Ian
Notorious member
Sometimes the internet is wonderful, sometimes near useless, it all depends on what you're looking for and what's already been done and posted. With regard to getting good accuracy with powder-coated cast rifle bullets at normal copper-jacketed speeds, the reports are fair to dismal and only a few people have really done any serious investigation. I want answers to the fundamental questions of accuracy potential, velocity potential, fouling issues, bullet designs that work best, alloys that work best, special loading considerations, and all that. Main reason for me is I want to abandon traditional lube and shoot my cast bullets through suppressors without leading. I've concluded there is no shooting HV cast bullets through a can without leading the baffles, no matter how good the load is, but powder coating eliminates the leading completely, so I'm looking to change all my cast rifle loads over to coated bullets and this is the beginning of that investigation.
First off, a brief test of my M1A, suppressed, fed from the magazine. I tried and tried to make the Lee C312-155 shoot in this rifle and it just refused to group. I tried different alloys, powders, loaded length, even single-loaded the cartridges and never found joy. The rifle will group fairly well with the NOE XCB bullet and even better with several others, getting into the 1 MOA at 100 category with the MP 30 Sil bullet and a lot of tricks, but the Lee bullet was a no-go. Until I tried powder-coating some.
Here's a photo of some of many targets "before powder coating:
Here are the very first two groups I shot WITH powder coating...and bullets that measured 10.4 bhn (air-cooled 50-50) at 2,381 fps average velocity!
Not match-winning at 1.75 MOA @100, but first try with no tweaking and butter-soft alloy didn't do too badly fed from the magazine. The main thing to notice is how dramatically the coating alone improved the accuracy of the load. Something to this I think.
First off, a brief test of my M1A, suppressed, fed from the magazine. I tried and tried to make the Lee C312-155 shoot in this rifle and it just refused to group. I tried different alloys, powders, loaded length, even single-loaded the cartridges and never found joy. The rifle will group fairly well with the NOE XCB bullet and even better with several others, getting into the 1 MOA at 100 category with the MP 30 Sil bullet and a lot of tricks, but the Lee bullet was a no-go. Until I tried powder-coating some.
Here's a photo of some of many targets "before powder coating:
Here are the very first two groups I shot WITH powder coating...and bullets that measured 10.4 bhn (air-cooled 50-50) at 2,381 fps average velocity!
Not match-winning at 1.75 MOA @100, but first try with no tweaking and butter-soft alloy didn't do too badly fed from the magazine. The main thing to notice is how dramatically the coating alone improved the accuracy of the load. Something to this I think.
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