Anyone remember these?

Anyone ever try this?

Years ago, P&C listed moulds that took a short length of copper tubing. You were to clean and flux the inside, preheat and place in mould before casting.

It looked like a neat idea, but P&C vanished before I bought one.

My God, man, do you realize what that could lead to???!!!!

It could lead to sinful casual thoughts, that's what it can do. Shame on you for bringing it up in the first place.

So can all those BC'd G7 factored spin rate and ballistic drop path calculators you went and turned us all on to.

Those .7+ BCs really do some nice things on paper for a bullet's trajectory and energy numbers, don't you know? Leads a mind to wandering down impractical pathways, sometimes.

Shame you can't cast a boat-tail onto a cast bullet and have it really work any better than a very low velocity checkless plinker round.

Lead bullets need a large flat meplat (or to be cast very soft) to kill well. Needle pointed boat-tail lead bullets wouldn't work anyway and wouldn't do anything useful even if they did exist.

Oldfeller

"Lead bullets need a large flat meplat (or to be cast very soft) to kill well. Needle pointed boat-tail lead bullets wouldn't work anyway and wouldn't do anything useful even if they did exist"

The word 'need' puts you on a slippery slope Oldfeller. Sure the soft wides kill, but yrs back when I saw the cast slug as a hunting bullet I worked out two methods to beat the slow soft cast. I used 311644 cast otta ww alloy and given a minor heat treatment [probably amounted to annealing more like] and slumped the bullet nose in the bore. These were loaded to 2500 fps from an 06 with Alliant 22-- producing a wadcutter like hole at the 100 yd target. Otta the Hart barrel I was using at the time these made under 2 moa using LBT Blue and did not lead-- which surprised me. I carried these for a hunting season but didn't get any shooten that season. But I suspect a flat nosed 30 caliber going over 2100 at impact would be deadly. I figured I had at least 200 yds of range with that combination.

The other is the Wilke check, the center punched check mounted in the mold in a driver slot. If a guy wants the ultimate in a cast hunting bullet this is the route, albeit labor intensive. Yet you only have to make enough for hunting purposes in the end. This route is also the easiest way to get real speed otta cast and good accuracy. I did pour the noses from a ww/pure lead alloy if memory serves correct I think it was 2 Pb to 1 part ww alloy and heat treated. It's not as difficult to make these as some might think yet making the punched out check with uniformity is the challenge. That's the reason I used the 'slump the nose' slugs.

Boat tails have been done with cast-- they work fine hard with the Wilke check again used but this time as the base check. BT's add around .1 to the BC but are again too labor intensive for just shooten paper and dirt...

Ok, Aladin. I can stretch my mind and visualize a mold in a common caliber, like .308 for example. It looks just like a big 220 grain MatchKing bullet in my mind's eye.

It has a zone between the start of the nose HBC ogive form and the start of the boat-tail conical section that is a straight-walled full-diameter section. You and Waksupi are talking about putting a short piece of thin wall copper tubing in this section and casting around and through it. The ring-like copper band becomes your gas check equivalent. Is that what you mean by Wilke check?

Somebody has actually done this and it worked?

You'd have to tumble lube it or NECCO coat it because you could never run it through a lubricizer.

Wait a second. If you had a boat-tail cast bullet and did run it through a lubriciser then you would get a solid wax ring generated around the boat tail itself.

It would be a soft "wax check". You would have to use some really stiff lube or it would melt on a hot day and contaminate your powder charge, but otherwise it would keep the gas cutting at bay upon firing and it would leave a lube film on the bore for the next bullet to ride on.

The wax ring would self-destuct from spin force and gas blast upon exiting the muzzle, so it would not affect the flight ballistics any. It would have the same net effect as using a gas check mold with no gas check in place.

The straight portion of the body could have a few micro grooves cut into it sort of like little round radius bottom lube grooves so it would hold some lube as it went up the tube.

Now you don't need the piece of copper tubing any more and it becomes a simple water dropped hard cast lead bullet that you just size in a heated lubriciser like any other lead bullet.

Somebody would be selling them already if the idea was worth anything. It must not work very well.

Why? If it has been tried before then what was its downfall?

Oldfeller

See what silly questions lead to -- silly answers full of unworkable unknowns.

If you launched such a wax ringed, boat tailed cast lead VLD long distance bullet, it would have to be in a long distance shooting caliber that NORMALLY maxed out under 2000 fps. 45-70?

I can really see a 45-70 guy carrying a bullet like that to an organized shoot. First, 100 years of development in that caliber and those loads would eat him alive unless it really really worked well.

And if he won (say at a big Quigley Shoot), the BP boys would skin him alive with their Bowie knives for "cheating".

Oldfeller

"Somebody would be selling them already if the idea was worth anything. It must not work very well"

I think they call the idea the jacketed bullet and last I looked they sold quite well...

Really all chiding aside, your not looking at the factors which could determine success. Harden that bullet past the effects of obturation-- shoot slow fuels for max speed, and install that Wilke check just forward the BT for seal and you'd be home. Then cut the mold to fit the throating and you go shooten. It'd work no doubt and has from what I've been told, but 90% of those shooten cast wouldn't even bother to heat treat a bullet. Sure the whole process is DE-tale orientated, but consider the possible upside. Your costs are locked in with the mold cut and a supply of Wilke type checks. Those hi BC Sierra's to for around $25 a box and higher. Barrel/throat wear would be less at the lower than norm operating pressures of the cast slug shooten the slow fuels-- albeit with not quite the flat arc of the Sierra's. And the cast route is labor/time intensive, which could be minimized with a quality mold to some extent. But consider in 2000 rds you'd save $500 on bullets alone, add in the barrel life extention-- it's not that far removed.. Like any hobby type endeavor-- is it worth it to the individual? And that answer is just what that individual thinks is worthwild.

BT's in the 45/70. What you'd be gaining is around .1 in BC and I think with the slow speeds and hugh trajectory arc I dunno if that could be utilized but by just a few shooters. I think Dan Theodore has done such, but I'm not sure. I know NEI cut one and it's still in the display drawings I think. Now if someone geared a long BT for a 16 twist 45 caliber and used some sorta hard plastic sabot for the base wad-- those BPCR guys would be eatin' dust. Course the BPCR crowd always goes on about the superiority of BLK-- but when it comes time for some innovaton, the rule book comes out....

Granted the top rung of BPCR shooters are amazing riflemen. But the vast bulk of those shooters can't compete with a smokeless loading.

Why must you use a wilke check at all? Hardened lead seems to accept rifling OK, although your space age lead slug is cutting down on the amount of engagement quite a bit.

What would the functional difference be between a plastic sabot around the boat-tail (added cost to develop, added cost to make) and letting a lubriciser put a wax seal plug around the boat-tail?

I <think> a 100,000 rpm spin rate (twice as fast as a dremel tool spins) and the pressure/scrub forces generated by the 30,000-40,000 psi red hot powder gases as they tried to bypass the boat tail as the bullet base began to exit the muzzle would assure the wax check was thoroughly removed.

Most cases wind up getting some filler used in them too, wouldn't the filler "sandblast" add to this scrubbing action? I think your boat tail would get cleaned off pretty good so the bullet would get the normal ballistic advantage.

Still, if this has been done -- what is the information from those attempts? Who has it?

Oldfeller

A paper-patched hard cast VLD boat-tailed bullet might be worth investigating. The paper patch would be cut by the rifling and it reliably comes off on muzzle exit.

Paper patch has a good reputation for accuracy, does it not? And this trick is already proven to work at higher speeds. I remember articles written about paper patching 300 Winchester magnum rounds at full speeds with "good" accuracy from major gun writers from about 10 years ago.

Still, even if it could be done it would be a "fiddle thing" done just for amusement. It would not in any sense be a mainstream use of cast bullets.

To be mainstream, you would have to have a system that allowed you to cast them and shoot them easily.

Shame they don't make paper straws any more, that's about what you would need to make it main stream. Cut straw to .560 long, insert bullet, crumple end of straw around boat tail, twist and load.

Oldfeller

I've played with all off these ideas and all worked very well indeed. The idea of casting in a copper driving band is not new, NEI and others do moulds that take copper tubing, most are .375 as you can get 3/8" copper tube easily. I use rings of tube cut to fit into the driving band portion of a mould. A bit of hassle to use but in my .375 H&H I get moa groups at over 2600fps with 300gr. bullets. They work perfectly with plain base bullets too.

This technique should work great with .50 BMG as you can get 1/2" tube easily.

Also for my .375 I made a mould to duplicate the shape of the Sierra Game King. This worked well with the copper tubing but even better with paper patching. I ground the cherry down .010" for this and they patched up perfectly. Cast as hard as possible and fired at nearly 2800fps I have used this bullet to good effect all the way out to 1000 yards!

The only problems with either of these techniques is the hassle, especialy when you go down in size with the copper driving bands.

OK Andrew, given (since you have actually done it) the ideas work.

You have a CB community that is used to shooting lead at 1,650 fps using normal lubricants and gas checks. You have a new casting technique that is capable of replacing their current technology and actually chopping well into the realm of the jacketed bullets speeds, high BCs and killing ranges.

Apparently this has been worked out several times before and it never "took" before. Attempts at selling custom Wilke check molds never took off, NEI's custom molds didn't take off either (or were these the same initiatives?)

Anyway, they didn't take off (not commonly used).

I stopped by the hobby shop (I go by there to pick up stuff for gun projects since I can find it there) and I checked out the small round hard brass tubing they sell to construct model airplanes.

Commonly available thin wall brass tubing exists for .308 and 7mm sizes. I guess you'd cut the stuff with a little bitty cute tubing cutter.

So, the stuff exists to do this trick in common calibers. I'd suggest unless it was very easy and cheap to do it nobody will do it. Cast bullet people are innovative, but why do something the hard way when you are already equipped to do the very "cheap and easy way" 1,650-2,400 fps slugs?

Paper patching by hand takes too long and is too "finicky" for my taste. Dropping in a bit of tubing into a mold is more reasonable to me, but the tubing has got to cost about the same amount as a gas check and be about as easy to do.

Someone has to market the molds and the brass tubes at a very reasonable cost to make this idea a player. Then most traditional casters would still not like it because it really is a jacketed (half-jacketed) bullet.

We have a bias against jacketed bullets.

Casters would accept casting around/thru a paper tube pretty well. Why? Because they accept paper patched bullets as being very traditional (they are, after all, a traditional cast bullet form).

Could a piece of dry paper tubing survive the blast of heat from casting a bullet through it? Paper, once cast in place, would accept our standard lubricizer's force-lubrication action while sizing the paper and the lead.

Once again, very traditional stuff, very acceptable stuff.

You would get a very quick and easily lubricated paper patched bullet out of the process (using what we already own for processing equipment). Dry paper tubing would be cheap, too.

Paper tubes would have to be VERY consistent in wall thickness and would have to fit the mold with a slight "tension/collapse" on mold close to keep the as-cast lead mass very much centered so the resulting bullets would shoot well.

Oldfeller