My bullets have flashing....

[L1A1Rocker]

I've been thinking about getting one of these for testing bullets. . .
http://www.officer.com/product/10041159/-bullet-test-tube

http://r2.officer.com/files/base/image/OFCR/2007/08/16x9/640x360/bullettesttube_10041158.jpg

The "wax" is re-usable. Just melt it and pour it back into the tube to use it again.

 

[358156 hp]

Drift Alert!!! Women and children to the lifeboats!

Have you considered epoxying or crimping a steel BB in the nose of your cast hollowpoint bullets to facilitate expansion? This might help with the feeding cycle in a BO by protecting the nose cavity from deformation, and still stay together through a suppressor.

ETA: Early handgun hunters used to thread brass roundnose screws in the noses of commercial rifle bullets to make them expand more reliably in handgun length barrels. Al Goerg referred to them as "bone breaker specials". This may be usable too.

 

[Brad]

But not putting the BB in the mould before casting. The air cavity below the initiator, the BB in this case, is important. Let the BB have a space to move into and start the expansion.

This does mean we need a pretty large HP.

 

[358156 hp]

But not putting the BB in the mould before casting. The air cavity below the initiator, the BB in this case, is important. Let the BB have a space to move into and start the expansion.

This does mean we need a pretty large HP.

Yes. The air pocket behind the BB is critical, a cast in place BB would act much like a FMJ. The screw idea may be more practical since you can get some pretty small screws, or steel shot from/for a shotshell could be used, and you can get them in some pretty small sizes too.

You guys are going to force me to buy a 300BO yet!

 

[freebullet]

Interesting results, like they say 1pic1k words.

I think it needs more airspace too. It's a tough journey in through the feed ramp of an ar but, looks like a bigger hole or thicker strip could be help.

To further add to the expert drift attempts on your thread I'll spit ball another idea, spurred from your tests. What if you took a thin peice of tube(like small brake line tube) wrapped it in foil to maintain the hollow cavity place it preheated in the mold & pour the bullet around it. If you wanted a tougher bullet you could back fill the nose with another alloy. If the tube had splits in one end or the other you could adjust how much expansion you wanted with some fine tunning.

 

[Brad]

Everyone here is a certified enabler.

I enjoy my 300BO very much.

 

[Ian]

You'd enjoy it a lot more if you had a can. Just sayin'.

Some of the ideas about putting hard metal in the bullets may be crowding the line of AP regulations, so we have that to consider, too.

 

[Brad]

How small a BB does air soft make? Something less compressible that lead to initiate expansion.

 

[freebullet]

Metal (brass,steel, alu)less than 25% of Bullet weight is not considered ap iirc. I researched that at some point but, don't recall exact specs. It's on the atf website.

They make little metal beads that are hollow through the middle in infinite sizes. Just like the little plastic ones you string on fishing line for spinner baits.

http://www.mudhole.com/Hollow-Metal-Beads

 

[Ian]

Ok, I'm officially calling off the testing due to some light baffle strikes.

The problem seems to be a combination of the hole I drilled through the nose, and some just-out-of-the-oven, soft bullets, and the kick in the shorts that 6.4 grains of Titegroup was giving these. The nose seems to have slumped pretty badly, as you will see from the rifling marks way up the nose on these. The noses before firing are about .001-2" smaller than bore diameter but have even land marks all around after firing.

Bullet on the left is just as I prepped them for firing. It rolled a little but the hole is right in the middle.

Next bullet from the left is the first one I fired. It went through carpet, a glossy magazine, 8" of packed, wet cardboard, the side of an old brittle 5-gallon bucket full of crumb rubber mulch, almost going out the other side but stopping short. The nose and main body of the bullet were found close together, within an inch or so. Shattered pieces of bucket the size of quarters followed the bullet and were all around where it stopped, so it must have opened up a pretty good cavity in the mulch for those pieces to make it nearly all the way across to the other side of the bucket.

The next one over is the second shot, I moved the cardboard stack over a little for a fresh place to shoot, but lined the shot up with the golf-ball sized hole in the bucket from the previous shot to eliminate the plastic as a factor in expansion. This one made a decent hole in the cardboard pack, but turned in the mulch and punched out the bottom of the bucket and into some sand a couple inches where I dug it out. Why it didn't expand at all I cannot explain, but look at the land marks and nose set back.

The last one smacked the second-to-last baffle of my silencer and you can see where the base raked the powder coating off on the aperture. Opposite the struck baffle, on the end cap hole, was more scuffing that showed the bullet yawed coming out. All the holes in the first layer of cardboard showed slight yawing, the last shot the worst. Due to the yaw and strike (I guess) the last shot broke up in the wet pack, making quite the shredded hole and dumping the nose and both halves of the body into the cardboard. The base continued through and into the bucket of mulch (through the little window hole in the side of the bucket) and made it about halfway through it, seeming to trace a straight path.

So I've managed to make the most unpredictable bullet of all time, thanks to the slump-o-matic nose.

 

[Brad]

Hold on a second here. You are telling us the safety of your can is more important than our need to know?
Strikes me as baffling......

 

[Ian]

I could shoot them without the silencer to see how they group, but I will bet it would be abysmal anyway so there's not much point. It appears that I'm back to square one on this, and looking at how the split halves behave I'm pretty non-plussed. It's difficult to get the halves to go opposite directions, it seems one side just follows the other and the only real separation occurs due to the rotation of the bullet shearing them apart slightly.

Obviously if they hit something hard like bone they'll come apart, or if they were pushed faster, but I'm trying to get them to open up in soft tissue at low speed.

 

[JWFilips]

Ian,
I think your problem is that "red candy apple coating" messing up your cast bullets

 

[fiver]

hollow point time.
with a filled point to insure expansion
I been going over this with OSOK over on the boolits site with his low velocity 38 special snub nose loads.
if you want predictable controlled low velocity expansion that's your only bet.
we even had a little tool built to slightly cut petals into the interior portion of the nose.
right now he has some '2 petal makers' off getting tested in some ballistic gel.


they make steel shot clear down to at least size 7.
the smallest I have here is size-4

 

[freebullet]

Hold on a second here. Strikes me as baffling......

I see what you did there...funny


If I had any precision machine capabilities I'd make a dual pour mold to solve this issue. I can envision it but, have no way to make it.

If ya had the body poured like a standard deep hollow point but, only poured up just past the riding point remove the pin & pour another alloy for the nose you could have pointy or round noses(or even flat) that feed but, expand reliable. So the nose section is poured into a hollow point like cavity in the body alloy. Almost providing a mechanical lock between alloys. Could make soft body & hard tip for low velocity or vise versa for high speed.

 

[358156 hp]

Some varmint hunters swage their own jacketed bullets with an oversized cavity they fill with things like mineral oil or petroleum jelly, then they swage the nose shut to prevent leakage.

Hmmm... I wonder if melted bismuth, or another alloy would bond with the lead in a cast hollowpoint. Cast the bullet, then reheat it in an oven before filling the nose. A different thought to two-alloy bullets. Or cast a hollowpoint bullet, but don't cut the sprue, and remove the hollowpoint stem and pout melted pure lead down the hollowpoint channel. The break the sprue, drop the bullet, and cleanup the nose after it cools.

Just throwin' random thoughts out there. Wild thoughts. Crazy thoughts. I must not be getting enough sleep again.

 

[358156 hp]

Hey! simultaneous posting. It's an omen. I should have hit "send" earlier instead of running the thought through my head over and over.

 

[Ian]

I see swaging a jacket with a big nose void and skivved ogive working. I also see a cast cup point HP with a hard nose full of Cerrosafe working as well. I need to study how BarnesX bullet points are made see if that can be copied in malleable lead alloy, with a plastic ballistic tip to initiate expansion.

 

[freebullet]

Yep...jax a different game entirely.

Maybe a solution. You'd mentioned displeasure & inconsistent performance from the smaller cavity hp's that feed well. What if instead of a small round HP you used a t shaped pins. Might give the feed benefit of small HP & the expansion of large hp's. Mihec's penta pins release fine, bet a tapered t pin could be made to as well.

 

[fiver]

they later added the Tip after some failed attempts at getting the bullet to open every time.
I'm pretty sure others cut their nose to pre-program it then fold everything back into shape.
that's how I do it with my heavy jacketed 44's I want top open 100% of the time.
I don't even bother with a hollow-point for them any more, just a big flat nose and an annealed pre-cut jacket.

this pointed cut tip stuff is one time that a lyman type sizer and a lathe is pretty handy to have on hand.