Swaged vs molded

[Nameless Hunter]

Thanks to all who have chimed in on this discussion - it has been a good learning experience for me.

 

[roundballman]

I have shot several deer and 1 elk with round balls. Elk was a spike bull at 90-100yds, 530 Hornady round ball with 120 yrs FFg. Recovered under skin on far side, flat as a 50 cent piece. 2 deer with 390 Hornady balls, 55 grs FFFg, recovered under skin on far side, flattened out like a quarter. Others were past through shots and not recovered. I like round balls better than any of the conicals for hunting.

 

[Travler]

Hi All,
I have been watching this post for a couple of days. Great dialog. I wanted to add my 2 cents. I shoot targets mostly and from a bag on trail walks. I am looking for accuracy over concern about the hunting performance. With that in mind I like having no sprue, as it is a tad bit easier to load without having to line up the position of the ball. I do like to cast my own, but also time and place are limited, so usually I buy roundball.
Out of concern of bad balls and talk I have read on issues with swaged balls, I bought a scale and measured all the balls in a box of Hornaday .395s. I took the measurements and added them to a statistics program (yes - anal). I saw that the difference between the heaviest and lightest ball out of 100 was right at 1 grain. I expect that the scale I have has that much error in it. Also, on a normal distribution (again anal here), all the balls weights were within 2 standard deviations. I am told this means they are of consistent weight and no outliers.
My expectation was that I would have outliers in weight and I could toss them. In this box though, I think all 100 are fine and I will not have an excuse for my fliers based on voids or otherwise bad balls. Also, I am liking the Hornaday product and intend to keep using it. ( but I will check them)

 

[Robwright]

I just weighed a bag of cast .530 balls from an unknown source, and about 30 were underweight by a grain or more. Also, I used to read a lot on Castboolits forum about hardness of pure lead being somewhat dependent upon the method used to cool the newly casted items. If I recall, dropping from the mould into water would make them somewhat harder. Also they claimed that old lead castings are harder than fresh ones.

 

[Griz44Mag]

I just weighed a bag of cast .530 balls from an unknown source, and about 30 were underweight by a grain or more. Also, I used to read a lot on Castboolits forum about hardness of pure lead being somewhat dependent upon the method used to cool the newly casted items. If I recall, dropping from the mould into water would make them somewhat harder. Also they claimed that old lead castings are harder than fresh ones.

For anything made with an alloy, true statement.
For pure lead, any hardening would be so minor as to be negligible.
I have some brick lead (foundry) that is 20+ years old, and hardness is still 5.1 Last time I checked it was some 10 years ago.

 

[Oldbear63]

Is there any way for casters to swage their own balls (no joking now)? Since the problems are the casting flash and the sprue is there a way to swage out the sprue to improve the roundness of a ball?

 

[Griz44Mag]

Is there any way for casters to swage their own balls (no joking now)? Since the problems are the casting flash and the sprue is there a way to swage out the sprue to improve the roundness of a ball?

Why is the sprue a problem?
I shoot hundreds of them every year (sometimes every month) and I have never had a problem with a sprue....

 

[Grenadier1758]

Back in the dark ages, my hair was dark red not gray as now, the was a swaging device sold. It had a mold to cast a lead rod. The swaging plates had a cut off plate to make lead slugs of the correct size. The slug was placed on the spherical cavity and the plates indexed together. With your desired hammer you smashed the plates together and swaged a round ball. Often the ball would have the lead flash around it and the ball would be placed on a sizing hole and driven through to remove the flash.

Judging by how many are around and used all these years later, the home swaging process was not much of a success. Its much easier to cast balls in a mold.

 

[hawkeye2]

A friend bought one of those outfits circa '77 and I remember looking it over and thinking it was real neat. I think I remember him saying it didn't work too well but can't say for sure. I thought it would be nice to have the dies to use in eliminating the sprue but a person would have to have one set for each size and that could get expensive and the sprue really isn't much of a problem. That was the only one of those sets I ever saw and I don't remember them being on the market long.

 

[Khufu]

If the sprue bugs you go to harbor freight and get a ball mill (rock polisher) and put 100 or so balls in each tub, put in some dish soap and water and roll them for an hour or so, then rinse them off, they will be round and no sprue and polished up, they look just like swaged. then you don't have to worry about orienting them sprue up while loading.

 

[MSW]

Back in the dark ages, my hair was dark red not gray as now, the was a swaging device sold. It had a mold to cast a lead rod. The swaging plates had a cut off plate to make lead slugs of the correct size. The slug was placed on the spherical cavity and the plates indexed together. With your desired hammer you smashed the plates together and swaged a round ball. Often the ball would have the lead flash around it and the ball would be placed on a sizing hole and driven through to remove the flash.

Judging by how many are around and used all these years later, the home swaging process was not much of a success. Its much easier to cast balls in a mold.

I think what you refer to is the Corbin system … you describe how it works clearly. Using their dies, you can swage all manner of bullets... most are intended for centerfire rifle or pistol use. These are super precise, and the dies (mostly) only make one bullet weight and only one design (i.e. rebated boat tail or pointed soft point or whatever).

The upside is that these projectiles are a good bit more consistent (and therefore more accurate) than what you would find at your local gun store.

The downside is the price point (which is why I never got into the system. Although the notion of being able to whack out super accurate 30 caliber rebated boat tail bullets using nothing more than lead and some copper tubing from the hardware store, the buy in was just a bit past my budget.

Here's a link:
http://www.corbins.com/index.htm

 

[hawkeye2]

No connection to Corbin which is a fairly sophisticated system. In this system you laid the bottom half of the die on a very solid surface, dropped the core in, placed the other half of the die on the top and gave it a real hard whack with a big hammer.

 

[thixotropy]

one method is to roll cast balls between two 1/2 inch pieces of plate steel, I use a tuna can cut less than the diameter of the balls as a retainer. I also just was given a vibrating case polisher for free at a yardsale- I threw about 50 or so of two calibers in that for an hour -they came out perfect.