CBA President, John Alexander, wrote this article appearing in the Sept/Oct 2011, #213 issue of the Fouling Shot.
Over the years I have often wondered how picky I should be when inspecting a freshly cast bunch of bul-lets. For various reasons a few will have gross defects that obviously rule out trying to shoot them. On a good day with a good alloy, a good mould, and everything working right almost all the bullets will seem to be perfectby the unaided eye. But they arent perfect.
If you examine them under a stereomicroscope at say 20X you will see that many are considerably less than perfect. Should we sort our bullets with the help ofa microscope? Most of the top competitive shooters inthe CBA dont sort with a microscope and they still man-age to shoot some amazing groups, it seems safe to say that a microscope isnt needed even though visually perfect bullets may not look perfect under magnifica-tion.
So our usual criteria for good or bad bullets is arbi-trarily based on what the human eye can see without aid. Is this arbitrary limit the proper one to determine what bullets should be rejected? If a skilled shooter had poor eyesight and couldnt see defects as well as the average shooter would that be a disadvantage, I dont think we know.
Although casting is fun when everything is working smoothly and the bullets are nearly flawless, on some days the cast bullet gods seem to punish us with bullets having rounded edges or wrinkles of various sizes or both. Even after repeatedly cleaning a mold, turning upthe temperature of the pot, adding tin, fluxing with a magic elixir, and whispering ancient incantations passed down from the Schuetzen shooters in old Bavaria, as well as some more modern expletives, I sometimes windup with a number of bullets with easily visible wrinkles or rounded edges. The advice usually offered is to remeltall such bullets, or at least cull them out to be used onlyfor shooting offhand or for fouling shots.
I like to cast bullets but I like to do some other things with my time even more and after I have spent a coupleof hours casting I am reluctant to throw away a substan-tial fraction of my production even if they dont look per-fect. I have always wondered how severe a defect has to be before it makes a difference? Logically the stan-dard should depend on what the bullets will be used for and how much precision is needed. If they are to be used for offhand or casual pistol shooting, or in a rifle that only averages three minutes of angle it seems rea-sonable that we should be able to relax our standards a bit compared to the standards needed for competitive benchrest shooting or squirrel hunting.
It has also been argued that the size of the bullet also matters and that defects in small bullets will cause more dispersion than similar defects in larger bullets. This alleged relationship has been cited as a reason why it is considered more difficult to attain good cast bullet accuracy with the 22 bore than with larger calibers. This seems logical but as Ken Mollohan argued in Fouling Shot #212, logic based on faulty assumptions can lead one astray.
Over the years I have occasionally run limited tests comparing defective bullets to good bullets and have been surprised at how well some of the defective bullets shot in a direct comparison. Many other experienced shooters have observed similar results and are more tolerant about what bullets are good enough for the intended purpose.
Cast bullet shooters, and especially beginning shooters, need some realistic advice about how to judge when a bullet should be rejected. I believe the standard advice that bullets with any visible defects should be remelted is not only arbitrary (as noted in the first three paragraphs) but also often wastes a lot of perfectly good bullets as well as a lot of casting time and effort for no good reason. More importantly, the zero tolerance rule pushed on beginners may cause them to give up casting in frustration when they could be getting good results with less than perfect bullets.
One difficulty in developing better advice for begin-ners is in describing the level of defect. How do you describe what a small or large wrinkle is or how much rounding of edges is enough to make a difference. I have a lot of records of past tests that show that bullets that were slightly wrinkled, or had moderately rounded base edges or badly wrinkled either did or didnt do as well as the good bullets when fired in alternative groups. After a few years those notes arent very helpful even to me and they certainly arent useful to other shooters. But just because describing the level of defect consistently is difficult doesnt mean we should give up.
Over the years I have often wondered how picky I should be when inspecting a freshly cast bunch of bul-lets. For various reasons a few will have gross defects that obviously rule out trying to shoot them. On a good day with a good alloy, a good mould, and everything working right almost all the bullets will seem to be perfectby the unaided eye. But they arent perfect.
If you examine them under a stereomicroscope at say 20X you will see that many are considerably less than perfect. Should we sort our bullets with the help ofa microscope? Most of the top competitive shooters inthe CBA dont sort with a microscope and they still man-age to shoot some amazing groups, it seems safe to say that a microscope isnt needed even though visually perfect bullets may not look perfect under magnifica-tion.
So our usual criteria for good or bad bullets is arbi-trarily based on what the human eye can see without aid. Is this arbitrary limit the proper one to determine what bullets should be rejected? If a skilled shooter had poor eyesight and couldnt see defects as well as the average shooter would that be a disadvantage, I dont think we know.
Although casting is fun when everything is working smoothly and the bullets are nearly flawless, on some days the cast bullet gods seem to punish us with bullets having rounded edges or wrinkles of various sizes or both. Even after repeatedly cleaning a mold, turning upthe temperature of the pot, adding tin, fluxing with a magic elixir, and whispering ancient incantations passed down from the Schuetzen shooters in old Bavaria, as well as some more modern expletives, I sometimes windup with a number of bullets with easily visible wrinkles or rounded edges. The advice usually offered is to remeltall such bullets, or at least cull them out to be used onlyfor shooting offhand or for fouling shots.
I like to cast bullets but I like to do some other things with my time even more and after I have spent a coupleof hours casting I am reluctant to throw away a substan-tial fraction of my production even if they dont look per-fect. I have always wondered how severe a defect has to be before it makes a difference? Logically the stan-dard should depend on what the bullets will be used for and how much precision is needed. If they are to be used for offhand or casual pistol shooting, or in a rifle that only averages three minutes of angle it seems rea-sonable that we should be able to relax our standards a bit compared to the standards needed for competitive benchrest shooting or squirrel hunting.
It has also been argued that the size of the bullet also matters and that defects in small bullets will cause more dispersion than similar defects in larger bullets. This alleged relationship has been cited as a reason why it is considered more difficult to attain good cast bullet accuracy with the 22 bore than with larger calibers. This seems logical but as Ken Mollohan argued in Fouling Shot #212, logic based on faulty assumptions can lead one astray.
Over the years I have occasionally run limited tests comparing defective bullets to good bullets and have been surprised at how well some of the defective bullets shot in a direct comparison. Many other experienced shooters have observed similar results and are more tolerant about what bullets are good enough for the intended purpose.
Cast bullet shooters, and especially beginning shooters, need some realistic advice about how to judge when a bullet should be rejected. I believe the standard advice that bullets with any visible defects should be remelted is not only arbitrary (as noted in the first three paragraphs) but also often wastes a lot of perfectly good bullets as well as a lot of casting time and effort for no good reason. More importantly, the zero tolerance rule pushed on beginners may cause them to give up casting in frustration when they could be getting good results with less than perfect bullets.
One difficulty in developing better advice for begin-ners is in describing the level of defect. How do you describe what a small or large wrinkle is or how much rounding of edges is enough to make a difference. I have a lot of records of past tests that show that bullets that were slightly wrinkled, or had moderately rounded base edges or badly wrinkled either did or didnt do as well as the good bullets when fired in alternative groups. After a few years those notes arent very helpful even to me and they certainly arent useful to other shooters. But just because describing the level of defect consistently is difficult doesnt mean we should give up.
Photographs may be one way of describing defects I recently had the opportunity to try this method when I cast a batch of 75 grain 22 bullets. The bullets were of scrap lead of uncertain composition with a BHN of about 15. Out of the 119 bullets about 30 had one or more ran-dom wrinkles that looked bad enough through my trifocals to make me reluctant to shoot them in an upcoming postal match. I called them my culls.
I picked out six bullets that were typical of the culls, rubbed black ink in the wrinkles to make them show up better, and took the accompanying picture. I then loaded the bullets in the picture along with 24 additional similar-ly wrinkled bullets. As a control, I also loaded thirty visu-ally perfect bullets, from the same batch. The load was five grains of 700X ignited by a Remington small pistol primer. The bullets were lubricated with LBT blue. The average velocity ten feet from the muzzle was 1,430 fps.
I shot the 12-5 shot groups in my 223 Tikka Lite on the same day in a tunnel. The six five shot groups with the culled bullets were shot alternating with six five shot groups with good bullets to avoid systematic differ-ences caused by bore condition, fatigue, or other vari-ables. The six groups with the wrinkled bullets averaged 0.78 minutes of angle and the six groups of good bullets averaged 0.82 minutes of angle.
I was not surprised to find that the wrinkled bullets appeared to shoot as well as the good bullets because in past tests bullets with similar wrinkles had averaged better accuracy about half the time. Note that the accuracy difference was NOT statistically significant. I am not in any way proposing a new theory, similar to the one justifying the dimples on golf balls, that wrinkled bullets are more accurate. I dont believe they are. But it appar-ently will take a test with a rifle/load combination more accurate than the one in this test to show that they are less accurate.
One thing is clear. If your rifle is shooting two inch or larger groups it is unlikely that results can be improved by discarding bullets with wrinkles similar to, or smaller than, the ones in this test. Changing other factors such as bullet fit, alloy hardness, or powder type or charge are more promising tactics than more critical sorting of bullets.
This was a limited test with a specific caliber, bullet, load, and rifle and may not apply for all situations. However, because the 22 caliber is alleged to be sensitive to bullet defects, wrinkled bullets may have even less effect on larger calibers.
It is also worth noting that the rifle had a one in eight inch twist, instead of the one in fourteen inch twist of most 22 centerfires. According to prevailing theory, the quick twist should have accentuated the effects of the undoubtedly unbalanced bullets.
I hope this test and the accompanying picture will be of interest to readers and provide food for thought. I also hope others will be encouraged to run similar tests with other types and levels of defects and report their findings. I suspect we usually spend too much of our time and attention sorting bullets when we should be looking elsewhere to cure our troubles.
I know that many casters take pride in how their bul-lets look, as well as how they shoot, and will not be interested in shooting wrinkled bullets even if they shoot well. They should keep right on discarding those ugly bullets. After all cast bullet shooting is a hobby, not a way to save civilization, and we should do it the way we enjoy doing it. However, for those like myself who are a bit lazy and would rather shoot than remelt and recast bullets this article may offer bit of guidance about how some easily visible wrinkles can be ignored with no loss of accuracy.
I shot the 12-5 shot groups in my 223 Tikka Lite on the same day in a tunnel. The six five shot groups with the culled bullets were shot alternating with six five shot groups with good bullets to avoid systematic differ-ences caused by bore condition, fatigue, or other vari-ables. The six groups with the wrinkled bullets averaged 0.78 minutes of angle and the six groups of good bullets averaged 0.82 minutes of angle.
I was not surprised to find that the wrinkled bullets appeared to shoot as well as the good bullets because in past tests bullets with similar wrinkles had averaged better accuracy about half the time. Note that the accuracy difference was NOT statistically significant. I am not in any way proposing a new theory, similar to the one justifying the dimples on golf balls, that wrinkled bullets are more accurate. I dont believe they are. But it appar-ently will take a test with a rifle/load combination more accurate than the one in this test to show that they are less accurate.
One thing is clear. If your rifle is shooting two inch or larger groups it is unlikely that results can be improved by discarding bullets with wrinkles similar to, or smaller than, the ones in this test. Changing other factors such as bullet fit, alloy hardness, or powder type or charge are more promising tactics than more critical sorting of bullets.
This was a limited test with a specific caliber, bullet, load, and rifle and may not apply for all situations. However, because the 22 caliber is alleged to be sensitive to bullet defects, wrinkled bullets may have even less effect on larger calibers.
It is also worth noting that the rifle had a one in eight inch twist, instead of the one in fourteen inch twist of most 22 centerfires. According to prevailing theory, the quick twist should have accentuated the effects of the undoubtedly unbalanced bullets.
I hope this test and the accompanying picture will be of interest to readers and provide food for thought. I also hope others will be encouraged to run similar tests with other types and levels of defects and report their findings. I suspect we usually spend too much of our time and attention sorting bullets when we should be looking elsewhere to cure our troubles.
I know that many casters take pride in how their bul-lets look, as well as how they shoot, and will not be interested in shooting wrinkled bullets even if they shoot well. They should keep right on discarding those ugly bullets. After all cast bullet shooting is a hobby, not a way to save civilization, and we should do it the way we enjoy doing it. However, for those like myself who are a bit lazy and would rather shoot than remelt and recast bullets this article may offer bit of guidance about how some easily visible wrinkles can be ignored with no loss of accuracy.
