blarby
Member
This will be a continuation of last years' "A partnership for powdercoating".
The original thread can be found here :
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=753510
Its been over 200 days, and for all purposes will actually be easier to start anew with this years experimentation.
Ahhhh, a lot of things can happen in a year ! New laws, New guns, New injuries.....
But, Harbor Freight still sells powdercoat ! The earth is still round, and as promised, the show will go on !
Speaking of powdercoat, I did try a new color- the Matte Black from Harbor Freight.
It sucked.
Super poor adhesion despite all of my efforts, and multiple coats made no difference. If you are tuning in for the first time, feel free to skip the Matte Black !
I'm all ears on a new flavor to try other than that this year, if there are any requests !
I am actually working full time again, and juggling a fun shotgun project, and a full summers' shooting schedule- including a fairly large assortment of defense carbine and shotgun courses- so if I'm away, or a bit slow in posting new things this year, I apologize in advance.
With all of that out of the way, lets cover some stuff now that all of the loads from last year have been shot, as a matter of housekeeping :
#1 All of the Glock rounds in 40 s/w performed flawlessly. I ended up selling the gun, and the new owner remarked at how "unused" the barrel looked. Some 3000 rounds in, thats a statement if I've ever heard one.
#2 I did get to do some side-by-side comparisons of the "thin" single coat bullets against the more uniform double coated bullets. It made no difference I could discern in 357, 44 mag, 40 s/w or 45 ACP. I did notice some additional leading on the 30 carbine in the single coat loads. So theres that. I'm still going to do double coats because I like the uniform look of the finished product, but I'd have to say at this point its probably not necessary except in the most demanding of applications. I noticed no discernable difference in accuracy at 7, 10, and 25 yard targets from the pistol loads.
#3 The pure lead hollowpoints in 44 mag performed well in wet newspaper tests. They were going about 1300 FPS in 210 gr, and 1150 in 240 gr. I have no desire to push them further, but I'm sure you could, and get even wider expansion. There was no lead fouling, even using pure lead at higher velocities. I'm not sure if this was a result of the double coat of PC, or not- as these were two of the bullet types that only got double coated.
Now, on to this year !
Things we're gonna try :
#1 I got a spiffy KEITH 158 gr LSWC for 357 mag, and these bullets are gonna be great, I know already. It was a Fun winter project rehabbing this mould, as it was essentially a block of iron oxide that I slowly coaxed back into usefulness. I know the square lube groove does us little in powdercoating, but its nice to put this piece of history to good use.
#2 160gr .312 bullets for an SKS. Had a lot of requests for this one, and the Mrs. really likes her SKS, so this will get done. Still waiting on the tooling on this one- dies, moulds, and sizers .311-.314. Hurry up truck !
#3 Speaking of tooling, if someone can figure out how to get a lee push-through sizer in .459, I'd be stoked. It doesnt exist
. I was able to try some .459 PC bullets in my 458 socom last year, but I can't really judge its effectiveness, because they had to be sized in my SAECO, and thus, had high-speed rifle lube in them. They worked well, but I want to get rid of the lube. After about 150 rounds the lube starts building up in the chamber (not the gas port, thankfully ! ) and makes chambering impossible. This is one application I really want the PC for, and I'm stuck on tooling :banghead:
#4 I'm going to try a limited amount of 170gr GCFN's in .309 in my new M1A just to see what shakes loose. I now understand the gas system a lot better, and can get in there and clean it well if things go awry. If the M1 carbine and M1 garand loads are any indication, I think this should make for fun "end of brass life" plinker loads for this rifle to get one more shot out of notoriously short-lived brass.
Anyone have anything to add ? BDS ?
One little note :
We're ( the partnership) are pretty focused on the easy, low-tooling, low-tech, shake and bake method for this project. We're focused in that manner because, as I stated last year :
If you'd like to extol the virtues of your wiz-bang bowdercoat spray system or your pizza-oven cooker, please feel free to do so...in another thread. We're trying to keep it simple, amd focused on simple-low tech so that veterans and novices alike can jump into the game with as minimal an outlay of materials and tooling as possible, using methods that have been demonstrated to work using such.
I understand that a lot of methods work very well. Thats awesome, and I'm glad they do. We're just not covering those methods here.
The original thread can be found here :
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=753510
Its been over 200 days, and for all purposes will actually be easier to start anew with this years experimentation.
Ahhhh, a lot of things can happen in a year ! New laws, New guns, New injuries.....
But, Harbor Freight still sells powdercoat ! The earth is still round, and as promised, the show will go on !
Speaking of powdercoat, I did try a new color- the Matte Black from Harbor Freight.
It sucked.
Super poor adhesion despite all of my efforts, and multiple coats made no difference. If you are tuning in for the first time, feel free to skip the Matte Black !I'm all ears on a new flavor to try other than that this year, if there are any requests !
I am actually working full time again, and juggling a fun shotgun project, and a full summers' shooting schedule- including a fairly large assortment of defense carbine and shotgun courses- so if I'm away, or a bit slow in posting new things this year, I apologize in advance.
With all of that out of the way, lets cover some stuff now that all of the loads from last year have been shot, as a matter of housekeeping :
#1 All of the Glock rounds in 40 s/w performed flawlessly. I ended up selling the gun, and the new owner remarked at how "unused" the barrel looked. Some 3000 rounds in, thats a statement if I've ever heard one.
#2 I did get to do some side-by-side comparisons of the "thin" single coat bullets against the more uniform double coated bullets. It made no difference I could discern in 357, 44 mag, 40 s/w or 45 ACP. I did notice some additional leading on the 30 carbine in the single coat loads. So theres that. I'm still going to do double coats because I like the uniform look of the finished product, but I'd have to say at this point its probably not necessary except in the most demanding of applications. I noticed no discernable difference in accuracy at 7, 10, and 25 yard targets from the pistol loads.
#3 The pure lead hollowpoints in 44 mag performed well in wet newspaper tests. They were going about 1300 FPS in 210 gr, and 1150 in 240 gr. I have no desire to push them further, but I'm sure you could, and get even wider expansion. There was no lead fouling, even using pure lead at higher velocities. I'm not sure if this was a result of the double coat of PC, or not- as these were two of the bullet types that only got double coated.
Now, on to this year !
Things we're gonna try :
#1 I got a spiffy KEITH 158 gr LSWC for 357 mag, and these bullets are gonna be great, I know already. It was a Fun winter project rehabbing this mould, as it was essentially a block of iron oxide that I slowly coaxed back into usefulness. I know the square lube groove does us little in powdercoating, but its nice to put this piece of history to good use.
#2 160gr .312 bullets for an SKS. Had a lot of requests for this one, and the Mrs. really likes her SKS, so this will get done. Still waiting on the tooling on this one- dies, moulds, and sizers .311-.314. Hurry up truck !
#3 Speaking of tooling, if someone can figure out how to get a lee push-through sizer in .459, I'd be stoked. It doesnt exist
. I was able to try some .459 PC bullets in my 458 socom last year, but I can't really judge its effectiveness, because they had to be sized in my SAECO, and thus, had high-speed rifle lube in them. They worked well, but I want to get rid of the lube. After about 150 rounds the lube starts building up in the chamber (not the gas port, thankfully ! ) and makes chambering impossible. This is one application I really want the PC for, and I'm stuck on tooling :banghead:#4 I'm going to try a limited amount of 170gr GCFN's in .309 in my new M1A just to see what shakes loose. I now understand the gas system a lot better, and can get in there and clean it well if things go awry. If the M1 carbine and M1 garand loads are any indication, I think this should make for fun "end of brass life" plinker loads for this rifle to get one more shot out of notoriously short-lived brass.
Anyone have anything to add ? BDS ?
One little note :
We're ( the partnership) are pretty focused on the easy, low-tooling, low-tech, shake and bake method for this project. We're focused in that manner because, as I stated last year :
If you'd like to extol the virtues of your wiz-bang bowdercoat spray system or your pizza-oven cooker, please feel free to do so...in another thread. We're trying to keep it simple, amd focused on simple-low tech so that veterans and novices alike can jump into the game with as minimal an outlay of materials and tooling as possible, using methods that have been demonstrated to work using such.
I understand that a lot of methods work very well. Thats awesome, and I'm glad they do. We're just not covering those methods here.
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