Ed harris wrote this article which was published in the Mar/Apr 2009, #189 issue of the Fouling Shot.

Properly designed hollow-point cast bullets expand at subsonic revolver velocities without requiring +P charges.

The standard of terminal performance from a concealable .38 Special service revolver was for many years the so-called “FBI load.” It featured a 158-grain all-lead, hollow-point, semi-wadcutter at a velocity of 880 f.p.s. as obtained from a four-inch vented test barrel, which approximates what you can expect from a “wheel gun.” Winchester sold it under its symbol X38SPD. Remington’s equivalent was R38S12 and Federal’s 38G. Winchester and Remington loads are still available from Midway. Federal no longer makes it.

This is a short excerpt from "Cast Bullets for Beginners & Experts" was written by Ken Mollohan.

This has mostly to do with Lyman and other iron/steel molds with Lyman-style alignment pins. I know little about maintaining aluminum or brass molds.

Any trace of oil or grease on a mold will smoke and cause severe wrinkling of the bullets. Consequently, all molds must be clean and dry before use. Some casters never put any preservatives on their molds: they just leave the last bullet cast in its cavity as a sort of protection. I know one fellow who stores the dry molds in a box of heavily galvanized steel. It seems to work, but most of us are more comfortable with some sort of petroleum based rust inhibitor for safe storage. Which means it must be removed before the mold is used again.

I’ve used every solvent you can think of, and probably quite a few you never even heard of, trying to get the metal really clean. Some shooters clean their molds with soapy water and a brush and report good results. But the best way I’ve found was recommended in the American rifleman some years ago. They suggested bringing a sauce pan with 2 or 3 inches of water to a rolling boil, and adding ‘some’ dish detergent - maybe half a teaspoon if you just HAVE to measure it. Then open the mold (on handles) and set the blocks in the pan. The water should cover the blocks. Then let the pan come back to a rolling boil. You’d think this is going to boil over and make a mess, but it doesn’t. Let it boil for about a minute. Then take it out and rinse it off briefly in scalding hot tap water, and sling it dry. Be very careful not to give it a long rinse with cold water: The metal will be so free from oils that if it’s kept wet, it will rust in a hurry! But a hot mold will dry quickly, and will give you no trouble with rusting. This takes only a few minutes, and is the best method I’ve found.

Bullet molds need to be adjusted now and again because they wear and get damaged. Sometimes the mold doesn't close completely, sometimes the mold halves will move when the mold is closed, and sometimes the sprue plate isn't flat or has bumps.

There must be no lead on the face of either half of the mold. Get the lead off by heating the mold and touching the lead with the tiniest bit of bullet lube. The lead will go away as you cast. Ken's method is to heat the mold so hot the lead specks melt. -Then wipe the molten lead away with a slightly oily rag after you’re done casting, so it will be clean for your next session.
With the mold off the handles, check as follows: Hold the closed mold up to the light, look through the bullet cavity, and see if there's light coming through a crack. Any visible light means that the mold isn't closing completely. Hold the closed mold in two hands, one hand holding each half, and see if the halves move when you try to twist them. The slightest movement can be easily felt. If the mould fails either test it should be adjusted for the best results. Remove the sprue plate and screw and washer from off the mould half. You'll need a small fine file. My file is eight inches long. A file with a "safe" edge, with no teeth on the edges, is preferred.

The "SKS Match Rifle" written by Ed Doonan was published in the Mar/Apr 1996 #120, issue of the Fouling Shot.

You may think this title is an oxymoron and, to a certain extent, you would be right. But, you can make your SKS shoot well enough with cast bullets to be competitive in our 100-yard offhand matches at Wind Hill Range.

I got an SKS because they are cheap, because I don't think the government wants me to own one, and I wanted to see how the rifle worked. My SKS is a low serial num­ber Chinese model with milled parts and a screwed in barrel. Local experts tell me it was probably made in the 1950's. It came with at least five pounds of Chinese grease packed every­where, including the stock. At one time it was blued because traces still remain under the stock. Basically the metal finish is bright. Strangely enough, it doesn't rust even in our humid mid­western summers. Despite the lack of finish the SKS shows no sign of having ever been fired. There was no copper fouling in the bore, no wear on the boh face, no carbon in the gas system - nothing. It does show signs of handling so it was proba­bly limited to use as a train­ing rifle.

The bolt is simple in concept, with a strong ex­tractor. The SKS works much like the 99 Savage. In the Savage, the lever pushes the boh up to lock, in the SKS, the bolt car­rier pushes the rear of the bolt down; the idea is the same. The trigger mechanism is a mess and not easy to rework because of all the transfer and linkage problems. However, the safety is very clever, you know instantly whether it is on or off by feei and it can be moved into the off position without a sound.

The portion of the book, "Cast Bullets for Beginners & Expert" by Joe Brennen Jr., was written by Ric Bowman.

There are several reasons to lap bullet moulds: new moulds with machining errors and burrs, corrosion and stains, equalizing volumes of multi-cavity moulds and casting problems. Other than for casting problems, most lapping has been done for cosmetic appearance and for match bullets, made as round as possible. I think everyone loves to make beautiful shiny bullets with zero runout, but it doesn’t make them shoot much better for most of us.

I have never been able to make moulds cast bullets larger than 0.002 inches greater than originally cut, and still keep them round, by lapping. If you need a bigger bullet, buy a mould that casts a bigger bullet as manufactured. However, lapping can make bullets drop from the cavity easier and remove baked on material from the surface of the cavity.

Lapping is not a “spur of the moment” decision, but takes some planning and forethought. The first thing you will need is ten of your best quality bullets cast and separated for each cavity you are working with. Wheel weight alloy is just fine except for polishing, and then linotype alloy is probably best, as bullets are larger, harder and more closely conform to the cavity. The three most useful lapping compounds are “Clover” brand automotive valve lapping paste in “fine” grit, Brownell’s 800-grit water based lapping paste and “JB” bore paste or “Flitz” polishing cream. (See picture)

To drive the lap, I use a small sheet metal screw that has a quarter inch head with a socket and “T” handle wrench. A small electric screw or nut driver may be used if you are careful and check your work often.

The following was taken from The Fouling Shot No. 19, April 1979 and was written by Frank Marshall Jr.

The .25-20-86, .32-40-165 and 38-55-255 created such an impression among riflemen during the fabulous blackpowder era into the smokeless schuetzen period that even today, mention of these legendary rounds con­jures images of thumbnail sized groups.

My Uncle Will was not immune to this fever, and when Winchester introduced the Model 54 in .30-30, he arranged to have a heavy octagon barrel 1885 Winchester Hi-Wall dismantled, and had the .32-40 bar­rel put onto the .30-30 Winchester M-54 action, and stocked with an early version of what later become the famous Winchester Marksman stock. The idea was to find how accurate the .32-40 really was. and Will had already deduced this could not be done within the inher­ent difficulties of the single shot rifle, its two piece stock, etc.

Will knew all the tricks related to coaxing bullets into the X-ring and had devised some not known outside his domain, as he never knew when the outcome of a friend­ly wager might depend on a trick of the trade as yet unre­vealed to his competition Will had a minimum .32-40 reamer made up with a short groove diameter cylindrical throat. and a gentle taper leads cone. instead of the orig­inal .32-40 chamber with no throat. The lead cone begins right at the case mouth with the .32-40 and most other blackpowder breach loaders. and the practice was carried over to some early smokeless calibers like the .30-30. Many .243 Win. rifles are still made that way.

The .32-40 barrel had the standard 16" twist with a . 311" bore and .319" groove, and as fitted to the 54 was a stiff 28" long. The rifle weighed 14 lbs. with its Lyman AS scope. That spring and summer was devoted most­ly to that rifle at Will's camp range, and was intently noted by area accuracy buffs Will's trick in mind was to use the common Ideal 319247. the standard flat-nosed .32-40 bullet at .319" and 168 grs. cast from 1 :20 tin/lead. He loaded it with the two front bands out in the throat with the front band snug in the gentle leade cone. assuring concentricity, but not actually engaging the lands, as was popular at that time, using a modification of the breach seat system which required soft 1:40 two­ diameter bullets that could not be trued or lubed in the normal way. Will claimed that a close throat, a gentle lead and a chamber that uniformly took a bullet of throat diameter in a case fired from that chamber without resizing was the optimum condition assuring a concentric launch. The excellent efforts of present-day cast bulleteers not withstanding, the cast bullet chamber, or CBC as it's now called, is not a new idea. but really dates from the 1920's, if not before.

This article was written by Ed Doonan in the Mar/Apr 1999, #138 issue of the Fouling Shot.

In so much of cast bullet shooting we violate the first rule of solving engineering problems - we don’t understand the problem. So it is with gas checks; we know the effect gas checks have, but we don’t know the how or the why. Until we understand the HOW and WHY it is nearly impossible to make improvements except by blind experimentation. There are shooters that simply don’t care —- they may be the smart ones as it is very difficult to change the present system. Still at matches you hear shooters speculating on the effect of gas checks and plotting ways to make them better. A lot of this is generated by the jacketed bullet shooter’s experiments on wall thickness of jackets.

There are many theories on how gas checks work. Some of the more common sense ones are; 1. It strengthens the base of the bullet, 2. It provides a gas seal, 3. It is a scraper.

There are some things we know for sure. Plain base bullets are very accurate. If you are ever in a match with a good plain base bullet shooter and the wind doesn’t blow too hard he will teach you. We all know that at some point you must put on a gas check to increase velocity with accuracy. The only exception to this being the paper patched bullet. There are plenty of very, very smart plain based bullet shooters. If there were a way around this they would have found it by now.

Attempts to protect and provide a gas seal for the base of the bullet using a wad have been made from the start. There’s nothing new about a wad. Nearly everything that could possibly work, and some that couldn’t, has been tried. Wads appear to allow a slight increase in velocity with plain base bullets. Yet it is apparent that any kind of wad or filler does not do the same thing as a gas check. After shooting thou-sands of wads I finally ran a test where I could prove that the wad hit the bullet after it left the bore of the rifle. Never in those tests was a load with a wad more accurate —- they were either as accurate or less accurate. The slight increase in velocity simply wasn’t worth it.

Another theory is that GCs are a pressure seal and scraper. I think this is correct, never the less I think all bullets leak pressure before they can start to move. I’m not sure about soft lead breach seated bullets at low velocity and pressure but I think this is true for fixed ammo shot from a leade at 1600 f.p.s. and above. Here we have a bullet sitting perfectly still and suddenly it is hit in the butt by 30,000 to 60,000 Ibs. of pressure that wants to accelerate to 1600 / 2500 fps. The gas is not at the speed of light but it is pretty darn quick. No bullet sitting in a leade is a perfect fit. If it was it would be as hard to pound out of the leade as it is to pound on down the barrel. Since the bullet is not a perfect gas seal it simply has to leak some before it can start to move.

CBA member, by Tom Davis of Carnegie, PA wrote this article in 2005 and it was published in the July/Aug #176 issue of the Fouling Shot.

I acquired my first Swedish Model 1867 Rolling Block rifle in early 2002. I once had a rare Norwegian one, but it was museum-quality and I would not have felt right shooting it, so I sold it to a well-known author of rolling block books instead.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Swedish Model 1867 rifles, they are well-made, impressive pieces. The first ones were made in New York State by Remington for the Swedish government back in the late 1860’s, but the Swedes were later licensed by Remington to make them for themselves. They started off their local manufacture with about 10,000 Remington-made actions before they got into full production in Sweden. My rifle is one of the early ones that were made in Sweden – but on Remington-manufactured actions. As a result, the receiver has Remington markings, but the barrel has Swedish manufacture markings. My particular rifle was assembled at Sweden’s Carl Gustafs Stads Armory, and is a full-length version (just over 53” long, with a 36” barrel and three barrel bands). It even has matching unit marks burned into the buttstock and stamped on the cleaning rod!

The caliber designation is 12.7x44R, sometimes shown as 12.17x44R. The bores on these rifles are interesting: hexagonal in cross section
– similar to British Whitworth rifling. I availed myself of O. H. McKagen’s slug measuring service, and learned that my bore measured .513” across the grooves and .482” across the ands. Twist is approximately one turn in 42 inches.

This short excerpt was taken from the 3rd edition, vol. 1 of the "Cast Bullets for Beginners & Expert" by Joseph F. Brennen Jr. and published by the Cast Bullet Association.

4.3.2 HOW TO BUMP BULLETS IN THE LUBRICATOR/SIZER

I have only used the Lyman 45 and 450 Lubricator/Sizers, but understand that the Saeco and RCBS machines will also bump bullets. The problem with bumping bullets in a Lyman machine is that the handle, a flimsy proposition at best, will easily break.

Ken Mollohan: The warning that Lyman handles are too flimsy for bumping, and will break is correct in my experience also. But my remedy was to weld a reinforcing strip of steel across the top of the handle above the pivot holes, which is where the handles is thinnest, and the breaks occurred. These strips were the same size and thickness as the original handles, and perhaps an inch or an inch and a quarter long. Welding was completely across the surface. This simple alteration has prevented further problems for several decades.

This article was written by the late, longtime CBA member, Ken Mollohan and was published in the July/Aug 1997, #128 issue of the Fouling Shot.

Upset in cast bullets has been around a long time. Early experimenters, using muzzle loading ri­fles, tried many schemes to force undersized balls to expand and take the rifling, but a Frenchman, Cap­tain E. C. Minie had the first real success. Captain Minie employed an iron cup that was driven forward into the hollow base of a conical bullet upon ignition of the powder charge, expanding the base of the bullet to fit the bore. The Minie ball made possible the accurate rifled muskets that could reliably hit individual men hundreds of yards away. Even later, double-rest heavy bench rifles, weighing 20 to 40 pounds, worked best with two-piece swaged lead bullets with bases made of the softest lead to assure expansion. Some men could cut their initials into a 200-yard target with such outfits. That's accurate by any standard! The best rifles and marksmen we have today would be hard put to match it, but, today the expanding base is condemned as a major cause of inaccuracy!

How did expanding bases go from giving the best possible accuracy, to their current reputation for de­stroying accuracy? Well, to be specific, it is almost entirely the work of one man, Dr. Howard Mann. If you haven't read his book, 'The Bullet's Flight from Powder to Target, you should order a copy right now. Dr. Mann was one of the few truly scientific investigators into the factors affecting accuracy, and his book is still the best on the subject. He was the first to point out that the major cause of poor accu­racy is inconsistent bullets. He also found that one of the reasons for inaccurate bullets was the way they upset in the bore. He recovered and measured fired bullets, discovering that the more the base of the bullet is out of square with the body, the further away the bullet will strike from the impact of a bullet with a perfectly square base, and he was right!

Dr. Mann also showed that flaws in the base of the bullet are far more injurious to accuracy than similar flaws in the nose of the bullet. He would drill holes in bullets to duplicate defects and by orienting these defects in the chamber, he could produce large groups like donuts, or he could shoot small groups and move the groups around on the target at will, without changing the sights in any way. Today's shooters equate large groups with damaged bases, and have locked onto the idea that for good accuracy, the base of the bullet must be perfectly formed and perfectly square to the axis of the bullet; but, that's not what Dr. Mann said. He said that the bullet had to be consistent, not perfect. His book shows many ex­amples of fine accuracy with deliberately damaged bullets. He purposely damaged the muzzle of a rifle with a hammer and a punch to prove the point. The punch mark cut a huge groove, from nose to base, in every bullet he fired. This obviously destroyed the balance of the bullet, yet he reported that accuracy was still good; he only had to shift his sights to match a new point of impact.

Dr. Mann believed that the pressure from the burning gunpowder upset the base of the bullet in the throat of the rifle "like a hammer blow on a ball of putty." He tried to prove this by firing bullets from shortened barrels. Some of them were so short that the end of the bullet actually projected out of the muzzle before the trigger was pulled! And brother, did he get upset bases! His bullets looked like opened umbrellas! Even heavy .30 caliber jacketed military bullets were badly upset. The case seemed open and shut: If the pressure of the load is high enough to upset the base of the bullet, it will be unbalanced and inaccurate. Period!

Scuse me, Dr. Mann . . . . Those upset bullets in your photo are a lot bigger than the throat of the rifle. Looks to me like they expanded after they left the throat. Actually, it looks like they didn't expand much until after they got out of the bore altogether ... Oh, I see. It just shows that the pressure in the throat is high enough to make even a jacketed bullet expand as much as it possibly can.

Hmmm. If jacketed bullets expand with high pressures too, why do they shoot so much better than cast bullets. Oh, the softer bullet can't take the pressure as well as the tougher jacketed bullet, and naturally it deforms more and shoots worse? Hmmm. But if jacketed bullets and cast bullets both expand to fit the same throat and the same bore, aren't they deformed exactly the same, no matter what their strength? And, how come you can load a cast bullet to 40,000 psi in an Ml carbine and get good accuracy, but the same bullet isn't worth a hoot at 40,000 psi in a Ml Garand? Won't the amount of upset and accuracy loss be the same in both guns when the deforming pressure is the same? And looky hyar, Doc: Look at these .308 caliber jacketed bullets that I shot in a 7.65 Argentine Mauser. It is obvious that the bullets were rubbing on the lands, but it hardly touched the grooves. If the base upsets com­pletely like you said, why aren't there contact marks all the way around the bullet? And how do boat-tailed bullets make it through the throat without . . . Oww! My ear! No need to be that way about it, Doc! I wuz jest asking!

Like a lot of other shooters, I've done a fair amount of bullet recovery too. I've fired into swim­ming pools and mountain streams, swimming down to recover the bullets. I've even shot guns completely underwater, much to the dismay of some bluegills. I've recovered bullets from dirt and deer, from wood, sand, snow, sawdust and pretty near everything in between. With low pressure loads or with soft bullets, what I found pretty much goes along with Dr. Mann's findings, even if I do have some questions about the conclusions he drew from the data. But, he dealt mostly with low pressure loads, -the .30-40 Krag was a pretty hot number in his day- and sometimes his results don't translate too well in high pressure and high velocity cast bullet loads.

Oh, Dr. Mann's tests and reports are excellent, and still completely valid; however, we have so dei­fied him, that some people look at a loss of accuracy and jump to the conclusion that they've exceeded the strength of the bullet and are upsetting the bullet base. After all, if Dr. Mann said that is what causes inaccuracy, who are mere mortals to say otherwise?

Well, I have recently read articles by a number of competent people who feel that matching the strength of the bullet to the pressure of the load to get some upset gives them the best accuracy; and don't forget those Minie balls or black powder bench guns. A lot of things can injure accuracy besides base upset. We shouldn't be so quick to assume that poor accuracy means the base is upsetting.

I think it was Gen. Julian Hatcher who reported some tests in which he plugged the bore of a .30-06, and tried to clear it with a case that had the bullet and part of the powder charge removed. Usually, the pressure pushed the plug out nicely, but not so with one obstruction, a long lead plug to simulate several bullets stuck in the barrel. Several shots failed to dislodge the plug, but left a distinct bulge in the barrel. Guess where it was? It wasn't at the base of the super heavy lead slug like theory would indicate, it was in the middle! Why? I dunno. I just know that the base upset theory doesn't seem to explain away quite eve­rything yet.

For example, Lyman 311291 linotype slugs that group 3/4" at 50 yards at 2200 fps were tested in hot­ter loads that were hardly able to stay on target. The best ( control) load gave no leading at all. With two more grains of powder, the bore began to take on a whitish look, and group size almost doubled. With more powder, shooting was wild, and both bore leading and muzzle flashing were severe. Recovered bullets were too damaged to provide definitive infor­mation concerning base angles, but the gas check shanks showed little or no sign of a step that should have formed at the edge of the gas check if the base had upset. Miking the top of the gas check shank and lube grooves near the base gave no evidence of any upset, no matter what the power of the load. The biggest difference I found in the recovered bullets was that with the accurate control load, the engraving on the bullets exactly matched the rifling in the bore. Very tiny etched spots were found on the gas check shanks, right at the edge of the gas check itself, where engraving from the lands created a groove.

These spots grew progressively wider and deeper in more powerful loads until they formed a ring around the base of the bullet, between the gas check and the lower band. At the same time, engraving from the rifling on the bullet grew progressively wider by the wearing away of the metal on driving edges of the rifling. On the trailing side of the rifling, the engraving at the gas check began to extend forward to, and through, the driving bands on the body of the bullet. Lead flashing was noted at the muzzle.

There were no obvious differences in the bullet bases or their squareness to the body of the bullet that came anywhere near correlating with the change in accuracy. To correlate the bullet bases with accuracy, going from excellent to wild, the bases would have had to go from almost perfectly square to obviously very crooked. This simply did not happen. It didn't even come close to happening. I don't know that my Linotype bullet bases upset at all. I do know that even if they did upset, it was only very slightly, and not enough to tum my fine accuracy to shotshell patterns. I have deliberately damaged bases far worse and gotten better accuracy. I have done a lot more testing with similar results that I don't have room to relate.

My best guess? I think that in hotter loads, bore leading was deforming my bullets like Dr. Mann's bullets were deformed by his punch mark. But, his punch marks were uniform, so, even though de­formed, his bullets were consistent and his accuracy didn't change; he just had to re-set his sights. How­ever, once my bore started leading, it grew worse, becoming more severe with each shot. The leading, as it increased, imparted a different deformation and imbalance to each bullet, and each had a different point of impact!

Now I need to qualify my next statement a bit. Accuracy is a relative term. I'm not a benchrester, and I don't plan to apologize for that, so I use the word "accuracy'' to mean something useful in the field; which could mean groups up to 2.5 moa, depending on what I plan to hunt. That won't take many CBA events, but I shoot a lot more deer and groundhogs than I do matches, and I don't lose any of them from inadequate accuracy. I find that I can get the hunting accuracy I require from hard cast bullets at high ve­locity.

Why shouldn't I get good results? Col. Harrison's articles in The American Rifleman on paper patched linotype bullets at full power (near 3000 fps) in the .300 Magnum, tell me that linotype is strong enough for high velocities and pressures. If base upset doesn't destroy match accuracy in a 3000 fps loads in a .300 Mag, then it won't cause any major problems at 2600 fps in my '06 either. I may or may not get good re­sults with my '06, but if I don't, it darn sure isn't be­cause the alloy is too soft, and lets the base upset. I need to look elsewhere for the causes of poor accu­racy.

I'm beginning to get a handle on where to look for the causes of cast bullet inaccuracy. The paper patches on Col. Harrison's .300 Mag bullets were not for strength, but to prevent bore contact and subse­quent leading. We can argue about how it works, but the main thing is that paper patching does prevent leading and permits good accuracy at much higher velocities without gas checks than simple lubes can with gas checks. Note that one of the most remark­able things about my Cream-of Wheat loads is their lack of leading and fouling, combined with high velocity, decent accuracy and a lack of gas checks. Does anyone else see a pattern here?

Many things can cause poor accuracy with cast bullets, including leading, gas check (copper) fouling, poor lube and the like. I'm sure that any base upset that does occur makes its contribution to the accu­racy equation, just as any other irregularity will. Base upset unquestionably occurs with soft alloys and hot loads, but I don't think it's the major cause of inaccu­racy, and with hard bullets in moderately powerful loads, and I think there's cause to question whether it occurs at all.

Next time, I'll use my myopic magnifying glass to take a look at bullet lubes. Are they really lubricants? If they aren't, what are they? How do they work? Why do they work? Why do we need them at all, and what makes them fail? My ideas may surprise you. See you then. Molly @