/caster, today!

[StarMetal]

Bruce

Look at this. Don't know if you missed it when I posted it before. It's a RCBS 405 gr 45-70 gaschecked bullet fired out of my Browning 1886 Win carbine at a 200 lb doe that was approx. 200 yards away. It's cast from air-cooled ww's.

Joe

[BruceB]

Pretty hard to have better performance than that, Joe.

What would you estimate for impact velocity at that range, and how was the rifle zeroed?? I've been looking at the cast-bullet ballistics tables in the Lyman handbook, and thinking that about 150 yards would be a good zero distance for a 2100fps load (the 416-350 has a BC somewhere around .300 or so, I believe).

That bullet doesn't look familiar to me, so I likely did miss the photo the first time. Thanks for re-posting it.

[NVcurmudgeon]

Sounds like you have made a big breakthrough with your softpoint .416s, avoiding the two extremes often showing up with single metal CB. Guess they cast a mite slower than usual Bruceb methods, but at only one per critter, production is adequate!

[StarMetal]

Bruce,

Sorry, the muzzle velocity of that load was 1850 fps. Believe it or not I sighted the rifle for 70 yards as I was just thick woods hunting with the rifle. One day I found a salt block in the woods. I was 200 yards away from it. I rested the rifle across the seat of my Suzuki 4 wheeler, thinking that I had it sighted dead on at 70 yards, I would see how much see dropped at 200 yards. My mouth fell open. I hit the dang salt block and boy did the thing explode into a bunch of pieces. I guess 70 yds and 200 yds must be on the trajectory path, I dunno. I also don't know what the velocity of the bullet was when it hit the doe. I do know she was angling away from me so the bullet just about paralleled her whole body lenght, that is I had alot of deer to stop the bullet, which it did. When I was butchering her up I heard the bullet rattling inside her chest cavity as I was moving the almost frozen body. I reached in and picked up and said "Wow, cool". I never thought I would retrieve the bullet.

Joe

[7br]

Gosh Dagnabit. I have enough stinkin projects and here Bruce is offering up a way to blow another morning as well as the possiblity of changing my hunting plans this fall. I was going to using a muzzleloading pistol on a federal refuge, but now I may have to find a place to shake my .41 mag out.

I have a 235 gr mould for my .41 that I have tried to make softnose bullets with. I have a lee drip-o-matic that I keep filled with pure lead and an old saeco with ww. I may have to try this with the saeco at a lower temp to keep the swirling to a minimum.

One question: I used a 9mm case as a dipper before. Eventually, the spent primer came out of the case. Did you encounter this? I guess I could always plug the primer hole with a small screw.

[Abert Rim]

Bruce: Great post, great idea, great thread. Thanks for the heads up over on AR. Since I swage commercial .379 bullets for .38/55s, I have spools of pure lead extruded wire around the place. I have a core swage die and would be happy to make up some pure lead cores for you. They are .326 in diameter and any weight you want. Let me know, as I still owe you a favor for those fabulous .416 slugs you sent me several years ago.
Bill

[Mk42gunner]

One question: I used a 9mm case as a dipper before. Eventually, the spent primer came out of the case. Did you encounter this? I guess I could always plug the primer hole with a small screw.[/QUOTE]

Mark, try a military case with crimped in primer. You could use a 9mm like you have been or cut off a 5.56mm case.

Good Luck
Robert

[Headstamp]

Try this. More of a nose annealing process rather than softnose pouring though.

http://www.beartoothbullets.com/tec...ch_notes.htm/35

This man recently passed away. He did a heck of a lot of experimentation in this area. Too bad he's gone now.

Regards

[MOA Shooter]

My search for a CAST hunting bullet for the .416 Rigby is successful. Today I cast a couple dozen very nice, consistent RCBS 416-350s with pure lead noses and wheelweight shanks. Actual weight is 365, +/- 0.5 grains.

The rifle will shoot this boolit in straight lead at 2000 fps without leading, but accuracy suffers a bit, compared to WW bullets. I really want an expanding bullet for game, so I set out to create some. Attempts at hollowpointing were not very good.

MY RCBS furnace runs at 870 degrees at maximum, and I filled it with WW to within about five pounds' capacity from the top. I then suspended a steel dish of 3" diameter and 1.5" depth by wires so that its top was about even with the top of the furnace, and filled it with pure lead. This brought the actual level in the furnace almost to the top of the dish. The furnace was set at absolute top temperature.

A .40 S&W case with a wire handle added served as a dipper for the pure lead, and weighing one dipperful gave a weight of 180 grains....almost precisely one-half the the normal weight of the 416-350 in WW.

With everything heated to the max, I placed the mould in the melted lead for three minutes on EACH FILLING. By doing this, I ensured that the lead in the nose of the cavity would stay liquid until the WW was poured on top of it. So....drop a dipperful of lead in the mould, fill it with WW, and then I placed the mould on my trademark wet cloth roll, where it took about 30 seconds to cool enough for the sprue to freeze. Once the sprue solidified, I turned the mould over and cooled the sprue for a further ten seconds before opening the mould. This makes certain that the HOT bullet in there doesn't get its bottom ripped out.

Cooling like this means a long re-heating for each bullet, but it's better than holding a mould with a LIQUID sprue for several minutes! It took so long that I just made a note of the time when I put the mould in the lead to re-heat, and did other things while waiting those three minutes while the mould reheated. A very leisurely casting rate, for sure.

The rate doesn't matter, because I'll only need the soft-nose bullets for actual shots at game animals. The weight is very close to straight-WW boolits, the dimensions are identical, and therefore all practice shooting can be done with the faster-casting WW boolits. I feel confident in taking on an elk with these softpoints at 2000 or 2100 fps, because that pure lead WILL EXPAND, guaranteed, and the bullet's construction is so homogenous that I seriously doubt it will come apart.

The 416-350 has three bands, plus a "scraper" ahead of the crimp groove. Using that .40 case for a dipper gives me a bullet which is pure lead right to the crimp groove, but ALL of the shank behind the crimp groove is made up of WW metal. Perfect, I'd say.

There is NO visible joint of any kind on a well-cast example. Only the difference in color and surface finish shows where the two components meet.

I'm a happy camper and a confident hunter. This success at casting softpoints has just made up my mind that the #1 .416 Rigby is going to Alberta with me this October for elk and whitetail with cast boolits, along with the new Savage .338 (which shot UNDER 0.5" with three Barnes 225-grain TSXs at 100 yards yesterday).

You note the "accuracy suffers a bit". Is there evidence on paper targets shot that the nose is slumping flat due to accelleration down the barrel? Those holes will look like a wadcutter hole, neatly round.


MOA.

[Oldfeller]

Damn, where did I last read these exact same words written somewhere by another lover of pointy bullets who also thought they went wadcutter when accellerated too fast?

Heck, could it be the same person?


Life is stranger than fiction !!


Oldfeller

[fecmech]

Many years ago I used to hunt woodchucks with my .44 mag using 429421HP's that were cast out of 40/1 lead tin at 1400fps. Paper targets did not show the classic wadcutter hole, more like a rn. I shot some into the snow the following winter and sure enough acceleration set the nose back to where the wc shoulder was eliminated and basically turned the bullet into a rnfp. I had a machine rest at the time and the 40/1 would group approx 3-3.5"@50yds while the lino solids I used for silhouette shooting averaged 2.5"@50. I have next to no rifle cast experience, how much worse is the accuracy with say 40/1 or 30/1 mixes?? I would think at rifle velocities you would get good expansion with those mixes.