#bombbullet

At the request of a friend I reposted this from a post I made in 2014 on a forum we used. It was posted over several weeks of nickel and diming the project so I have edited it to remove all the extraneous commentary from the forum:

This project is way over-due but I am gone a lot and I have to work on things every few months as I can. I chose to call this project the Green Beanie (they will understand why) in tribute to the two men who have made it possible. Matt is a local retired guy who has a gunsmith shop up the road and gives me free run of the place to do things I don't have tools for at home. Mike is a friend, brother in arms, and an artist with metal: more to follow on that when I post the complete project. I don't get to see him as freely as I would like but he has been inspirational as a man and artisan. My wife bought me a Boyd’s Tacticool stock for my rimfire trainer an Christmas or two back. I really like the stock and bought one for this SML. The more I shoot the Tacticool the more I realize it is not quite right for me. The grip is too much and could stand some more taper from tang to wrist. The forearm is beaver-tailed and too fat for a psuedo-sporter. The Tacticool barrel channel is for a Varmint/Sendero channel and as a result left a unsightly gap around my barrel. I used a modified Douglas 5A contour on this gun so I taped the barrel and full-length bedded the gun so that when the tape was removed I had .040" of float from the recoil lug forward. To reduce the forearm I used a plane and cut the beavertail down parallel to the top edge of the forearm and all hard edges were radiused. Using the McMillan ADJ GameScout I am smitten with, I sketched the reduction in the stock tang/wrist area and began to work it down with a rasp (not a great tool for laminate as it is very "chippy"). I changed over to a cabinet maker file and orbital sander. The comb is too low to allow for a good cheek-weld using a 20MOA off-set base and low Night Force rings so I molded, cut-down, and sanded a cheek-piece from Multi-Cam Kydex with an American flag to keep in tradition with the rifle's theme. Once I had it close to completion I mounted it on the stock and drilled the hardware holes though the Kydex and into the stock. I am not anywhere near done but it was time to take a coffee break and eat second breakfast. I still need to clean up the bedding as well as epoxy in the cheek-piece bushings, QD Push-button inserts, and bi-pod m1913 rail bushings. When all the prep-work is done I will primer the stock, cut the stencils, and paint the entire stock to match the cheek-piece. Was this the easiest way to get what I wanted? Absolutely not. Ordering another GameScout would have been much easier but some of us are diseased. Tacticool stripped of textured black paint, drilled for hardware, bedded, and ready for shaping (note: you can see where the stock has cross-pins and you can't see it but at the bottom of the pistol-grip there is another plug where they epoxy a pin into the grip just like you should in wood vertical grip stock which checked off one item from my to-do list):

The bedding before clean up (the overflow was allowed so I had proud material to allow for the reshaping of the grip and to allow for a better fit of the ejection port cutout in the stock as it left a lot to be desired). The stock was ordered as an ADL since they don't offer a 40-X inlet and they only do a 700ML in a thumbhole so the mag box cutout was filled with cutdown carbon arrows (which I have broken while stump shooting with my longbow) and everything epoxied in place:

Rough sketch of grip reduction to occur and holes for cheeck-piece hardware (the comb on the Tacticool is too low for a 20MOA base with low NF rings):

Kydex cheek-piece (only .080" thick so as not to remove eye far from center-line of comb):

Tacticool in relation to GameScout which it is going to resemble soon:

You can see little pock marks where the trigger pin holes were filled to prevent a mechanical lock. They are ugly so I cut them out. Honestly, I don't know that it is necessary but it looks better. Since I didn't have Matt’s mill I used my drill press with drill press vise and a router bit. I line up where I want the recesses and use the depth stop on the press to make as uniform a cut as possible. I make a small cut, again and again, to the desired depth so that the bit doesn't walk:

I mentioned I wrapped the barrel with tape and full length bedded it to fill the barrel channel which was a gross mismatch for my contour. You can keep good tight wraps on the barrel shank and straight taper but the radius just forward of the breech gets little wrinkles and there are fine lines where the wraps of tape meet along the length of the barrel. So I put two wraps of tape the entire length of the barrel and took a strip of 150 grit aluminum oxide cloth, tightened the action down and cut back the barrel channel bedding just enough to remove blemishes then prepped it for paint. I also removed the proud bedding material along the top stock line where the ejection port cutout formerly was a poor fit:

Grip Reduction complete and blended with the angle of the tang:

I decided not to dish out the "thumb flute" (if you will but it is not a flute in the traditional sense but it is not the wrist either) as it looks awfully thin once the grip/wrist reduction was finished. Thumb-holes are thinner I believe but they remind me of an H-brace in a fence and I think they probably distribute the recoil force better. Regardless, I stopped once it felt good enough to quit.

I also epoxied in the brass bushings for the cheek-piece hardware. I use Loc-Tite 5-minute epoxy for things like this. They use a 10x32 machine screw and are available through Brownells:

A few weeks back I received my breech plug lapping tool. Today, while I was waiting on some epoxy to set, I worked the BP shoulder over. I used three different cameras trying to get a good picture. This is the best I got for my efforts and shows an evenly polished shoulder:

I off-set it to the upper portion of the stock because if you don't the gun will tend to tip away from you when slung because the barreled action and optic make them top heavy:

I learned that the hard way when I ordered them pre-installed on the McMillan:

The forward insert is 13" ahead of the trigger-guard and lines up with where the insert in the M1913 rail on bottom goes for the bi-pod mount:

It's time to paint the stock on the Green Beanie. I masked the bedding, recoil pad, and plugged the threaded inserts for the cheek-piece so we don't get paint anywhere I don't want it. I then used a paint and primer color that is a grey/tan/slate color with a slight pink hue. It is a good base color for a Multi-Cam type pattern:

While it is drying I took a piece of wax paper and taped it so that the taped over lapped and drew my stencils:

Once the primer/paint combo dried I faded a flat tan into it in patches. I don't know that you can tell in the picture:

To create light spots I lay in the decals and then paint over them in a dark brown as they should be grouped together:

The blue decals will be dark chocolate colored and are paired with the grey/tan color from the picture above. I just did the reveal on the match rifle skins and they are sitting next to the Green Beanie stock. My dark brown paint wasn't playing nice with the plastic of the skins so I am going to have to go back and add it in but the Green Beanie should finish up similar to those skins.

I am going to let the brown dry overnight and tomorrow I will do the last two coats. To get the mid fade you need a light loam green and a red brown color. The goal is about a 50-50 coverage running in stripes that have some fade to them. I run them at a diagonal so that when I come back for the next coat I can run the other direction (criss-cross) to achieve a non-polarizing effect:

Now that we have a micro detail in light grey/tan and dark brown and macro detail in loam green and red brown we need larger pattern stencils. Macro detail in place over mid fade:

And final fade is tan, olive drab green, and another weird but slightly brighter loam green:

All decals removed you have something that looks similar to Multi-Cam. It just needs to sit in the garage a while to ensure that the paint is completely dry and tack free:

The Green Beanie is finished. Quick Re-Cap: Remington 700ML with Hunter Bolt Nose Kit PT&G .187" stainless lug McGowen CM .442/.451", 1-24″ twist barrel in a modified Douglas 5A contour crowned at 23", threaded for a muzzle-break Trigger is blueprinted factory and adjusted to 2.25# All CM parts are finished in Graphite Black Cerakote Scope base is Murphy Ti 10 MOA (Devcon bedded, screws siliconed and torqued to 25 in*lbs) Boyd's Tacticool (modified and pillar/glass bedded)

Quick load test shows a preference for 300gn bullet:

This has been an extremely busy year for me (having been gone a lot or working 18-hour days) and I have not been able to continue this study of Smooth-Form and Full-Form shooting that I started back in May. It is pretty apropos that this is Labor Day weekend because I just finished a huge bullet order for Arrowhead Sporting Goods, I have four days off from my real job, and I can just sit here and write up a continuation of this analysis. If you have not had a chance to read the case studies of  Smooth-Form vs Wads and Smooth-Form vs Full-Form give them a once over so that you can follow along. With hunting season quickly approaching I wanted to give you something a with a little more gravity than a bar graph on which to base your choices.

To start with this will be a completely conceptual approach based on modeling. Leading into the live fire portion of this test I shot a pound of powder and $100 worth of bullets in a couple of range sessions. Prior to that I shot close to 500 bullets ($1000) down range and gave away half that many for R&D to develop the BOMB and M-BOMB. That is not sustainable for me (or any small shop) at the moment. Enter Bryan Litz and Applied Ballistics, LLC (AB).

Bryan is the Chief Ballistician at Berger Bullets, a competitive shooter, and founder of the Applied Ballistics Laboratory. If you have not read his books you should because they are modern advancements on older works by Rinker and Mann. Bryan also has written the most advanced and accurate ballistic solvers around. I received his AB Analytics Package for my birthday last week and have been running the Weapon Employment Zone (WEZ) analysis for everything I own to ensure I have set myself up for the highest chances of success in every combination I shoot from the field of competition the hunting fields. The WEZ will be the tool we use to compare down range results of Smooth-Form and Full-Form shooting based on the findings from the aforementioned studies.

The WEZ is a modeling program that allows us to choose from several confidence levels (parameters for uncertainty) in regards to the shooter’s ability to judge wind, estimate range, or zero the rifle as well as the rifle’s precision and velocity deviation. We will continue this study over several weeks where we look at the shooter and various bullets but today we are only concerned with the gun and load. We will assume we are talking about a very good shooter who can properly zero, has a range finder, and can read wind very well (or we can have a no wind day). I understand there will say that this is just a model and isn’t real. That is undeniably true but Bryan has live fired a lot of ammo to test the modeling and they line up. I compared it to my competiton guns data and it pretty well matches my records as well. Even if you don’t buy that, modeling 1,000 shots with our chosen parameters stills saves you and I a lot of money and provides the necessary information to make better informed decisions about what we shoot and how we shoot it.

For the purpose of analyzing Smooth-Form vs Full-Form in the WEZ I am primarily concerned with velocity deviations since that is what the major take-away from the prior study was although I have also found that Full-Form tends to give better precision as well. We will also look at the two in regard to precision but it does not have as large effect on hit percentage as what you might believe. Plus, Smooth-Form can give really good precision but 100yds groups do not mean much in regard to long range shooting once you get inside of the 1MoA benchmark.

To start the comparison we are going to say we can shoot within the capability of the gun/load combination and have a Kestrel for atmospherics, can read read wind (although we will model winds at 0mph), and know precisely how far the target is. The same bullet was shot in all trials so there is no advantage between loads except the precision and velocities recorded. To isolate the effect of velocity deviation we are going to use the best precision recorded for all 10-shots which was right at 1MoA.

Since we are not using these rifles for score shooting or benchrest nobody cares about the MoA of the group at range in regard to hunting. If you do you are not thinking right except to determine the max range your raw precision affords your a fight chance at a first round hit. The vitals do not change size with range. Since most of us are deer hunters we will model the target as a 10″ circle since that is about the size of a whitetail’s vital area. All we are concerned with is a high percentage chance of making a first-round lethal hit. All range inputs for the WEZ are metric as it is intended for the military but all will be converted to yards in the caption. I will consider 90% to be our threshold for success and that anything below 90% we will have enough self control to pass on the shot since this is a living, breathing creature we intend to shoot at.

Also, before we even get started I am not advocating that anyone shoot this far using an SML. As discussed in the the bullet design and penetration entries we know that bullets need about 1800fps for reliable expansion. Our best load here hits the 1800fps barrier around 448yds. Although all examples here carry the prescribed 1000 ft-lbs of energy much farther than 448yds they don’t have the requisite velocity to ensure proper bullet performance. I am only demonstrating the importance of pursuing low deviations for the purpose of increasing hit probability.

Smooth-Form/No-Wad: Avg MV 2687, SD 15fps, 90% hit probability under Ideal conditions 656yds

Smooth-Form/Wool-Wad: Avg MV 2678, SD 16fps, 90% hit probability under ideal conditions 646yds

Smooth-Form/Veggie-Wad: Avg MV 2691, SD 7fps, 90% hit probability under ideal conditions 749yds

Full-Form/No-Wad: Avg MV 2707, SD 7fps, 90% hit probability under ideal conditions 751yds

I get e-mails all the time about bullet performance in regards to everything from bullet sizing, to ballistic coefficients, and bullet expansion. I try to answer everything to the best of my ability based on either actual testing or my best educated guess (which I always say is a guess if I have to do it). I test, if possible, to solve the inquiries if I have not done so already but there is a finite amount of time I have available to me. Luckily, inquiring minds also want to know and are willing to share their findings. Dave in Iowa sent me the results of his penetration test using Kinetic Performance LLC 302gn BOMB and 300gn M-BOMB so guys could see what they look like after impact. 

The bullets were launched by 78gn of BH209 from a CVA Optima. With his chronograph twelve yards from the muzzle (to protect it from sabot strikes) it registered right at 1900fps. A little backward math means the muzzle velocity is in the neighborhood of 1924fps which is representative of what you can expect these guns to do from any modern substitute blackpowder. That velocity would be representative of factory Savage ML-II with an MV of 2400fps shooting between  200 and 300 yards or a .45 SML with an MV of 2800fps shooting between 350 and 450 yards.

CVA Optima, 78 gr by weight of BH 209 302 gr BOMB with MMP orange 458 sabot shot from Caldwell Magnum Fieldpod:

The jugs were filled with water and placed at 100yds with a 2x6 board as a backstop in case the bullets passed through the jugs.

The jacket from the 302gn BOMB was recovered in the 2nd and 3rd jug (which is where the core separated and is twice the thickness of a deer's thoracic cavity) and the core passed through all jugs and the 2" thick wood backer but was not recovered. That means that the 213gn core just kept on going. The jacket also looks a lot like the only one recovered from a deer killed with the BOMB; all others have been complete pass throughs: 

Dave’s results pretty much mimic what we saw from Jeff Fisk last fall. As I mentioned above, this test is about what one could expect from a Savage ML-II or .45 sabotless gun using lots of BH209 and an MV of 2400fps would do at 200 to 300yds. Jeff shot this brute that field dressed at 231lbs through both shoulders at 236yds using a 302gn BOMB where impact velocity would have been about 1900fps:

Bullet entrance through shoulder blade:

Exit wound through off-side shoulder blade. Jacket caught under skin and separated hide from body all the way up the neck to the head. Bullet core exited the body and was not recovered as jug tested showed:

Jacket as recovered from buck:

The 300gn M-BOMB went through all jugs and the backer and the last time the spotter saw it was when it hit the 200yds berm. 

Unhappy with the fact that the BOMB’s core and the M-BOMB were not recovered Dave conducted the test again but added a high density plastic bale behind the board to catch the bullets as they passed through. 

This time the jacket passed through all jugs and stuck in the backer board. The core was found 4 inches into the bale. Total retained weight 278.7gn which is 92.3 percent of original weight;one ear of the pedal was broke off.

The second BOMB is shown with all pedals with the core with a total retained weight of 299.9gn or 99.3 percent of original weight. The pedals were found in jugs #3 and #4, and the core was 5 inches into the bale. 

Same set up as before, but was shooting the 300 gr M-BOMB with the MMP 458 sabots. One went thru 4 big jugs and 6.5 inches into the bale; the tip was the only thing missing, weight was 292.8gn for 96.9 percent. The next bullet opened up a little going thru 6 jugs and hitting at the base of the 2 x 6 and the backer board. 

Edit: 20 minutes after I posted this Dave killed a deer with the M-BOMB and e-mailed me the results.

Keith,  

Down by where I hunt, a farmer has a tree farm, and he gets special deer tags, so was able to do a hair test with the Optima, shooting the 300 gr Mono's 110 gr of BH 209, shooting out of a pop up blind, 83*. Saw the deer at 158 yards, watched it come thru the field and jump the fence onto our property, 132 yards, double lung ran 32 yards.Went to where I had shot him and found parts of the lungs 4 foot away from where I had hit him. The pictures are marked entrance 1 and 2, exit 1 and 2, and lungs. After we started to clean him up, took the pic of the lungs, there was nothing left of them. Then I noticed the size of the exit hole inside of chest cavity, looked like the bullet had tumbled, The bullet hole looks like it went thru the exit hole side ways.

Dave

Entrance 1

Entrance 2

Exit 1

Exit 2

Lungs

By late winter I had the concept in hand  (picture at top of page) and by early spring I had the first test batch in my possession for preliminary testing: 25 x boattail and 125 x flatbase. I kept the boattail and 25 of the flatbase, the rest were mailed out in 25 count boxes to testers who were experienced in shooting monolithics or who were experienced shooting sabotless with Blackhorn209. All were .458″ since all the testers primarily shoot Full-Form.

First run of the Monolithic B.O.M.B off the Swiss lathe:

The first thing I discovered was that these copper bullets were not the nightmare to size that I had heard from other shooters using other solid copper bullets. That meant the choice of copper already showed an advantage. On the flip side, I had to adjust my sizing die 8.75-ish notches tighter. The Hankins die does not have fine graduations like the Swinglock die so you have to estimate or scribe your die if you ever need something in between that you intend to reference again. The usual setting I use for the cup and core bullets was painted green so I knew where to return to. Without that sizing adjustment there was no prayer of those bullets going down the barrel. That is why you pull your plug and size bullets then test fit them at the house. If you don’t you get to the range and they might not load.

Flat Base and Boat-Tail versions of the Monolithic B.O.M.B. Full-Formed after test sizing:

Where I ran into an issue right up front was I had been shooting a bunch of IMR3031 along with jacketed bullets for the past year. I chose to clean the barrel prior to switching over to H4198 and the mono bullet. My test fit at the house was spot on for a clean barrel. After two foulers into the berm and a 3-shot group I found the next bullet had to be hammered down using a rubber mallet. I shot it and hammered down two more (seen below is the target with the first two groups shot with these bullets). If you reference the target it supports my claim that as seating pressure increases it is less controllable and precision suffers (not much in this case but happened nonetheless).

Boat-Tail at 100yds from my gun:

I jumped in the truck and sped away to the house where I again pulled the plug and tightened up the die until I had an appropriate fit for the dirty bore that allowed for one hand of seating pressure. I sized three more bullets, threw my charges, re-primed my modules and headed back to the range since I had an hour of light left. Since the M-BOMB had shot so well at 100yds I could not call it quits until I had shot them to 300yds. I got to the range with enough time to go paint a piece of steel and hammer out a group in the cold, windy evening as the light failed.

Boat-Tail at 300yds from my gun:

Having seen the night before that the boat-tail M-BOMB was stellar when Full-Formed I felt certain that the flat base would be too but Full-Forming the flat base had to wait. With a six week work trip coming up I had limited time so I decided to draw some down to .452″ and smooth size them since I hadn’t gotten .452″ bullets for testing. I chose the flat-base over the boat-tail because conventional wisdom is that you cannot shoot boat-tail bullets Smooth Form. Since I did not have a ton of the boat-tail nor did I have a surplus of time I took the safe bet. Maybe I’ll test that theory later.

I Smooth-Formed them and they tumbled when I shot them so I determined that as soft as these were compared to other copper bullets they were not soft enough for smooth form. It is possible also that running a .458 bullet through a .454 sizer, then a .452 sizer, and finally a Swinglock Smooth-Form die work hardened the bullet to a point where it was too hard for use as a land rider. I decided to anneal them and try again. Fifteen minutes on the electric stove, set to high, softened them up (but did not jettison the tip which annealing with a torch will do as one tester found out which supports the idea they work pneumatically) and quenching them in a cup of Apple Cider Vinegar cut the oxidation right off. Some guys do not bother cleaning them after annealing but I don’t like to put anything that looks like that through my dies or barrel. A quick spin in a piece of bronze wool and they looked brand new. Don’t worry, the .452 version will come pre-annealed using inert gas so you will have a soft and clean bullet for Smooth-Form without having to do any of the work.

A copper bullet will slightly shrink when you anneal it so it came out slightly undersized with my current setting on my Swinglock Smooth-Form die. I didn’t want to adjust the die since I only intended to Smooth Form a few so for the first (and probably only) time in my life I used a pair of files to knurl the annealed bullets up a touch in diameter until I had the proper fit. Some guys do this regularly and it works. I would caution  if you do this, ensure you use high quality files or you could end up with slivers of teeth from the file embedded in your bullets and that will ruin a barrel (happened to a couple of guys I know).

Flat-Base annealed, drawn down to .452, and shot Smooth-Form in my gun:

I Full-Form sized the remainder of the flat base bullets for testing precision and drops to confirm or deny what computer modeling had predicted for ballistic coefficient. They sat for the next eight weeks, unused while I was gone, and were shot when I got back. Apparently a copper bullet will spring back just a touch over time just like a cup and core bullet will. After two months they were just enough larger that they went from one hand loading to two hands. I recommend, regardless of bullet, that you size them only as you need them to fill your shooting needs. I did not bother resizing them because I could load them consistently enough to feel good about it and was getting pretty good precision.

Flat-Base at 100yds from my gun:

Flat-Base at 300yds from my gun:

My buddy Carlos did quite a bit of testing of the M-BOMB as well. Carlos is a long time SML shooter and does a lot of internet muzzle-loader business for Ed’s Gunshop in Vass, NC.  He used two separate rifles for the testing: one gun had a 1-18″ twist like my gun and the other gun was a 1-22″ which is more common for a .45 SML. In either case he met with great success using the M-BOMB and had results compiled for me as soon as I got home from my training.

Flat-Base at 100yds from Carlos’ Gun #1:

Flat Base at 100yds from Carlos’ Gun #2:

Flat Base at 300yds from Carlos’ gun:

With everything having panned out so far Carlos, Rob, and I hit the range to test some 415gn BOMB bullets and to test powder sensitivity with the new M-BOMB. The bore was freshly cleaned so Carlos shot a fouler then we started the test. Using 81gn, 85gn, and 90gn of IMR3031 with the M-BOMB showed very little change in the point of impact across the 150fps change suggesting that the bullet is fairly insensitive to changes in powder charges. This was mirrored in my gun also which showed very little POI shift between boat-tail and flat-base versions of the M-BOMB.

Powder Sensitivity Test:

As the test showed, Full-Form bullet sizing offers --at the very least-- advantages of higher and more consistent muzzle velocities. In that particular test it also showed the highest precision with a 10-shot group of 1.035 MoA. This was not a surprise to me because in several guns Full-Form sizing has proven to give up better precision than Smooth-Form sizing.

My Remington 700ML with McGowen .451″ barrel was pretty forthcoming with good precision. I could just Full-Form a bullet with a single pass, push it down with one hand, and shoot little groups. That barrel did not require indexing of the bullet; if you are unfamiliar with the term it means aligning the bullet at the muzzle so that the formed bullet is matched to the exact groove corresponding to it. This was not an issue; just push bullet through brake, twist until it dropped into the barrel, and push to seat.

Having said that, it did not happen that way with my Hankins gun. Full-Form sizing for that Brux barrel would leave some bullets hard to seat. It turns out that on the lands of this barrel one or two of them have a small flat. If you look at the picture below you can see what looks like a groove just above the green dot on the punch. That is a flat in the land, the grooves are lined up with the red dots on either side of the green dot.

Some makes of dies seem to be better (Swinglock namely and it’s patented) and so do some barrels. Brux makes good barrels but not every barrel is going to be perfect. I had to figure out a work around to get this die and barrel in concert because I was determined to make Full-Form work in this gun due to the performance advantages it offers.

I began to index all the bullets but it was still spotty as to how consistent my bullets fit the barrel. On the range it was causing mayhem with my precision and accuracy. I might shoot three or four shots through one ragged hole then pitch one or two shots an inch and half or two out of the group. Being the kind of guy who immediately looks at myself instead of my equipment when I fail I let this go on for a few weeks trying to work through it. I spent a lot of time with a small bore gun working fundamentals and hit the range again to no avail. Certain it was not me I began tweaking bullet sizing and powder charge. I completely re-assembled the gun to make sure there were no issues. Nothing improved. 

Whenever I can’t figure something out I talk to people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. I usually find out there is still nothing new under the sun and that there is a viable solution someone else has figured out. In this instance the recommendation from my buddy Rob was to size the bullet two to three times, rotating the bullet each time. The idea is that it is still Full-Form so a much more occlusive seal than a Smooth-Form but by rotating it you eliminate the sensitivity to indexing. You can just find a land/groove orientation, the bullet pushes past the crown, then you ram it home.

The question I had was, “How do you do this without having a bullet with twelve to eighteen grooves in it?” After a brief explanation via text message I had a grasp on how to get it done.

If you take a look at the punch (protruding from the top of the die) you will see one green witness mark and two red. The green lines up with the witness mark at the bottom of my die where the bullet enters (couldn't get a good pic). Luckily, I had my Full-Form bushing inserted in the die where a land was lined up facing me. If you have a fixed bushing die you just have to mark it where you can see a land to work with.

When you mark your punch I recommend that you spot drill it. If you don’t your mark will wipe away. Drill it or punch it then paint it. You need to mark your bullet the first time as well (I used green since my first dot was green). After you size the bullet you can re index the two marks (one in punch and one in a land) then mark your grooves. Again, I recommend that you spot drill your grooves and paint them or you will lose your marking.

If you look at the two red dots both are aligned with the left edge of the groove they correspond to. That is how far the bullet rotates in one pass. When I make the second pass I turn the bullet 180° (or half the total number of grooves in your barrel) and line those two red dots on the inside right edge of the rifling to take into account how they enter the die. If you feel any resistance that feels like initial forming stop and use a dowel to punch out from the top instead of cutting a larger groove. Another technique is to use a piece of tubing and run it through the top of the die towards the ram, force it over the bullet tip, then pull up and index it into the die before applying force with the ram. Either way, if you index it into the rifling it will just sail smoothly through on the second pass.

That said, if you cut a larger groove I have not found it to be a deal breaker. I have shot a slew of sub-.5 MoA groups using bullets that had a slightly enlarged groove from 2 passes from the FF die. I still segregate them though if I mess it up and will use them as my cold bore bullet (I actually believe it is usually a “cold shooter” but more on that another time) or bullets I use for shooting from alts even though there is no practical difference in precision or accuracy.

Loading does not require the removal of a brake as some think. You either have a funnel made/modified for full-form use or if you are stuck with a break made for smooth form bullets you improvise by using a pieced of tubing. You stick the bullet nose into the tubing and use the tubing (run through the funnel) to pull the bullet ogive into the base of the funnel so that you can use the funnel to insert the bullet through the brake, index it to the rifling, and lightly seat it before using the ramrod to finish the job.

I shot the Smooth-Form vs Full-Form test three days after the Smooth-Form vs Wads test. I established a baseline for Smooth-Form bullets with and without wads to see if Swinglock’s statement that a Full-Form bullet did not need a wad for superior performance was a truism. In this test I re-shot the Smooth-Form bullet without a wad again to see if velocity and precision were comparable plus it kept this comparison fair since I was collecting data for Smooth-Form vs Full-Form under the exact same conditions rather than trying to extrapolate data taken under ever so slightly different conditions.

Control Group shot with Smooth-Form sans wad:

Variable Group shot with Full-Form sans wad:

Analysis of Velocity Statistics and Precision:

Velocity:

With all else being equal the Full-Form bullet produced 24fps more velocity on average than a Smooth-Form bullet, with nearly half the Extreme Spread, and nearly half the Standard Deviation.

Comparing the Smooth-Form without wad in Test 1 to Test 2 velocities were nearly identical. The differences in high velocity were 6fps, low velocity 5fps, average velocity 4fps, extreme spread 1fps, and standard deviation 1fps.

Precision:

With all else being equal the Full-Form bullet produced 50.9% better precision than the Smooth-Form bullet.

While this is more accuracy than precision, the point of impact on this round of Smooth-Form, No Wad is lower than the last test with the same load. All other groups, including Full-Form, No Wad, had nearly the same point of impact which is in the 8-ring between 12 and 1 o’clock.

Conclusion:

With all else equal, there is a discernible performance increase with a Full-Form bullet over a Smooth-Form bullet.

I shot the Smooth-Form bullet test first. I wanted to baseline them before I shot the Full-Form test. I also do not own wads and and did not have time to order veggies so had to get them from a friend. He supplied me with a .060″ thick, .460″ diameter vegetable fiber wad. I am unsure of the brand. I purchased a package of Traditions Wonder Wads at Gander Mountain while I was in town one day.

I had the breech plug out of the gun a couple of days earlier so I cleaned the bore. I have found that powder fouling can cause you to need a few rounds to settle in when changing powders so I cleaned the carbon out of the gun but left the copper as I believe it makes a larger difference based on testing I have seen. I had decided that if there were any wildly out of place numbers I would add shots until it normalized. Luckily, the muzzle velocity of the first shot fit with the rest (although the point of impact was quite low) and a similar velocity was found again on the eighth shot.

The control group target only has seven shots on it: cold/clean bore through the X-ring and a 6-shot group in the 8-ring. The wind was blowing 12-20mph and the target backers had just been replaced with Coroplast. It is a corrugated plastic sheeting and my staples were not securing the target well as a result. The target blew down twice during the 6-shot group and the two other shooters on the range were kind enough to go cold and let me re-hang it. When it blew down again I decided to just shoot shots 8, 9, and 10 through the chronograph and into the berm.

Control group without wads:

When I pulled my target after shot 10 I used a screw gun to secure my cardboard sheet to the Coroplast. That solved the falling target problem and I was able to finish out the test. All I had to do was switch out target sheets after testing the Vegetable Fiber Wads and shoot the Wool Wad.

Variable group with Vegetable Fiber Wads:

The lubed Wonder Wads were shot last as they could possibly have had an effect on any testing after them in the event the lube left any residue in the bore.

Variable group with Lubed Wool Wads:

Analysis of Velocity Statistics and Precision:

Velocity:

A vegetable fiber wad produced higher average velocity, with roughly half the extreme spread, and roughly half the standard deviation of identical Smooth-Form bullets shot without a wad or with a wool wad. It won on all accounts.

There was not an extreme difference between performance without a wad compared to performance with a wool wad. Nonetheless, a wool wad appears to offer no advantage over a bullet without a wad. If I had to choose wool or nothing, based on this test, I would choose nothing.

Precision:

Due to technical difficulties with wind blowing down my target I didn’t get all ten shots on target for the “No Wad” group. We will never know what that group would have turned in although I did re-shoot it in the next test for a head to head comparison with Full-Form (you’ll get that in the next installment). The potential for precision looks very good but it looked that way for the “Veggie Wad” until I had one each out of group, high and low. I know from shooting match rifles that as shot count goes up so does group size so nothing new there. Law of Averages.

Conclusion:

Preface: I have seen some pretty heated debates over Full-Form vice Smooth-Form over the years. You got my take on it last time based on my preconceived notions. Proponents of both sides always have a slew of reasons most of which are little more than opinion. This is my modest attempt at offering you something more objective.

I am, by nature, a very curious person. I also have an overwhelming need to understand things. From the time I was a child to the present the answer, “Because,” has never been adequate for me. Everything has to be qualified and substantiated or I am not having it as anything more than opinion. I also learn best by doing. When a shooter who I’m acquainted with started struggling with Smooth-Form at long range I became curious as to why. While I do not have the resources that big companies like Berger have I began to devise some testing to come to a better understanding of why we might be seeing what we have been seeing and determine if some claims stand up.

Following the Scientific Method, I began to make observations. I drew from the fact that I have seen a lot of guys see an improvement with wads and that Jeff had bullets failing to stabilize at long range. I also took three key statements from Swinglock’s statement in the provided link: A much better seal is produced because the bullets form fills the rifling grooves, Full formed bullets do not require the use of over powder wads, and Full formed bullets produce higher velocities with less pressure.

The easiest hypothesis to test is the null-hypothesis. It assumes no difference between states. The hypotheses become:

1. There is no difference in load performance between a Full-Form and Smooth-Form bullet.

2. The performance of a load using a Smooth-Form bullet is not dependent upon using a wad.

Now I had to devise the test. One thing that immediately invalidates a test is slanting it in favor of a particular outcome. You also have to ensure you only change one variable at a time until you have tested all variables. Only then can you combine variables. I did not intend to ever combine variables, just do two tests that built upon one another with different variables.

I have loads that are dialed in for my guns using the bullets I make and my preferred powders. While they all shoot very well some are better than others and if gamed things accordingly I could rig this test. I wanted to test with something I had no reason to see succeed over something else. I needed to do this test with some unknowns. Those unknowns would be powder and bullets suspected to succeed but never tested together.

I took a look on my powder shelf and saw that I had a pound of Hodgdon’s H322 I bought a year or so back and never used. I shoot a lot of H4198 with the 302gn BOMB and IMR3031 with 344gn BOMB. H322 falls between those two in burn rate so I ran it through Quick Load to compare it’s pressure and efficiency to the others using a 317gn bullet which falls between the two bullet weights I frequently use. Everything looked good so I chose a charge weight that should put me in the velocity band where I expected good accuracy.

I decided to make no changes to my dies for this test. They are set up to size the BOMB 302gn and 344gn so I expected they would work just fine with the 317gn BOMB. Both the Smooth-Form and Full-Form bullets were sized with two passes through the respective sizing die.To check the potential of this load I needed to range test it with a known quality. Since the 302gn bullet looked better than the 344gn bullet based on computer predictions I hit the range with the 302gn bullet sized in the Swinglock Smooth-Form Die and the 76gn of H322 I intended to use for the test.

H322 showed plenty of promise with a known bullet:

Everyone has a pile of scrap. As a bullet maker I have scrap bullets. I happened to do a custom run of bullets a while back for a guy in 317gn and while they were structurally sound they had some cosmetic blemishes in a ratio that made them not worth pursuing. I shot some of them with H4198 when I first made them just to see if they would shoot but since I could never make one pretty enough to sell they have been sitting on my test shelf. Using my standard 70gn of H4198 they were sub-MoA to 300yds (as far as I shot them) so I felt like they would work for this test since I had only ever shot 9 of them and never with H322. I sorted out 50 of them that were good to go and set them aside for testing.

The 317gn bullet with H4198 from proof testing at 100yds and 300yds back in Feb2016:

At this point I had all the hardware components for the test: an accurate and precise rifle, a dependable optic, a powder that showed good precision with a known and similar bullet, and a bullet that showed good precision with a known and similar powder. Research finished, I could set parameters to test the hypotheses.

Test #1:

Shoot three groups, 10-shots each, using Smooth-Form bullets and 76gn of H322. The first group would be with shot without a wad as the control group, the second group with vegetable fiber wads, and the third group with lubed wool wads.

Test #2:

Shoot two groups, 10-shots each using 76gn H322. The first group will be shot with a Smooth-Form bullet as a control group. The second will be shot with a Full-Form bullet. Neither group will be shot using a wad.