Ken Mollohan

First off, let me disavow any hint or implication that any of the following constitutes recommendations for you to put into practice. The SOLE purposes for this article are education and entertainment. Anyone attempting to replicate any of these procedures will bear sole responsibility for the results, as he will be the sole person with any control whatsoever over the conditions of use.

There are several types of cast bullets that can be used interchangeably with data for jacketed bullets. (Of the same weights, of course) They are not jacketed in the sense of the factory bullets you buy for your 30-06, but they are ‘jacketed’ in the sense of the accuracy and power they offer.

Paper Patching

This technique is mentioned only as a matter of thoroughness, as most casters who have passed the initial learning stages will have heard of paper patched cast bullets, though not many may have tried them. They are well documented in the industry, and this book deals with them extensively in another area. There is no need to duplicate that data here.

Metal Bands

The next type is somewhat obscure, but still fairly well known to advanced casters. It uses copper bearing bands cast into the bullet. The bands are cut from appropriate diameter tubing and dropped into the mold while casting. For example, 5/16” copper tubing is nominally 0.312” in diameter. A short length of it, not longer than the driving bands on your design, can be dropped into the open mold and held in place by closing the mold. Pouring the molten lead alloy in the mold will produce a rather odd looking cast bullet with the band as the bearing surface, instead of the usual bright lead surface.

I’ve read that some experimenters use such a band in every band on the bullet, and reported outstanding results. My hat’s off to them! But I’m klutzy enough that getting one band into the mold is about all I can do. (Hot!! Burny, burny! Use tweezers!) If I try to insert another one, more often than not, I knock the first one out. By the time I DO get them all in place, the mold has cooled and won’t cast well. (Working on the surface of a hotplate will help keep the temperature more uniform.) And I didn’t find more than one band (located at the bottom, just above the gas check) was necessary.

Results: Worked fine, but was a lot of trouble. And there aren’t too many tubing diameters so convenient. Half inch and 3/8 (0.375) are about the only other copper tubing with any potential at all. But there’s no reason to limit the idea to hardware store tubing. Most hobby stores carry what is called ‘telescoping brass tubing.” This is a series of thin brass tubes that are slip fits for one another, and they offer a very wide range of diameters. You can find something suitable for almost any need.

The biggest problem with this technique is getting the tubing cut reasonably well. If you can do it with a saw, you’re a better tool man than I am. I ended up getting some sliced off in lengths of 0.050” and 0.100” by a machinist friend. I’ve read that others have gone to the extreme of drilling holes through gas checks and using them as the bands. The hole is to allow the molten lead fill up the rest of the mold, or the GC would just act like a dam. The advantage would be that it’s easier to find the right diameter!

You might take a look at the instructions (elsewhere in this book) for making a paper patch mold in your own shop. While this was not its original intent, I see no reason that a bit of telescoping brass tubing (selected for a snug fit in the cavity) couldn’t be inserted before the lead was poured. The resulting ejected cast bullet would indeed be jacketed. While I would have some concern about the cast core shooting out to leave the jacket as a bore obstruction for the next shot, the simple process of rolling a groove around the jacket before casting should correct that potential problem. If one can find tightly coiled spring-stock of an appropriate diameter, this could also be used in the same way, with little danger of shooting through.

Other Metal Bands

Though few people realize it today, there were quite a few methods tried to overcome the velocity limitations of cast bullets. Believe it or not, you could once purchase factory made lead (swaged or cast?) bullets with a jacket that was composed of tightly wrapped soft copper wire. If the advertisements are to be believed, it worked fine - but its fallen by the technological wayside unless someone decides to resurrect it.

Other Alloys

Heigh-Ho, Silver, Awaaay! The Lone Ranger wasn’t satisfied to use run-of-the-mill lead bullets, as any boy of my generation could tell you. He and Tonto had a private silver mine where they did all their reloading. Believe it or not, I once read a magazine account of someone who decided to try it, and melted down a few coins in the interests of advancing our knowledge of cast bullet potentials. As I recall, he learned quite a lot, especially about concerns that were not initially considered, like the similarity of the melting points of silver and iron mold blocks. And the LR&T corporation must have had some really impressive buffalo running around if they were able to melt silver over a chip fire: The author had to resort to an acetylene torch, and even so, the best he could get were very poorly filled castings, more suited to fishing sinkers and sling shots than the type of marksmanship that the LR was accustomed to employing in his mission to fight evil and support truth and justice and the American Way.

But times have changed since those thrilling days of yester-year. As luck would have it, there is a much wide range of metallic alloys available today, suited for almost any need. I’ve played with a variety of Babbitt metals and such, mostly getting decent results, but without notable advantages. I found the best use of tin Babbitt was for tin for alloy blending. Lead Babbitt generally joined the range salvage box.

One exception is Zinc. Cast bullets are espoused by an occasional magazine article, and have even been reported favorably in the American Rifleman. They report fine accuracy, low pressures, high velocities and complete freedom from bore fouling. I have tried the technique, but was unable to get any usable castings. However, that was long ago, and I probably wasn’t using the proper zinc alloy. I’ve since learned that there are special grades of zinc alloys, including some especially designed for casting. (From here on, this is hearsay, provided for your information and consideration only!) From what I’ve read, such castable zinc alloys are actually common and inexpensive: You can get it by the basketful at your local automotive junk yard in the form of door handles, etc, which are (or at least once were) made from zinc castings.

Me? The time only time I tried casting zinc was so discouraging that I’ve not been tempted to revisit the experience. But some reports that I consider quite reliable / responsible have described a great deal of success with them. If you give it a try, please consider reporting your experience here for others to read and enjoy. From my limited experience, I’d suggest you have a heat source considerably hotter than the typical lead pot handy. Let’s see. A Bessemer furnace rented from a Pittsburgh steel mill might do. I wouldn’t advise using your favorite mold for the first try. Oh, yes: I’d also recommend a very thick sprue plate, a sharp pour hole, and a BIG hammer to cut the sprue. Zinc tends to be quite a bit harder than lead alloys.

There are other alloys with a melting point that suggests that they could have some potential for something like this. Aluminum comes to mind, and I’ve had some interesting results using machined aluminum bullets. And you can actually melt aluminum in a wood fire - but I’m not too sure about the efficacy of buffalo chips.

The problem is that molten aluminum has a very high surface tension, and doesn’t want to make sharp, detailed castings. Unless you can come up with a way to cast under enough pressure to push the aluminum into the mold, I’d recommend this as a first class waste of time and energy better devoted to Linotype.

REALLY strange stuff:

I once knew a fellow who made his own bullets for the .458 Winchester out of 35 Remington cases. He’d become annoyed with the performance of factory ammo, and decided to do something about it. And while he used swaging to form the finished bullet after adding the cold lead, there is no reason that the lead couldn’t be added with a dipper.

He prepared the .35 Rem cases by annealing the entire case dead soft, trimming to length (no, I don’t remember how long it was) and counter-boring the case interior to get the quick mushrooming he wanted. The solid brass base supplied bullet integrity. You could shoot a concrete wall, and still find some remains of the bullet. Then he dropped in a pre-weighed lead roll. (This is where your ladle could come into play.)

He’d either made, or had made a .458” bore sizing die, with a rounded nose cavity. This was installed in an RCBS Rockchucker press, along with a .35 Rem shell holder. Raising the ram swaged the lead to fit the interior, while shaping the nose to whatever contour he had made. If memory serves, he used lanolin for sizing lube. The ram and shell holder also provided plenty of extraction power: there were NO stuck bullets in his dies. He used enough lead to produce a little bleed teardrop on the nose, which was removed with a fingernail trimmer. It was one heck of a lot of work, and even a fanatic like me would have to be hard pressed indeed to go to such trouble.

And I don’t really expect anyone else to go to such lengths today. But it actually worked, and I thought the notion and technique should be mentioned because of the trouble of finding appropriate projectiles for some of the very old guns, many of which apparently had bore dimensions chosen by the flip of a coin. It isn’t necessary that the base of the case you use be an exact fit for the bore: A base a bit too large can be turned down past the web, if too small, the swaging process will expand or size the body to whatever diameter you’ve bored the swaging die for.

Believe it or not, I can recall a magazine article (many years ago) that outlined a similar procedure, but I have no recollection other than there once WAS such an article. I hereby submit my formal apologies for any inadvertent plagiarism.

Regards, Ken Mollohan