http://www.nennstiel-ruprecht.de/bullfly/fig2.htm

Check out this link for a pic of an orange slug going supersonic. Note the air disruption after the cannelure.

One of my reasons for running a 30-210-HBC-A Lee run is to acquire inexpensive spitzer molds for testing. Test what? Removing the lube grooves and comparing the flight characteristics.

Yeup. No lube used as it's commonly seen. Remember the moly coated threads of long ago per Shooters??

Aladin,

If you left the front "engagement" driver band wide (minimizing the number of unused lube grooves) wouldn't you get a bullet that could be shot either normally lubed or shot lubeless with no ill effect?

Point being, why do you have to cut away the lube grooves just to do your experiments?

Look at one of the brand new, latest Barnes X bullets and you will see exactly this same format. Their unused "lube grooves" are intended to cut down on engraving friction between the solid copper slug and the barrel walls and really have nothing to do with lube at all.

Take that same outline and slap a gas check on the back of it and you get a HBC hypersonic that the empty lube grooves don't affect the flight characteristics because they are well inside the sonic cone. Perhaps Barnes did some design work for you, in other words.

Oldfeller

aladin, why don't you get that mould made, take the lube grooves out, cast some bullets, then do an at home electro-plating with copper? Same difference as with moly except different metal and different application of said metal. I don't think the turbulence those grooves make will amount to a whole hill of beans. Just my two cents

Joe

I wouldn't know about how the new Barnes X shoot (or the old solid ones either) as they are $20/50 style (real pricey) to shoot. All I know is when I saw one of the new boxes on a dealer's shelf a few days ago and then looked at the pictures on the display I said to myself "That sure looks like Aladin's HBC bullet".

Apparently I was pretty close, anyway.

If they can shoot them with empty grooves at high speeds without blowing their BC to the dickens, maybe you can too for your experiments. That's all I mean by the comment in any case.

Now, to Barnes X bullet lovers everywhere, I mean no offense with what follows. Take what follows with a grain of salt and a <g>.

Some people do love their X bullets for hunting because of the way they always open up with four nasty little cutter flutes and leave a cusinart style hole in the critter.

They certainly are effective, and at higher speeds (the new Ultra supermagnum guns) they are really the only game in town as all other constructions blow up completely at the upper upper speeds they can so easily reach.

A Barnes X simply sheds its petals at the higher hyper-speeds (four separate little wound paths at a 45� angle) and the remaining blunt expanded brass stub makes a large meplat-style channel hole all the rest of the way through the critter.

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<g> --

Hey Barnes guys, try this trick and post me back saying if it works or not. Stick a few of those new Barnes X in your lubriciser and fill up the lube bands and inject yourself a flat based wax check that will temporarily cover your boat tail (while it is still in the barrel, anyway).

Don't worry, the wax check will blow off completely at the muzzle blast gas-bypass event as the boat tail exits the muzzle edge, so you don't have to worry about it sticking around on your boat tail to screw up your long distance BC numbers.

The wax check will just hang around long enough to completely stop gas by-passing the bullet in the bore just like it does on our softer lead slugs when we use it. This will be helpful to you since the intentionally slightly smaller diameter of a Barnes bullet tends to always leave a tiny bit of air between the bullet body and the bore wall which lets some hot gas shoot by.

(and this is done intentionally, Barnes is afraid of excessive pressures due to heavy engraving or any possible bore wall/bullet interference on firing -- solid copper doesn't slug down all that well and tends to act like a stopper jacking the pressures way up until the copper does finally yeild. This is also why Barnes wants you to back off the bullet seating depth to at least 0.060" from the rifling to let everything have a good running start before the stopper-time occurs)

The residual lube film on the bore walls will surely cut down on the hideous heavy copper fouling that sometimes was attributed to the solid copper Barnes construction style AND you will likely pick you up some free fps using this trick as you don't have that wonderful copper to steel drag coefficent at high engraving pressures (and you will have actually sealed off the bore for once, too).

If it shoots better (more accurately) then you will have set our collective cast bullet brain cells to twirling as that means you can actually have a cast-in-place boat tail on a cast bullet. Plus you will know how to get better groups, much easier cleaning and increased for free higher speeds out of your favorite super high speed long distance copper cuisinart bullet.

(you can tell, I am a fan of the expensive Barnes X bullets and how they expand with jaggedy edges)

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Me, I think I'd rather still have a nice long gas check shank on your HBC cast bullet as I need the scraping action to help scrape out the hard powder fouling build up from my mil-surp powders shot to shot to shot to shot. Need some good shank room to fill up with scraped-off black powder fouling.

This is a much bigger irritant than leading in my 8mm guns anyway. IMR 5010 is a second cousin to holy black in the bore fouling aspect.

(it also produces a faint smoke cloud on firing, too)

Oldfeller

Nothing's ever new. Back in the early Dark Ages, Nosler cut a relief groove over the partition to reduce drag and prevent the rifling from having to compress the web.