Soft nose bullets

[dmize]

Has anyone here ever cast a softnose bullet,as in pure lead to the front driving band and hard alloy after? I read a Scovill article article on it,and it made sense,but does it really make a difference?

[whitworth]

Sixshot -- Dick -- casts soft nose bullets for hunting. I hope he comes here to share the details.

[sixshot]

Haven't been on the computer much in the last month, I have a flooded basement ($30,000 damage) so I've been busy, trying to get things back to normal before it starts getting cold.
Softnose cast slugs work great for hunting & are pretty much fool proof with a little experimenting, you can actually dial in how much expansion you get depending on your chosen velocity. They can be spectacular in smaller calibers like the 357 because you can get very good expansion & still get the penetration of a hard cast slug.
A jacketed bullet usually has a smaller meplat than a cast slug of the same weight, the jacketed slug also needs to be driven at its ideal velocity to achieve expansion. No matter what bullet you use, if you get expansion you are going to give up some penetration, it can't work any other way.
I have no knock on jacketed bullets, I just like cast better & with the softnose bullets you have the best of both worlds, both expansion & penetration.
I demand 2 things of my hunting loads, first is placement, & the second is penetration, if I also get some expansion I'm way ahead of the game. For sure some jacketed slugs will give you both on broadside shots or on smaller big game like deer. Its when you have to take a shot at an angle that things can get tricky with jacketed slugs on bigger animals. But if you choose carefully there are jacketed slugs being made now days that are terrific, most have very heavy jackets & work about like solids or cast slugs but with a smaller meplat, plus pressures will be higher & velocity lower than with the same weight cast slugs.
Pound a big buck through the shoulders with a jacketed slug & you'll probably get him, do the same thing on a bull elk or moose & you might not, that expansion that many sixgunners think is magic can now work against them. I have too many friends who've had great luck with jacketed slugs to rule them out, I just stick with whats worked for me for almost 45 years. I do think jacketed slugs are proably better than cast on deer although I've never had a problem. Bullet placement comes first, a gut shot deer or elk is still gut shot, whether its jacketed or cast.
OK, lets make some cast softnose slugs! I first read about them several years ago in Handloader magazine when Ross Seyfried penned an article calling them the finest handgun slugs ever. He was right!
I use 2 melting pots, a small Lee 4 pounder that holds pure lead, it sits on my left side, on the right side is a 20 lb. Lyman pot full of WW alloy & in the middle is a small piece of steel plate, I sit my bullet mould on the steel plate. The mould is sitting level.
After I've made several casts to get the mould quite hot I now start casting my softnose cast. Using a 380 case with a wire handle I dip it into the pure lead & at the same time I get a dipper full of WW alloy in my right hand, I pour the pure lead in & quickly top it off with the WW alloy & usually water drop the slugs into a 5 gallon bucket of water. I have a rag pushed down into the water with a hole cut in the center of the rag, the bullet lands of the wet rag, rolls to the center & the cold slug drops to the bottom.
I make sure the seam where the 2 alloys weld together is above the ogive, that way if there's any part of the "seam" that isn't perfect it doesn't contact the rifling. I practice with regular slugs & use the softnose cast when things get serious.
I've taken deer, elk & moose with softnose & they can't be beat, you can adjust the amount of expansion by how much pure lead you use. You really need to decide on a velocity first & then cast accordinly. I've never recovered one yet, even on moose but you can see from the exit hole that they are the finest hunting bullets out there for the sixgun hunter because that pure lead will expand even when the bullet is down to maybe 600 fps.
Several million buffalo were killed with pure lead slugs. When the back 2/3"s is hard metal on a softnose you will always get complete penetration & it will be straight penetration because the bullet has the original flat nose & the flat nose is what makes sixgun bullets work so well, whether jacketed or cast.
I have photo's of my setup but I'm too busy remodeling to find them right now.

Dick

[dmize]

Wow Whit you were right and Dick Thanks a lot for the info, I guess what I should have said is,I deer hunt in Missouri,a BIG deer where I'm at will go just above 200 lbs on the hoof,with a 480 Ruger shooting a Lee 400 grain cast bullet do I really need to bother?

[whitworth]

Sept 18, 2011 21:32:50 GMT -5 dmize said:

Wow Whit you were right and Dick Thanks a lot for the info, I guess what I should have said is,I deer hunt in Missouri,a BIG deer where I'm at will go just above 200 lbs on the hoof,with a 480 Ruger shooting a Lee 400 grain cast bullet do I really need to bother?

I would say no. That big bullet will do the job as long as you do yours.

I told ya Dick is the man!

[bwelch47]

During the 80's, Lyman manufactured moulds which had two components which were use to cast hard bases and soft noses which were helt together with adhesive'

[dutch41]

castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=53234

Here's another method,

Scott

[subsonic]

I wonder if your exit hole is bigger because the nose blows off leaving a larger than normal meplat?

I have been kicking around an idea for plastic spitzer noses that attach to eiter full WC or WFN type bullets somehow and discard on impact, leaving the flat nose to do the work while increasing BC during flight. Then I realized I just re-invented a ballistic tip.

[smirker]

A few years back Ross Seyfried did a article in handloader on cast soft nose bullets. Maybe some one here can scan it and post it for you, dont know where my copy is at right now.

[flash]

The attempts I made were hit and miss but often produced good expansion results into wet newspaper. I never hunted with the bullets but they seemed to performed pretty well.
I used a round ball mould to cast 60 grain pure lead balls of consistent weights and then melted them separately in a small dipper.
As sixshot did, I got my 30 caliber mould up to temperature and poured the small dipper of 60 grains of lead into the mould. I followed that up with straight wheel weights and water quenched.
The small dipper of 60 grains gives better control over the soft nose size otherwise, it becomes too long and breaks off and /or bends over.

[subsonic]

I read something about anealing noses on quenched ww bullets in the beartooth manual. Set the bullet in water up to the crimp groove and heat with a propane torch until it turns color.

I don't know anything else about it, but it seems less than ideal since WW metal will still be around 10-12BNH air cooled and I just don't hear many people complaining about hard cast, flat-nosed bullets not taking game well.

[tek4260]

The biggest game I'll run into here is whitetail deer, so I play with HP's. Here are a few pictures of some non scientific results

325 Keith and 297 Mihec HP. Both straight WW



297 Mihec, straight WW left, 50/50 right




Shot into my box o dirt, then out the back side, then cut a 10ft trench along the ground, then hit my log backstop, except the 50/50 that didn't make it thru the 3' box. Pretty much gave up on catching boolits after that.

I'll try again one day when I come up with tons of newsprint.

[subsonic]

Sand will stop them.

I plan to try a water trough at some point.

[groo]

Groo here
If you want to try what a soft nose bullet would be like shoot some
Rem SJHP bullets loaded up...
This is the old style with lots of soft lead at the nose [not like the newer stuff]
The nose will blow off at speed leaving a wc base.