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I shot off a few 30-30 rounds in the back yard into a dirt pile 20 yards out the backdoor just to hear the rifle go "boom" The loads consisted of a 170gr LFNGC TrueShot bullet by Oregon Trail going about 1800 fps. Here is what the bullet looked like after I dug them up.
I have little cast experience and was wondering if this was typical bullet performance. I would have thought that most of the bullet would still be present, only transformed into a wadcutter type of shape. Instead, what I dug up was a bullet a little more than half it's original size with a nose tapered into a nice cone shape.
Did it perform this way because it was NOT made up entirely of lead? What happened to the nose of the bullet, is the remaining shape dirt pile related. How do you think these bullets would perform on game? Any ideas?
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I've seen premium cast bullet from BTB and CP and Garrett's loaded ammo come out of doug fir and other test media intact or nearly so and not much deformed.......I would have thought Lasercast would have held together a bit better. I have heard that they are extremely hard, which is why they claim not to lead your bore.
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I would think they lost lead was because they were fired into dirt. Notice the cone shaped points, I think they are that way from being ground away by the dirt.
Mike
Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit...
I've learned how to stand on my own two knees...
Oregon Trail products are an extremely hard alloy. During silhouette matches you can occasionally "bark" a target, with a soft lead bullet, if you shot low and hit the dirt in front of the rail. They kind of flatten out and kick up at the target. Laser Cast bullets just blow apart.
I know a whole lot about very little and nothing about a whole lot.
I have some super hard cast .459 dia 510-gr Elk Busters (caster is no longer alive) but I have experienced the very same thing after recovery. This showed me how brittle they can be getting chizzled down to a wad cutter look.
I suspect a combination of two factors will affect what you wind up with: BHN and Velocity.
I have some commercially cast bullets that are supposedly 24 bhn that are virtually undamaged when recovered from dirt but my home cast bullets (9# WW to 1# 50/50 solder) mushroom nicely as below when using the same load.
For just shootinng that bullet may be fine, but for hunting the alloy is way to hard. The nose is shattering off and my bet is thaat even in gel the bullet is going to come apart rather than expand. If you can shooot them without leading in your gun an anlloy of either straight wheel weighs un hardened or Lyman #2 mix would be way better. I am shooting staright w/w in my 30-30 and have killed deer wiht the load. The bullets are expanding wel and will penetrate completely most of the time. The recovered bullets are retaining 90% of their weight and expanded to about 1/2" in the nose.
