Barrel Life with Cast bullets in Rifles?

[JSH]

Brad, I recall reading that, seemed like Mr Calfee noticed this some years back.
I clean my 22 and 45 bullseye gun after every session. It is interesting to see the first two or three out of a cold dirty bore be out of a group and then it shrinks by the last five
I got just stupid anal on my 22RF stuff for a long time. I still have things I do that folks think I am nuts.
I will say a lot of my thoughts on the rimfires I have used with my CB guns with good results.
We get so much in our heads of what is right and what is wrong. If a person has a regiment of cleaning,loading or what ever, and thinks it gives them an edge, it probably does on the mental side. If you have faith in a gun and load you WILL shoot better.

Some years back I grabbed a couple of the wrong cartridge boxes. Match was to far from home to run back and get the right one. I proceeded to go ahead and shoot, just knowing it was a total waste of time. Well the scores reflected that.
I later shot the remainder of that ammo which was a test lot. Guess how it shot. Lights out bug hole groups. A load I still use to this day.

One other thing that I didn't see touched on. Barrel cleaning. I am one on the thoughts that excessive cleaning does more harm than good at both ends of the barrel. Not to say that one should not clean on a regular basis.

My proven cast guns, get maybe a nylon brush, then Kroil allowed to set for a few minutes, then a clean dry patch. Storage say through the winter they get another wet patch of lube in the bore.

My 22RF more often than not only saw a patch worm the last 20 years on my 52's and 75's.

Jacketed. I myself am sold on wipe out. I have two hunting rifles that prefer a fouled bore. So before season my test shots are done, then a dry patch and that's it till the end of the season.
Probably not necessary for deer, keeps me under 1"@100 easily and my confidence level is not bothered.

I have seen guys clean rifles like they were trying to prime an old pitcher pump. Makes me cringe.
Jeff

 

[Brad]

I know that many here don't clean the bore on cast shooters very often, like maybe every 5 years. I clean the cylinders and chambers on revolvers but unless I notice an issue the bore is untouched.

I learned a bunch reading the article of Bill Calfee. He wrote in a manner that made it easy to follow.

 

[Ian]

I've pondered the dry .22 rimfire thing for a while. When I was a kid I remember the un-plated CCI stuff would collect a lot of pocket lint, but not anymore. Maybe a nose dip in some really thinned-down BLL would help?

 

[JWFilips]

My .243 Win Ruger 77V was retired in the late 1980's because of major throat wear. I used to "race" the rifle back then with a quest for that illusive 4000 Fps! ( 65 grain serrias with a stout load)
Then I picked it up again a few years ago to try to shoot cast bullets. Gave the crunchy throat a good going over with JB bore paste then started shooting cast bullets! I can say that I have turned in some tighter cast bullet groups then I ever had of jacketed. The rifle shoots cast like a dream! This from a rifle I had given up on!

 

[freebullet]

Can't remember where but, I'd read about super soft lead causing premature throat wear when driven slow. I've done such quite a good bit and haven't noticed anything I'd call excessive wear.

The only barrel I've worn out is a 270 that the throat was quite eroded on when I got her.

I would say any high power rifle caliber is more likely to erode the throat than actually wear out the lands or grooves.

 

[fiver]

the 45/45/10 lube come about partially because I was looking for a lube that would duplicate the old 22lr and paper patch dip lube but with more modern ingredients.
I had just settled on a mix of cooked off JPW and bees-wax mixed 3-1 when J.D approached me with the problem of getting his 50-50 mix of jpw and alox to dry.
I explained the solvent problem to him and what I was doing at the time and that if he wanted it to go to a working solid of wax alox and carnuba then cooking off the solvents and mixing in the alox while it was all still hot would work.
cutting it with more mineral spirits would help it all cool down and turn solid quicker was the second hurdle we faced.
I had been using a 50% mix with the JPW after cooking everything down which comes out to about 30% [still do] but he messed around with the mix percentage to get the lowest practical amount.
the lube almost got named 30/30/30 or 33/33/33 because of the solvent additive.

anyway the 3-1 mix worked out to make a nice thin coating that dried like a shell but could also be just warmed to about peanut butter consistency and used to fill a lube groove instead of melted and used as a coating.
it mimicked the old wax coating the 22's used to have pretty good, since when it dried in the cup it turned into a super hard solid puck, even harder than solid beeswax or paraffin alone would.

 

[Rick]

Can't remember where but, I'd read about super soft lead causing premature throat wear when driven slow. I've done such quite a good bit and haven't noticed anything I'd call excessive wear.

According to Dick Casull it's high velocity and too soft an alloy that prematurely wears the forcing cone.
.

 

[Brad]

Is it the velocity Rick or the pressure? I think I read where people got in trouble with the 454 because they used "soft" .452 jacketed bullets designed for 45 Colt with max pressure. The bullets seated up under pressure and caused wear in the forcing cone.

 

[Brad]

ALSO ANOTHER IMPORTANT FACT IS, THE FASTER THE VELOCITY AND THE SOFTER THE BULLET, THE QUICKER THE FORCING CONE AREA IN THE BARREL WILL WEAR OUT.

Right off Freedom Arms website. Interesting they mention velocity, not pressure.

 

[Rick]

Lot's of folks got in trouble using 45 colt jacketed bullets at 454 pressures, it literally peels the jacket off the bullet. What Mr. Casull was referring to with high velocity and forcing cone wear was with cast bullets.

 

[Rick]

ALSO ANOTHER IMPORTANT FACT IS, THE FASTER THE VELOCITY AND THE SOFTER THE BULLET, THE QUICKER THE FORCING CONE AREA IN THE BARREL WILL WEAR OUT.

Right off Freedom Arms website. Interesting they mention velocity, not pressure.

Uh . . . Hhmmm . . . yeah, that's what I have been saying.
.

 

[Brad]

And I stand corrected.

 

[fiver]

y'all gotta remember Dick only does high velocity.
he uses blue dot in his 9mm's and has upgraded recoil springs in all of his Pistols.
his idea of soft is about 15 BHN.

I got him to shoot most of a magazine of my 3.2grs of Bulls-eye load in my 9mm Para last fall.
I don't wanna quote his exact words here but they were something along the lines of him already having a 22 short somewhere in the house.
made me laugh, but I asked just how fast they needed to be going to make it all the way through the paper.

 

[Eutectic]

ALSO ANOTHER IMPORTANT FACT IS, THE FASTER THE VELOCITY AND THE SOFTER THE BULLET, THE QUICKER THE FORCING CONE AREA IN THE BARREL WILL WEAR OUT.

I still remember before the .454 Casull when my mouth fell open with Casull's "triplex" loads for his hopped up .45 Colt loads! I think he had Bullseye, 2400, and Unique stacked and compressed! So Lamar has pegged ol' Dick. He likes to test the elastic limits of alloy steels!
My early years at the refinery had us dealing with a lot of old technology tongue and groove joints. We eliminated these flanges, connections whenever we could going to spiral wound gaskets or ORJ (octagonal ring joint) The common gasket for tongue and groove was steel clad asbestos. BUT a high pressure localized leak (especially with hot gas vapors or steam would cut across the tongue and/or groove... This required the flanges or joint piece to be replaced.... We couldn't always do this. Shutting down a big unit is $$$$$$$$$$ per hour downtime. So we improvised... If pressures and heat were low we could fix a "cut" with a soft lead gasket. High pressure and hot would cut right past the lead. We found the best temporary repair until a turnaround was an annealed copper gasket if the process wasn't corrosive to it..

So the only way I see soft lead creating a problem in the above quote is if Dick's scorching gas cuts and leaks around said soft lead.

Localizing an area with leaking high pressure gas (like our gun powder) will cut like an acetylene torch! How many of you have had a primer cup split on the radius and got a nice cut into your bolt or breech face??

Pete

 

[fiver]

he had a round called the 450 express before the 454 casull.
it was basically an elongated 45 win mag or a slightly longer rimless 45 colt that run at high pressure.
it was put into a revolver he partnered with north American arms to get built.
I had one of the early ones for quite some time and had the 450 and the 45 win mag cylinder I never could find a spare 45 colt cylinder.
I kept hitting Dick up about getting one made but I think he was still sore about the whole affair after all these years and I finally ended up selling the revolver.
I initially had to make my own cases since the run of brass had long since been snatched up.
so I started by turning the rims off of some 454 cases then trimming to length to fit the cylinder.
I finally found a box of NAA marked ammo but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on any of them.

funny story on the ammo too.
back when I was casting and selling bullets at our local gun shows I always had a booth next to the same
guy and his wife and of course we got to talking all the time about this and that and got to be fairly good but infrequent friends.
when I quit the shows and moved to Idaho they also moved up here but about a year later but by then we had lost contact so I had no idea.
I run into them working at a little gun show in Wyoming about 8-9 years later and caught up on what we had been doing
it turned out they only lived a few miles away.
he asked what I was looking for and I told him about a few things I was working on, then mentioned the 450 express.
he says hang on a second.
he digs around under the pile of stuff behind him for a bit then turns around and puts a 50 count MTM type box with shrink wrap and a NAA sticker on the side up on the table.
I was like you gotta be kidding me, what do you want.
40$
sold, how long have you had these?
since they were new, I sold the revolver to Doc about 3 years back.
I chuckled and told him I had bought the revolver from Doc about 3 years back.

 

[KHornet]

Have never run a patch thru a 22RF in all of my 78 years.
Don't intend to start now!

Paul