Soft nosed hardcast bullets

[AtlLaw]

Over the years I've read several articles on casting bullets from 2 alloys, the objective being a soft nosed -expanding - hard cast bullet.  the softer alloy is poured (a measured amount) into the mould, followed by filling the rest of the mould with the harder alloy.

I've always been a proponant of expanding projectiles and as I am just getting into cast bullet shooting (I'm a late bloomer  ) this seems like a pretty good idea to me.     Has anybody tried it?

[Dee]

AtlLaw, I have been casting and shooting my own bullets since about 1970 or 71. I too have read the articles, and have even tried the technique of pouring them you described. My conclusion? A pain in the bohind with VERY limited positive results. The soft lead almost always smeared off on contact causing dramatic bullet weight loss.
The expanding bullet vs the hard cast kill similarly, and yet differently. Both have penetration, while one (the hard cast) will usually out penetrate the expanding one.
For pistol and revolver, I have cast everything from 9mm (yuk!) to 45acp and 45LC. In rifle, from 30 cal to 45cal.
My final analysis is it wasn't worth the effort on the soft nose.
For 3030, I shoot a 170 grain round or flat nosed bullet of wheel weights and a gas check at 2400fps with no leading, and it is a bone breaker in the shoulders.
I long ago abandoned anything in handgun below 38 caliber, as I consider them (9mm) inferior as a fight stopper with personal experience as a reference. SO! I mold a 158 grain SWC in, once again wheel weights for EVERYTHING 38 cal. pistol or rifle. Once I surpass 1100fps, without a gas check some leading is going to occur. Some will say no, but I have my doubts. It's their call.
For 45acp, a 200 grain truncated bullet, 45LC a SWC in 250 grain, and in 4570 a 400 grain SWC. This last bullet I will load to about 1500, and experience no or almost no leading. Who the hell knows why, but I like the load. WITH A RECOIL PAD! In an 1895 Cowboy, I will take on anything on the planet with this load.
Doubt I helped, but that's my experience. Go for a good shot placement, and break some bones with a plain ole hard cast.  Critters and folks don't get far when their frame is all busted up. Good luck.

[wmurrell]

On another forum ( about casting) a guy there was using a buckshot pellet in the nose of the mould and pouring the harder body over it. I have not tried it yet but sounds interesting

[Dee]

On another forum ( about casting) a guy there was using a buckshot pellet in the nose of the mould and pouring the harder body over it. I have not tried it yet but sounds interesting

I have tried that one too. Placement of the pellet is crucial, as if it gets off center, the bullet is thrown out of balance. If the lead is too hard, the bullet shatters. If it is too soft, it over expands, and usually comes apart. There are many attempts in making something do something it was never intended to do.
It is like saddling a cow. Yes, you can ride the cow, but a horse is better. You may put a collar on a coyote, and call him Spot, however he will still eat you chickens and sheep.
We also used to put cooking oil in cast hollow points, and jacketed ones also, after loading them, and plugging them with a pellet. Dramatic results, but not very useful. There are an endless myriad of parlor tricks, but if one wants expansion, one must either sacrifice velocity, and use a soft bullet, or forget the bullet molds, and buy jacketed bullets. Cast bullets are what they are for the most part.

[Graybeard]

I'm of the opinion ya need to decide what ya want the bullet to do and stick with bullets designed to do that. If ya want expansion then use a jacketed bullet. If ya want deep penetration and minimal expansion use a hard cast.

I've just never seen the need to mess around and go to all the trouble to make an expanding nose cast bullet nor one with a HP either. The whole idea to me seems a wee bit silly sorta like trying to make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

[Anduril]

do a search for the phrase  "bruce b bonded boolit"
or if I did this right use this http://forums.handloads.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=16393
kind of a complicated p.i.a. way to make a cast bullet, but they do work.
..



"sows ear"?? 
..

[mechanic]

Atllaw,

I have been casting some 330 gr. .458 hollow points, along with some 405 gr. roundnose.  Been shooting them into water.  I know water ain't flesh, but not getting my contract with the Mythbuster crowd, its the best I got.  The hollow points really don't expand THAT much more than the roundnose.  I've had better luck playing with the alloy, and the load.  If you're thinkin' of shooting them in that cannon you've built , the hollow point would probably blow all the meat off a deer except for the end of it's nose. 

But then again, 2, 974 people will probably disagree with my unscientific method of testing anyway.

[lee1954]

  Here is my two cents...  I'm not a expert ,,but I got the start of a mushroom look at 22 rimfire speed  when I dug the boolit out of the dirt  ----
  It is a pain to cast   I used a sawed off  22 short case and a wire handel for the pure lead..  then finished with W.W. lead.
  At higher speed the W.W. would get to be part or the mushroom  and about 2/3 origanl length -- A little more speed and I'd just find the last 1/3 of the boolit in the dirt bank... I'm guesing 1900 FPS. I was casting  .223 cal -  60 Gr,,   And a few years back..
  I should work on some 30 cal now that I have time ..   I'm thinking 1600 - 1700 Fps after that the boolit breaks apart  in the dirt bank..   If you have two leadpots  --one with soft lead. and some time to just be frustrated ....  Give it a try !!                     Dan Lee

[Lloyd Smale]

ive done it alot and have even killed game with them. they are tricky to make but not as tough as some guys have said. When i get the temp right and the rythm down i may loose 10 percent as rejects. Do they work? you betcha but they have limitations. How they perform depends on you. They can be made to expand better then any jacketed and they can be made to barely expand. What i like to see in game with the ones i make are performance simular to a partition. I want quick expansion and for the most part after that the nose can blow off and i cast them with enough hard lead that theres a good portion of the bullet left to continue penetrating. The quickest kill i made on a buffalo was with a lyman devestator that acted just like that. It expanded fast and lost its nose and the shank gave complete penetration.
  Now before you get to wrapped up in what i recomend ill say this. Soft nosed bullets and hps whether cast of jackted in my opinion are only really useable bullets for animals under about 400 lbs. Any bigger and your much better served with a hardcast bullet and even under 400lbs you wont get me to say a soft nose is superior to a hardcast. dont think going to a bigger caliber is going to buy you more killing power to step up to larger game as weve found just the oposite. The larger bullets when expanded act like big parachutes and do a poor job of penetration.  To me its just something differnt to play with once in a while. But one thing you should take from this is it is very easy to make your own softnosed bullets that will do as well or better then any jacketed bullet if expansion is what you want. Why would anyone do it when jacketed are available? Maybe because there about free and the last time i priced a box of xtps they sure werent free!!!

[Lloyd Smale]

duplicate post

[AtlLaw]

My final analysis is it wasn't worth the effort on the soft nose.

Thanks Dee, that is my final thought also.  Maybe I'll try it if I'm at a point where I'm looking for something to play around with!   

ya need to decide what ya want the bullet to do and stick with bullets designed to do that. ... I've just never seen the need to mess around and go to all the trouble to make an expanding nose cast bullet

Yup, you right.  I don't know what I was thinking.   

kind of a complicated p.i.a. way to make a cast bullet,

There seems to be no doubt about it!   

What i like to see in game with the ones i make are performance simular to a partition.

That was my analogy as well when thinking about this.

Why would anyone do it when jacketed are available?

This is undoubtedly the consensous!  Well, at least that thought is put to rest!     I'll now retire to my man cave to try and come up with something else that is equally impractical!      Heck, I don't even cast anything but round balls anyway!   

[mechanic]

I cast because I can.  And I get free lead.  So that means free bullets.  So then I can shoot even more which costs in the long run just as much.     Maybe I ain't so bright after all.

[quickdtoo]

Here's an article from Handloader magazine on it Richard, the link is in the H&R FAQs and Help sticky.   

Tim

http://www.riflemagazine.com/magazine/article.cfm?tocid=974&magid=71

[jhalcott]

  Yep, I've played with soft nosed cast. I tried Bruce B's method and the 2 pot one also. You can go to far with the soft nose. I like about a third of the bullet or LESS soft. The remaining bullet can be any thing from ww to monotype. They are a bit tedious to make BUT you only need a few for hunting season. In my 30-06,35 whelen and 45-70 Mauser, both soft nosed and regular cast bullets shoot to the same point of aim. So I can practice with the "normal" ones, saving the few softnoses for deer.
  Altlaw, here is ANOTHER thing to think on. Clamp a small piece of Aluminum foil between the halves of the mold. Have it adjusted so it only goes as far as the front driving band and is tight across the cavity. Pour in your molten alloy. After the sprue cools remove the bullet as normal. Make as many of these as you want or need. Trim off the excess foil and lube size and load them. To see what happens when the "split point" bullet hits an animal, hit one on the nose. IF you did this casting correctly, you should get some thing like a scissor effect. The halves of the nose SHOULD open up and create a LARGE wound. The petals may break off and cause additional wounding. This is NOT a large dangerous game bullet,but does spectacular work on deer sized animals.

[Lloyd Smale]

i dont agree that its not worth bothering with. there are some real good uses for these. they work real well on deer and give you the capability to make your 4570 into a varmit gun. Push a 405 to about 1900 fps with a soft nosed bullet and it turns coyotes inside out  same goes for a 3030 or 35rem and in them especially the 3030 you are borderline to small in caliber with a hardcast to make clean kills on deer sized game, at least in my opinion, a soft nose can make them just as effective as jacketed bullets. Why not just buy jacketed? Like i said earlier, at 30 plus dollars a box ill pass. Im retired and my time is free.  in a handgun a 300 grain lfn or swc soft nosed gives the best of both worlds. It expands and still as much weight left to penetrate as a 250 grain bullet. Is it needed? hell no. But its fun to play with. Now if you really want to play try soft noseing some hollow points. Plus what satisfaction would you get killing something with a bullet someone on a assembly line made! might as well just buy factory ammo and be done with it.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            My final analysis is it wasn't worth the effort on the soft nose.[/quote]

Thanks Dee, that is my final thought also.  Maybe I'll try it if I'm at a point where I'm looking for something to play around with!   

ya need to decide what ya want the bullet to do and stick with bullets designed to do that. ... I've just never seen the need to mess around and go to all the trouble to make an expanding nose cast bullet

Yup, you right.  I don't know what I was thinking.   

kind of a complicated p.i.a. way to make a cast bullet,

There seems to be no doubt about it!   

What i like to see in game with the ones i make are performance simular to a partition.

That was my analogy as well when thinking about this.

Why would anyone do it when jacketed are available?

This is undoubtedly the consensous!  Well, at least that thought is put to rest!     I'll now retire to my man cave to try and come up with something else that is equally impractical!      Heck, I don't even cast anything but round balls anyway!   
[/quote]

[AtlLaw]

Here's an article from Handloader magazine on it Richard,

Thanks Tim!  I remember reading that article.  Shows ya how long I been thinking about this!      Does sound like fun though... 

[AtlLaw]

i dont agree that its not worth bothering with.

And you're right also Lloyd!     Like I just said to Tim, it sounds like fun.     Maybe when I retire I'll give it a shot...    That is if I even get into casting anything but round balls... 

[243dave]

Fellers, before I get started let me say I'm no caster --- I shoot'em thats it, but I do read about casting, so if I'm don't know what I'm talking about, tell me so, just be kind .     I think I've read somewhere that some one cast their bullets pretty hard than put the bullets in a pan of water to where the noses were sticking out of the water than used a propane torch and heated the noses up and this caused the noses to be softer than the rest of the bullet-----creating a controlled expansion cast bullet. Have you'll heard of this ?    Dave

[Gun Runner]

Years ago Lyman (I think) made a setup for making a soft nose and a hard base. Seems it took to moulds and you had to use some kind of adhesev(sp) to put them to gather. Used to have the article on it but thru a bunch of moves (complements of the Navy) and couple devorices lost the artical. Seems like it was a time consuming deal, but it was a hot topic for a while, then just died off.

Gun Runner

[AtlLaw]

Got the latest issue of HandLoader yesterday and see it has an another article on the subject.

[mcwoodduck]

After reading all of the posts.
I really can not see how you can get any consistancy in pouring soft lead into a small mold and then adding hard lead on top of it.  I can not see how you will get exactly X grains of soft and Y grains of hard to make the bullets uniform.  After all the pure soft lead is going to weigh more than the hard lead alloy and the weight differences would be vast in terms of percentage.  when reloading for hunting this would not be a big problem for 25 yards and under but could be a problem past that.  Well a 300 grain mould is ased on a pure lead bullet and using pure lead you will get 300 grains.  using an alloy that is 80% you will have a 240 grain bullet.  Not a problem as long as you know they only weigh 240 and load acordingly.  But by adding an unmeasured mix of both metals you will have anywhere from 300 to 240 and not a uniform ammount of each.
When I first read your post I was thinking you had a Hollow cavity keith lead mold and would pour the hard lead alloy into the mold and then top the hollow cavity of the keith off with soft lead. 
With the Handloader comming out with another article on it I think they have hit a wall on what to write aboout.
After all the copper Jacket was developed to do exactly what you want.  Allow the soft lead to expand but do it with some control.
What they should be looking at is what percentage of alloy and what alloy will work best at what speeds and calibers to get the expansion you want.
so for a .454 bullet to expand to .65 and retain 85% driven at 1500 Fps with 14" of penitration you will need X percentage of ..... into your lead mix.
Driving the same bullet to 1300 Fps we had .55 and 90% retention with 16" of penitration into ballistic gell.  I just used what ever numbers popped into my pea sized brain so don't ask me for recipies of an alloy to retain 85% at 1500 Fps.

[jhalcott]

MCwood, It isn't really all that complicated. As long as you have enough HARD body behind the softnose, the body will continue thru the animal. EVEN if the soft nose is blasted off! A linotype body and pure lead nose will put LOONG holes in animals. You can run into problems with too much nose. One method(BruceB's) uses a smaller caliber bullet for the nose. This bullet is melted IN THE CAVITY!! Then the hard base metal is poured in on top of it. I have used a tiny ladle made from small caliber brass trimmed to give me the weight I need. These are easier to make and NOT as pretty as BruceB's. They work as well though! I would not try them for a castbullet cartridge match , but they have and do work on east coast deer.

[Lloyd Smale]

theres no alloy so hard that it will give you a 240 grain bullet out of a mold that cast 300 grain from pure. Might be 280 grain but even that is a stretch. When you soft nose a 300 grain bullet you are talking of a soft nose that probably wieghts about 75 grains max. If say your nose pour varys by 5 grains, considering your still filling the mold with the hard alloy the weight variation can be 5 grains max. realisiticly considering you are filling the mold its probably more like one grain. Ive weighted 405 grain bullets made with pure noses and a #2 body and the same bullet just cast out of #2 and the weight variations between the two are only in the neiborhood of 5 grains. Ive seen that big of a swing in bullets cast out of the same alloy in some molds and its not enough to effect accuracy. Now if you were doing it by casting the nose in a seperate operation and using it cold to make the soft point im sure the varitations would open up. bottom line is my #1 has shot groups under an inch at a 100 yards with soft nosed bullets. Do they make an animal bleed? take a look! As to jacketed be superior. Not a chance. It would be difficult and very expensive for a bullet manufacture to make a two part alloy bullet. What you end up with is a very reliable bullet. You can make it act like a varmit bullet or make it act just like a nosler partition. When a typical jacketed bullet is designed it has to be designed to work in a wide varitity of differnt guns, both handgun and rifle in some cases, at a wide range of velocitys and it must work on animals of anything from a 100 lb deer to a  1000 lb moose. With cast you can control the bulllets hardness and expansion and create the bullet to work in the operating parameters of what your hunting. Ive seem many jacketed bullet fail to expand because velocity was to low in a handgun and the same bullet come unglued out of a rifle and fail to penetrate adequately. there alot of work and not something your going to crank out 500 and shoot into the dirt but with careful development and testing you can make a bullet that handsdown out performs anything the factorys make. Ive killed and watch the killing of quite a few animals with these bullets and know there strenghts and weeknesses. Having said that ill tell you my real opinion. They are a fine whitetail and black bear bullet. They tend to give quicker kills then hardcast on them but when the animal gets up over 500 lbs personaly ill take a hardcast lfn or swc any day over a hp or soft nose. With hardcast i know my bullet is going to penetrate and i know the animal is going to die. It might not flop on the ground dead but a hole in the vitals is a deed animal. Ive seen failures of just about every kind of jacketed handgun bullet and even on cast hps and soft noses on really big animals and it seems like the bigger the caliber the worse the failures can be. If you can find it look for the writeup i did on shooting game with the 500 linebaugh with hps an cast soft points. It was a dismal failure. When they expanded they were just so big that there wasnt enough momentum to push them deap enough. We were getting about 6 inches of penetration with a 450 bullet. Recovered bullets were textbook mushrooms. Most times a good old hardcast slug is hard to beat.

[jsh]

A comment made about why soft nose when jacketed are available. Well I myself don't like to shoot jacketed through my cast guns. Seems to wipe out the seasoning.
 As to measuring out a specific weight, here is how my casting/ shooting pard does it for the 204/ 35 cal lyman. He uses a round ball mold to cast a dead soft ball,45 I think. Then he gets the 204/35 lyman casting with WW and gets it good and hot. Along this time he has had the lead ball in a home built ladle hanging in side his lead pot getting hot. He then takes it past this and takes a propane torch to the dead soft lead ball to heat even more. Dumps that into the mold then goes directly to his WW met on top of that.
 We have shot this into a lot of different things and have yet to have a nose shear or break off. Expansions is about the size of a dime. Weight may vary about 1 grain. Ran through the paces with a 35 Whelan, top end loads shot right at 1" at 100M. Yes this is a bit slow, but just how many hunting loads does one use in a year? He has maybe 2-300 of these cast up and figures it should be enough for a long time. We are going to give this bullet a bit of a work out over the summer and see how it expands at 35 Rem velocities out of a handgun. Also going to try and work on 338 and 375's to see what we come up with. The price of thes per 50 is crazy, so a bit of free time is well worth it.
Toying with the idea of casting some of the 45-70 330 grain HP's this way. Problem is this mold is such a bugger to get to cast a good example to begin with let alone trying to get it hot enough. May be a two person job to get everything just right.
Jeff

[Hank08]

AtlLAW,  Lyman used to make soft nose molds for a variety of their molds. Many yrs. ago
they were used a lot.  I only have one of these.  I have the .30 cal 311284S.  It's cast 222 grs. from linotype and .309 diameter.  It's the bullet with the red mark.  The nose is the green one and I don't remember the weight of the nose.  You can see it has kind of a reverse cone that dovetails into the bullet and keeps it from seperating.  The noses are cast of pure lead then inserted with tweezers into the bullets nose and then the lino is poured in.  It slows down the casting process but actually makes a pretty good bullet.  I shoot them in a 30/06.
H08

[Hank08]

here's some loaded ones.
H08

[AtlLaw]

Thanks for the info and photo's Hank!  That is really interesting!  I wonder if there was a time, say after the ascendancy of comparatively small bores and before the advent of reliable jacketed bullets, that this soft-nosed hard cast bullet practice was more prevelent.   

[Hank08]

I think so, especially during the lever action yrs. and into the early bolt actions.  I have most of the Old Lyman reloading manuals back to about 1920 and I see they made nose molds for
a lot of the old calibers.  I have an old Savage b olt action called a SUPER SPORTER made in the 1930s with iron sights that's very accurate with these 220 gr. hardcast with softnose.  I'm thinking I'll use it come Deer season.
H08