I have been thinkin,never a good thing,does velocity with hard cast help or hurt.Let's use a 300gr lfn/wfn for the 44/45.Pushed at a merely 1000-1100fps it seems to me the bullet tears more than when pushed to 1200-1300fps.I gather this from CSIing animals shot at these velocities.

These loads out of carbines do the deed but the internals seem to have faced a different trauma with less tearing of organs.

All loads experienced took the game cleanly just the internal effects seem different.What have you noticed,same or different.

Very true and if you were to get the velocity up around 15-1600 fps you will have trouble finding deer because they do little internal damage, just a small hole. Faster flat points need some expansion.

That describes my experience with the factory 250 hard cast at 1350 out of a .41 on deer. Like a punch press.

Should the factories be making these heavier and/or slower?

Everyone wants to go to hard cast... Go back and read the original Lyman manuals and look at how their 90-5-5 bullets mushroomed. They were a waste of tin, but they did tremendous damage, held together and exited. Hard cast don't do that because they are too hard.

People don't like to hear it, but Elmer's 16:1 alloy worked like a champ, and the original Sharps calibers all but made the buffalo extinct long before alloying bullets to make them harder was even getting off the ground.

In my estimation, today's commercially alloyed bullets are too hard for doing anything but punching paper. Linotype shatters when it hits, and most commercial handgun bullets don't even deform when they hit a dirt backstop. That is just way too hard for use on an animal, as I see it.

Flame suit on, because I know what is coming...

Most of the bullets I cast are from wheelweights. These work very well on game.

quote:

Originally posted by MS Hitman:
Most of the bullets I cast are from wheelweights. These work very well on game.

Yes, they do indeed.....

quote:

They were a waste of tin, but they did tremendous damage, held together and exited. Hard cast don't do that because they are too hard.

Could you provide some pictures so we can see the differencein damage?

Hard boolits that fit the gun will do tremendous damage to an animal if in the right velocity range. The reason we use hard is for the tremendous accuracy we get, that is our primary reason.
But boolit toughness also comes into this so a softer but tougher boolit is very good and is a big problem when we have to start with WW's and try to figure the right stuff to add to them.
As I get to my faster guns where I need some expansion, it is a juggling act to maintain accuracy and prevent leading while getting just the proper expansion.
Then to make a new batch of alloy and match the good one again will cause a hair loss.
I went a little too far last season and the boolit worked too good, I lost almost the whole off shoulder. I used 50-50 WW's and pure plus a touch of tin, water dropped to make them tough enough to take the rifling. That just gave me a few fliers but overall tight groups.
I am going to change to 75-25 WW's and pure for the next try.
If I shoot either of these air cooled, groups get real bad with many far fliers. Water dropping them has not stopped expansion but makes them tough enough to shoot good.
To say hard is deceiving and I hate to use BHN figures as it does not tell the whole story.
Alloy composition and shear strength is more important. If I say my boolits are 18 BHN, they might be totally different from your 18 BHN.
However, with the right boolit and velocity, you can shoot game with the hardest alloy you want and 22 to 25 BHN kills game like crazy even from my .44.
Just don't expect it to work as you step up the velocity. You need to start expansion, slow the boolit in the animal, reduce the pressure wave from the flat nose that causes a large secondary wound channel that just collapses, and maintain penetration.
It really is a tall order and what makes it hard to explain is that none of us has the same alloy. Sometimes it is better to use a very hard base for accuracy but have a soft nose for expansion. Very hard to make right.
It is wrong to buy commercial hard cast and then try to get the highest velocity you can squeeze from your gun.
Leading is another problem and you can shoot pretty soft stuff without it but you can also shoot very hard alloys without leading. Leading is a boolit fit and alloy toughness issue combined with the wrong powders that can deform and skid the best alloys.
I know that doesn't help much because I can't make the same alloy twice in a row either!

Interesting for sure,I figured the hard cast traveling slower pulled on the organs until they couldn't hold and therefore tore apart which was leaving the tear look,where as the faster loads were as someone said acting as a punch press resulting in a different type of internal issues.(both equaling death)

One other thing I have noticed,or I believe what my eyes show me,is the 1000-1200fps loads show more physical reactions from quarry hit than loads that work between 1400-1600.Is it the longer it can stay inside the more momentum is transfered?These are just thoughts from experiences not science or anything else.


bfr I am working on beginning to cast and your post on matching alloys was a good one to cause some one to think.Have you noticed a difference in types of wheelweights and alloy hardness,say stick-on verses clamp on?And from your wealth of knowledge what BHN and velocities do you notice cause leading?Is there a minimum and maximum?Please share some appreciate it.

A revolver boolit acts the opposite of an arrow. Drive a slow, heavy arrow through a deer and they don't know they were shot sometimes and continue to feed. Speed the heavy arrow up so some shock is added and they take off but still die.
Shoot a deer with a slower boolit and they are shocked but push it through too fast and it is like when you cut yourself shaving, don't know until you see blood.
It is not momentum transfer, momentum gives penetration. Energy dump is wrong too.
After shooting many, many deer I figure the flat nose will do a lot of damage but when you make it too fast there is a pressure wave from the nose that forces tissue out of the way from the path of the boolit. All you get is a small primary hole, like poking a sharp stick in the deer. The flat nose starts to act like a hard round nose at any speed. If something vital is not cut, you can lose the deer even though it dies somewhere.
What is needed is to keep all tissue close to the boolit nose so it is destroyed by cutting and energy. Energy dissipates quickly and turns to heat, etc so you need close contact with what is hit. We can't compare the revolver at 1100 fps with a rifle at 3000 fps so different rules apply. You can't hit a deer behind the shoulder and have hydraulic pressure turn the brain to mush, so our work must be done in close proximity to the boolit.
The size of the animal can change this because a huge animal with tough tissue and bone will slow the boolit so it starts to work before it exits. It was called "dwell time". In large animals the energy is bled off at the start, then boolit work takes over. Stop the boolit too fast before it works because of over expansion and you have a problem.
There is no perfect bullet/boolit for all game and velocities, each must be different.
Now increase the size and weight of a revolver boolit without changing velocity, penetration and damage increases dramatically.
For WW's, stick on weights are almost pure lead while clip on weights contain antimony, tin and other elements. Don't mix them when smelting. Keep the stick on weights for a muzzle loader or to change the WW alloy for the velocity and use.
Normally I use water dropped WW boolits for all shooting but for super accuracy I add antimony and tin and water drop them. My mix is 20# of WW's, .4# of tin and .6# of antimony, alloyed in at 600* with Bill Ferguson's flux.
I have to go the other way and soften boolits for my 45-70 revolver yet I still water drop them to toughen them.

Interesting thread!

So as a fairly new cast bullet shooter I have have a question. I recently put together two loads for my .45 colt. The first is a 265 grain WFN at 1400 fps. The second is a 300 grain LFN at 1200 fps. The bullets are from Beartooth Bullets.

I'm assuming that both bullets should shoot through deer/black bear sized animals at ranges under 40 yards. That being the case, I had settled on the 265 grain load, thinking that the higher velocity and wider metplat would lead to more damage. But from what I'm reading here, should I be slowing this load down?

Pete

From the testing I have done, on both live game and newsprint; 1,200 fps is the optimal velocity for cast bullet loads. Most of my hunting loads these days run around 1,200 to 1,200 fps.

quote:

Most of my hunting loads these days run around 1,200 to 1,200 fps.

Don't leave much for margin of error, do you?

No, it's a precision thing. Meant 1,000 to 1,200 fps.

quote:

Originally posted by MS Hitman:
No, it's a precision thing. Meant 1,000 to 1,200 fps.

Makes a bit more sense now......

quote:

So as a fairly new cast bullet shooter I have have a question. I recently put together two loads for my .45 colt. The first is a 265 grain WFN at 1400 fps. The second is a 300 grain LFN at 1200 fps. The bullets are from Beartooth Bullets.

I'm assuming that both bullets should shoot through deer/black bear sized animals at ranges under 40 yards. That being the case, I had settled on the 265 grain load, thinking that the higher velocity and wider metplat would lead to more damage. But from what I'm reading here, should I be slowing this load down?

Either should work but I think I would feel better with the 300 gr.
Remember that velocity and muzzle energy does not kill as good as boolit work.

Pete: Your logic is correct. The 300 grain bullet will penetrate deeper because of greater sectional density and smaller meplat of the LFN compared to the WFN. However, on deer/black bear, a .45 265 gr. WFN @1400 fps has enough penetration to reach the vitals from just about any angle. The larger meplat of the WFN will cause a larger wound diameter than the LFN but penetrates less because the larger frontal area of a WFN impeds penetration.
On page 102 of "Jacketed Performance With Cast Bullets" by Veral Smith a 44 LFN at 1200 fps causes a 1" diameter wound channel while a 44 WFN at 1400 fps causes a 1 3/8" wound diameter.
You can find the penetration depth of most loads by googling Linebaugh Penetration Test. Another source of information is "Beartooth Bullets Technical Guide" by Marshall Stanton.
The whole concept of balancing wound diameter and penetration by varying meplat diameter is best described by Ross Seyfried in "Ultimate Cast Handgun Bullets"(Guns and Ammo Oct. 1993) when he said "Like shifting gears in the transmission of a truck...." page 60.

Very interesting. I've been working some loads with 158gr LRNFP for my GP100. I noticed heavy leading after firing the loads near the max with H110 and accuracy was great up until 17gr of powder. After that it went completely out the window. I will be working with some 180gr gas check bullits too. This thread gives me something to think about. I guess velocity isn't everything.

What do you guys recommend for the fastest removal of leading?

Also, do the rules being discussed with these cast bullets also hold true for jacketed bullits concerning better performance from slower velocities?

Curtis see if you can find a Lewis Lead Remover.

Those Curly Kate pot scrubbers work if you wrap some around an old bore brush. Make sure you buy the copper ones. Some of those type things are copper plated steel.

quote:

Originally posted by bfrshooter:
I used 50-50 WW's and pure plus a touch of tin , water dropped to make them tough enough to take the rifling.

If I say my boolits are 18 BHN, they might be totally different from your 18 BHN.

Do you think my 18 BHN, as indicated by my Veral Smith's lead bullet tester, is 'totally different' than yours cause I tend to use a smidge rather than a touch?

What other vector values do you distrust? RPM? PSI? Volts? Amps?

It could be. Too many different alloys can read the same BHN. I will never figure it out, lead is strange stuff and none of us has the equipment or knowledge to test what is in the stuff.
Mostly is is what is in WW's across the country or how many times the metal was recycled. There is no set standard for a WW alloy, if it balances tires it is good to go.
Now there are all of those stick on weights added to the mix. And then there are the zinc weights.
All the makers care about is not letting the weight bend in use.
They used to be close but with all the anti lead whakos out there, there is no way of knowing what you are making boolits from.
Did you know the billions of tons of WW's along highways is poisoning the earth? Darn funny I have only found one or two my whole life. They don't seem to fly off so I can find them unless there is a real bad accident and even then they seem to like the wheels better.
So can you come up with 20, 30 or 1000 alloys that all read 18 BHN---why sure! And since tin has almost no hardening properties, go ahead and add your smidge.
Bet my touch is equal to your smidge!

Hardness is a characteristic of a material, not a fundamental physical property. So if my boolits at 18 BHN work just fine for my hunting handloads, what does it matter what the exact chemical composition is? As long as the primary ingredient is Pb, I'm happy.

It seems what you're saying, to use an analogy, is that 400 horsepower from a Ford engine is somehow 'totally different' from 400 horsepower from a Chevy engine.

Also, what does it matter if a hunting handload leads the bore? So few rounds are fired as to make that point moot.

But how do you gear the 400 horsepower, for torque or speed?
I do not want leading in my bores beyond what the next boolit shoots out and might go a year without cleaning. A few shots is not an excuse. The boolit must be accurate from shot one to shot 2000.
Yes the alloy is important no matter what BHN says. I don't like those numbers and refuse to depend on them. They are like the Greenhill formula for twist.

you can have two identical bullets from the same mold, the same bhn and one be fragile and one hold together well. bhn is a guideline and not gospel.

quote:

Originally posted by tradmark:
you can have two identical bullets from the same mold, the same bhn and one be fragile and one hold together well. bhn is a guideline and not gospel.

If the 2 bullets are from the same mix then I diagree with your statement, but you said from the same mold, meaning the bullet mix may be different

yes, basically what i mean is different mixes. however, i've had instances when i had a .475 and also with my 45/70 hardcast rounds that were from the same manufacturer, same supposed lots and there were some really bum bullets that cracked up instead of holding together when they should've. perhaps one hog had a supershoulder and the other didn't despite being within 20lbs of each other, hell i don't know but i know that for what ever reason sometimes you can have a bum bullet in the bunch. hardcasts are not immune to it. i've seen 3 massive failures in the last 3 years where all the other bullets from the box appeared to have performed adequately. what was wrong with the one or two, who knows.

Cast them yourself and you will know that all are alike. I've used straight wheel wieghts water droped and have never had a problem. When buying hard cast or any type of bullet the quality controll of the maker is not always known to the consumer

Hard cast is really a misnomer. Tough would be a better description.
Brittle is just no good for anything but even 17 BHN can be considered hard as long as the alloy is tough enough to take the rifling and not over expand.
I have done a lot of work with light loads using fast powders and found 28 to 30 BHN was out shooting everything else but yet none were brittle. They just resisted deformation and took the rifling. The problem is that I can not tell you what is actually in the alloy. My WW's might be far different then what you have so that adding antimony and tin will give you something different.
So if you tell me 22 BHN works, how can I say you are wrong?
All of these numbers like ME, BHN, Greenhill, etc, are someones idea of coming up with a baseline. 99% of the time they do not work.
Only one thing works and that is to shoot enough animals and see what is happening. Shooting a couple of animals and being lucky does not qualify. It is so easy to drop an animal in it's tracks and proclaim the thing you used is the answer. You need more statistics. If the next one runs 200 yards and the next is lost, you need to lose confidence and change.