My first try at powder coating cast boolits

I don't Moly coat bullets. Maybe I am not qualified to comment but in my mind, Moly coating reduces friction in the barrel. It is not a lube intended to reduce leading in a barrel which is what lube does in both pistols and rifles shooting lead bullets at the high end of the velocity scale. Moly, applied to copper jacketed bullets. works but is difficult to clean whereas if you powder coat a bullet it serves as both a lube that also reduces/eliminates leading on cast bullets.

I commented on this in hopes more experienced folks can correct my errant statements.

Don't forget to get the white and mix the two for pink! Valentine's is right around the corner haha. They look fantastic! Should leave a nice clean bore.

I will forever relate the name pretzelxx to pink bullets.

Ha they look like jelly beans

Hmmmm another excuse to get into casting....

What if I've already bought 4000 traditionally lubed boolits?
I suppose I need to load em all up, and finally buy some casting equipment
for all the lead I have.

So if i bought 1000 cast bullets at .451 diameter and PC'd them, would i need to re-size or just load'm and shoot'm?

Now THIS is starting to look interesting!
I looked into various methods of "home coating" bullets a couple of years ago, but it sounded like a major pain in the behind and the expense pretty much drove the whole thing from my mind.

But this puts a whole new spin on it for me!

Did you by any chance take before and after measurements on those?
I read that they can be sized, but if the process adds just a couple of thousandths to overall diameter, and if you don't actually HAVE to size the coated bullets, I see new uses for a lot of old molds!
(Yeah, I'm a cheapskate...)

How does the rifling look? Can you paint the cases?

I have been getting into this also. Still in the learning stages, but so far results have been promising.
I originally got interested in trying this to see if I could improve the cast bullet performance in my 5.56 AR.
These are vary difficult to get satisfactory results. Speed/Twist/gas needs for the action. Way too easy to over twist the bullet.

Initial results are promising. Loaded at starting jacketed load of H335
They held together fine and accuracy was much improved over my best cast load.
Too early to call it a success, but it sure was no failure. More work to do.
But I have beat the best of MY cast loads 1st time out.





I had not really even considered coating pistol bullets. I have more than enough ways to size and lube them. Dont really have any loads that dont work.

Then I decided to see if they can be run through my Bullet feed dies.
The results may have just made me a full convert.
I have been dinking around for over a year trying to get cast bullets to feed with varying degrees of success. Eventually all lubed bullets end up gumming up the dies and a dissemble and clean needs to be done. Really defeats the perceived productivity gains by using a feed die.

Coated... Perfect feeding. Period....



Also finding I can size a bullet smaller than I normally would.
I.E. LEE 105 gr swc. Since I dont need to worry about maintaining adequate lube grove volume. Sizing to .356 is no issue.



I am using the HF Powder coating machine. Your not saving any work compared to standard lube. Actually is more work.
So in my Opinion, for guys that already have all the lube sizer ect. There needs to be other reasons to do it.
Hence my playing around with things standard lubed bullets dont do well. Leading reasons is not a reason. If you getting leading with standard lubed bullets. Your doing it wrong.

They look like tubes of lipstick. Maybe you are missing out on a marketing opportunity.

Well they are lip stick.... Taliban Lip stick.
Happy to provide free samples. All they have to do is stick their head up and say Goat Cheese.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

I have been interested in this idea for a while. I didn't want to try and join the conversation until I had something to share though.

This last weekend, I went to Harbor Freight and bought yellow and black powder coat. Like Palehorseman, I just rolled them around in a Tupperware container until they looked coated. With the yellow, it stuck on the first pass and they looked pretty good. I did a second coat after baking and it didn't seem to add much. On the matte black, they looked horrible the first coat but the second filled them out nicely. Unfortunately, they were out of the race car red... which was a shame because those look pretty smoking!

I had some aluminum window screen material that I used to rig a tray for them to bake on. I found that the screen wire was fine enough that it didn't leave any noticeable indentations on the bullets and they did not stick to it at all. A small square of the screen worked well for a strainer to dump the newly coated bullets on to get rid of the excess powder (which can be reused later).

I did not have enough time to work up more than 2 loads and for some reason, I had an urge to try and use up some of my promo... they did not shoot very accurately.

Even having said that, I am completely sold on this idea and am going to continue to work up loads until I get a good one. For one thing, promo usually smokes and these were extremely clean. There was no visible leading. They don't gum up my dies like the 45/45/10 stuff does and it added about .001 to the diameter of my bullets. This is a big help since both of my 9mm barrels are .357 and my molds tend to drop at .357.


Probably the biggest draw for me is that they just look cool. I know that is pretty petty but I have always been almost OCD about the appearance of my bullets.

If any of you have 9mm loads that you have worked up for these, I would be very interested. I am stocked pretty well with Unique, Bullseye, Promo, Blue Dot, power pistol, and 800x.

Thanks to Palehorseman for starting this thread. I have had a lot of fun with this one.

I put about 50 boolits in a clean coffee can and sprayed well with carb cleaner to clean, sloshed around for a bit and dumped out on paper towels to dry.

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I probably should add that I did NOT clean the bullets in any way. Granted, I had just cast them a day earlier but the powder coat adhered to them just fine with no cleaning.

Reminds me of he old Smith & Wesson NYCLAD bulletts...

we had a local scrapper that ended up with HBWC LRN SWC lead 45 and 38 cal and .38 SWCH nyclad bulletts as scrap once when smith quit the ammo business. I shot so many .38 HBWC and LRN it was not funny and had a milk carton of the nyclads... still have a cofffee can or so of them, I wish I had got in on the deal earlier I would have bought a 55 gal drum of them...
Anyhow they look really similar!

This is a great thread, thank you all for sharing

This idea really had my eye since Im looking to shoot subsonic 300 blackout for as cheap as possible. MBC has a great bullet but my suppressor is not user serviceable so Im very hesitant to shoot a lead bullet through it. Ideally I would get some unlubed bullets from MBC and then PC them so as to not lead my can or AR up. I would be interested to hear your ideas or thoughts on how or even if this is possible to do.

Boolits?

LT.Diver said:

Boolits?

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Boolits is used to describe hand cast bullets as opposed to factory bullets... they are all bullets to me

@Coz
I notice you have GC's on some of your bullets. It was my understanding that they're not really necessary with coated bullets.

Are you using them primarily to protect the base and reduce leading, or for increased accuracy because of the more uniform base?

I'm guessing that you installed them after the coating process?
Would you mind enlightening us as to your technique?

griff383 said:

This is a great thread, thank you all for sharing

This idea really had my eye since Im looking to shoot subsonic 300 blackout for as cheap as possible. MBC has a great bullet but my suppressor is not user serviceable so Im very hesitant to shoot a lead bullet through it. Ideally I would get some unlubed bullets from MBC and then PC them so as to not lead my can or AR up. I would be interested to hear your ideas or thoughts on how or even if this is possible to do.

Click to expand...

Ask this in the casting section of 300blktalk.com

Been doing a lot of reading lately on this method. Is anyone out there PC'g .308 bullets? I'm thinking of these .308's without a gas check (shouldn't need one if they're PC'd right?).

I'll be using the Lee mold, 170 grain. Since this mold is set up for a GC, I would think they would still shoot fine by being powder coated with no GC.

Your thoughts?