Powder Coat!

[Ian]

I gone and done it. After reading for a few hours on various methods of applying powder paint to bullets OTHER than the obvious one for which the stuff is designed, I settled on the "shake 'n' bake" method using a plastic jar with screw-on lid, some yellow airsoft bb's (what I had), and some green paint from Powder Buy The Pound.

Shook some Lee TL452-230-TC up, separated the bbs via a mesh wastebasket that I used to use for separating cob media, poured out on a foil-covered sheet, shook a bit to level them out, and baked in my bullet oven for 15 minutes at 400°F. Pulled out the tray and dumped the bullets on towel to cool for a few minutes, then ran them through a .452" push-through sizer, loaded, and went to the range with my AR-45. Yeah, I did all that tonight after work, it's easy-peasy.

The shooting was much better (if you followed my thread about poor accuracy with cast byullets in this carbine, but not as good as I'd hoped. The coating was about 95%, with some bald spots and holidays from my un-refined method of dumping from the basket to the pan, so that could have been part of it. Function was flawless, now I get to pull the rifle apart to check fouling. Will do pics later.

 

[fiver]

if you see stuff down the barrel increase the cook time. [your powder isn't fully cured]
watch it through the glass you'll see the powder kinda melt, then give it the required bake time to cure.

non-stick foil is handy.
a pair of latex gloves with some powder on the fingers makes picking the bullets up a mess free proposition.
many use hemo-stats in the lube groove.
#-5 is what your looking for on the Tupperware [cool whip uses this pete number BTW]

 

[Ian]

+1, good tips. The black .25 gram bbs are supposed to be best, but I thought I'd try what I had handy. The NS foil pretty much sucks, got some special and everything sticks to it (and I was using the correct side). What settled it for me was a utoob vid that Mark Chapman put up a year or so ago, it's the slickest method I've seen yet of any of the 'popular' powder-coaters. Here's a link to his page. I paused at one point and caught the recycle number on the bottom of the container he was using and it read #2 and worked great. Also, it was square, which isn't supposed to work either, but his bullets turned out fine. I call it the "quick 'n' dirty" method. Not the prettiest, but works dang good. The humidity in my garage was 99% at 89° this evening, I can't believe it worked at all, but my bullets had been inside and were bone-dry, as were the containers I used including 5-gallon bucket and the shaker container.

 

[fiver]

the hard shaking and static is what gets everything going and sticking.
I really think the humidity only affects certain powders [harbor freight red/black]

I know of one guy that impact coats his boolits with soft buckshot.
I talked him through graphiting his home made buck shot in his harbor freight type tumbler so it knocked the sprue down flat at the same time, and he just got to thinking 'what if'?

one thing I have seen the guy's do with their foil if they do the shake and dump method is to crumple up the foil then semi-flatten it out.
that way the bullets don't just lay on their side, they have just a couple of points holding it up.

 

[L1A1Rocker]

Looks like fun.

 

[Ian]

I ran a patch through the bore and checked the gas rings and suppressor for debris, BCG and suppressor are in great shape and there's a little bit of thin leading/antimony wash on either side of the lands. I'm pretty sure that is from the previous goes with BLL, though, since I didn't bother to clean the bore at all before shooting the PC bullets and the bolt wasn't getting dusted inside. Just in case, I re-coated the 75 or so that I didn't shoot, and that added another thousandth all the way around. After re-sizing, the grooves are about 2/3 full of PC and the tops of the microbands are getting sized now. MUCH better. I loaded about 25 of them and ran out of clean brass, dang it, but I'll shoot them this weekend and see if the accuracy improves, and if the leading gets worse, better, or stays the same.

While I was at it, I switched gears to some Lee 230TL bullets and tried Bangerjim's method of the Cool Whip container, bbs, and herbal remedy accessor....I mean surgical hemostats. Definitely found that tossing followed by rapid up and down shaking is needed to get the powder to stick well, but it works very reliably. If you drag any part of the bullet, though it wipes off the powder, so after a few are picked and powder shaken off, on goes the lid for another few up/down slams and they're all coated again. I layed these out on the troughs made by covering an oven rack with non-stick foil and they baked very well with one coat. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough thickness so I'll have to do them again...which presents the problem of the noses probably being too fat in places. Might have to rig up a nose sizer for these, which makes it pretty much a pita. Two coats and two different sizing operations is a little more than I'm willing to go through for high-volume blazing ammo. Josh's BLK bullets and good soap lube in the grooves has been working so well I'm not going to screw with it.

 

[Ian]

Feast eyes.....

 

[fiver]

this is the one place where I think the LEE t/l pistol designs are perfect.
they are somewhat designed to work with a barrel/lead barrier and this is a great work around.
especially for working around alox.

 

[Ian]

You know I love it when I can work around Alox! This really isn't a whole lot more difficult or time consuming than putting on a couple coats of tumble lube. I'm still figuring out my oven and working settings to get both sets of elements going for a more even heat. The second coat on the BLK bullets turned out much glossier and stuck a lot less to the foil than the first, probably due to me changing to a setting that got the upper heating elements going. I picked one at random, ran it through a .309" sizer (which finally got a little bit of contact on all the microbands and the base, but not on the front band at all), loaded it to max OAL and chambered it in both of my Blackouts from a magazine. Nothing but net. It appears the nose ogive has quite a taper to it in the critical area where the throat cut blends with the top of the lands, so my fears of the nose being too fat were unfounded. I'll load some of these and shoot them, too, just to see how they work.

Overall, I'm impressed with the shake/airsoft bb method the guys at CB worked out over the years, fine-tuning a non-spray, no-stand-up method of getting powder on the bullets evenly. These won't win any beauty contests, but the .45s at least are showing some promise.

 

[Missionary]

Thank you for the write up. Bought the powder a year ago and am looking to try it this summer when up north.
Have a 300 BO also so this is encouraging.

 

[Ian]

Shot 25 of the double-coated .45s for groups tonight at 25 and 50 yards, same load otherwise. Both groups were ever so slightly larger at their respective ranges than with one coat. About 10% larger. I really need to get the lead out of the carbine barrel and start over. One thing I can say about it, there haven't been any wild flyers or surprises with powder-coated bullets, they make very nice, round patterns, if still patterns. Averaging 1.6" at 25 yards and 5.5" at 50, which is about half the size of groups shot with the same bullet and load using BLL.

I'm going to try more with just one coat, but will do the Cool Whip tub and pick carefully thing instead of dump, sift, and pour out onto the foil. Still have the Blackout bullets to load and shoot this weekend just for grins. It really is nice being able to easily add .004" to the bullet diameter if needed!

 

[fiver]

might need a little load adjustment.
remember how slick this stuff is.

 

[Ian]

Coated another ~450 tonight in a couple hours using the Cool Whip tub, yaller airsoft bbs, and nodleneese pliers to pick them out. Got the temp and oven a little more refined now, they're coming out glossy and 99% perfect with one coat. Humidity is very high, but I'm not having any trouble getting the powder to adhere evenly to the bullets now, it's all about the shake technique. Also, picking and setting on the bases is preventing them sticking to the foil. Might still try parchment paper to see how that goes, supposedly it is less prone to stickage than the foil. And...I still need to try the crumple/flatten method.

 

[Kevin Stenberg]

Ian I hope my 2 tips will repay you for all you have given me.
Dragon heart on CB has been working on a double coat of PC. On the premise that 2 coats are closer to the depth of the rifling so as the bullet passes through the bore it can't cut through the PC. The first coat is baked for 2 minutes past when the PC is melted. which is long enough to melt the PC but not long enough to cure it. The bullets are cooled (recoat can be any time in the future 1 minute, 1 week, 1 month) Recoat bullets and bake a second time. From Dragonhearts searching he found out that the first coat (heated but not cured) remelts and bunds with the second coat for double the thickness. The second baking is done for whatever time you normally bake the bullets. Then size as normal.
My second tip. is from the video. You can either cut the 5 gallon bucket down so the sides are just higher than the strainer. Making it easier to drop the bullets for straining. Or forget about the bucket and strain the powder/ BB's into the tin container. Leaving the bullets to be dropped onto the baking pan. Kevin

 

[Ian]

Same principle as paper jackets, make them thick enough to just barely be cut through by the lands. I'm curious why the partial cure on the first coat...I've done two full-cure coats and the second one adhered to the first like gangbusters.

For now, I'm enjoying picking the bullets individually and setting them on the trays base-first. This gives me time to inspect each one for coating defects before baking and rules out any thin spots on driving bands. Any "defects" are returned to the container and re-shaken. Shooting them with an ES gun is obviously the best way to make the coating pretty, and just dumping them in a pile to bake is also effective enough for plinking ammo, but until I get tired of it the pick and place method is working pretty well for me.

Just got back from the "swamp" (aka my shooting range in dry months, it's halfway up a hillside but is dug out and has opened up an artesian spring that flows in wet months) and have some better results still using Titegroup. I jinxed myself in another thread by saying I wasn't going to combine Titegroup with PC bullets due to the worries over the powder eating up the coating on the bullet bases, but that's something I actually plan to test. The shooting results were nipping at the heels of jacketed and plated bullet performace...with one interesting exception: Filthy cases. I mean absolutely nasty black, flaky mess inside and out. And I was running at 95% max load with the 230TC according to both Lyman, Hodgdon, and QuickLOAD calculations.

So this PC stuff IS slippery, VERY slippery. Also, according to QuickLOAD calculations comparing favorably to actual recorded muzzle velocity with a MagnetoSpeed chronograph and using both Unique and Herco powders, the Titegroup load SHOULD have made enough pressure, long enough, to reliably lock the bolt back....but it wouldn't. Sooty cases and no lock back tells me the PC is dropping peak pressure and extending the curve down the barrel a bit. After studying this a bit, I adjusted the QuickLOAD start pressure friction factor down a bit and sure enough, it knocked a few thousand PSI off the peak pressure. I upped the charge .002" and got back where it was supposed to be with the uncoated cast bullet calculations.

I'm also happy to report the first two rounds from a cold barrel touching at 25 yards through several tests the last few days, so my lube demons are cured in this carbine.

 

[Ian]

Did I mention this powder coat is slippery?

I loaded up 25 of the Lee Blackout bullets that had two coats of PC on them and shot them through my full-length AR carbine (16" barrel, carbine gas). Same load as I use with the ACE 235 grain bullets. It wasn't until I got back home that I realized I forgot to size the bullets....oh well, they functioned 100%!

Shot a 3/4" group at 25 yards and two consecutive 1", ten shot groups at 50 yards, from a makeshift rest and using the daytime setting on my NV scope. Pretty happy about that. I see some evidence of yawing in most of the bullet holes, particularly the ones on the outer edge of the group. The real surprise came when about 1/3 of them went supersonic, which means they're gaining at least 80 fps over the cast/lubed ACE bullets.

It appears I'll have to reduce the powder charge...again. Already had to cut down to 10.4 grains when I started using a suppressor.

 

[fiver]

I will tell you before you do the experiment that titegroup will attack the powder coating.
just take a couple of loaded rounds and store them for a month or so then pull them apart.
if you can, give them a sniff as you pull them apart.
store a couple nose down and a couple nose up.

 

[KHornet]

Your color choice should have all the zombies running for cover!!

 

[Josh]

I have been trying to ignore powdercoat for a while now, Ian is making this harder to do...

 

[L1A1Rocker]

Did I mention this powder coat is slippery?

I loaded up 25 of the Lee Blackout bullets that had two coats of PC on them and shot them through my full-length AR carbine (16" barrel, carbine gas). Same load as I use with the ACE 235 grain bullets. It wasn't until I got back home that I realized I forgot to size the bullets....oh well, they functioned 100%!

Shot a 3/4" group at 25 yards and two consecutive 1", ten shot groups at 50 yards, from a makeshift rest and using the daytime setting on my NV scope. Pretty happy about that. I see some evidence of yawing in most of the bullet holes, particularly the ones on the outer edge of the group. The real surprise came when about 1/3 of them went supersonic, which means they're gaining at least 80 fps over the cast/lubed ACE bullets.

It appears I'll have to reduce the powder charge...again. Already had to cut down to 10.4 grains when I started using a suppressor.

Looking very good there Ian! Say, have I ever mentioned to you the potential benefits of swaging?