Can Am 90 Grain Zinc 9mm bullets

Craig0ry said:
Thats kind of what I was thinking, I'll take your advice and make up some lighter loads, I'll do them in increments of 50 since it takes a little before you can notice the fouling in the barrel. If I load any too light and they don't cycle I'll just pull them and the components will get re used.
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You don't need 50. Just enough to make sure the load cycles your gun and is accurate to some extent. Then you make 100-200 of them and test for fouling. If your lightest functionnal load creates fouling, you're SOL. Otherwise, you just found an almost endless supply of cheap bullets, which is great.
 
It might be interesting to knurl them and then lube them with Alox, but they're hard enough to make that a challenge, and for that effort, lead makes more sense.
 
A lot of suggestions on here that powder coating might be the answer to your problem but I'm not so sure it will be without a bullet swaging apparatus of some kind. I think that with the hardness of the zink and the extra dia. that the PC adds will make a very tight fitting bullet-to-bore that will scrape hard enough to remove the PC when it travels down the pipe, so your back to square one only worse now you have PC residue as well as zinc fowling. With the hardness of zinc being equal to copper jackets, trying to downsize the bullet a bit for powder thickness with an ordinary Lyman or RCBS sizer will just damage the sizer.

I think PC may make those bullets usable but the work involved before that is feasible really make the savings redundant....now if somebody wanted to use those PC'ed bullets in a .358 bore I would say "have atter".
 
Craig0ry said:
So if a powder has a faster burn rate does that mean it's also burning hotter? I see VVN310 is #2 on the list I found and Titegroup #15, I see CFE pistol is #44, I have a generous supply of that I could try as well.
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The biggest factor in how hot the powder will burn will be whether it is a single base or double base powder. Single base and double base powders both contain nitrocellulose. However, double base powders contain nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin. It is the nitroglycerin that will increase the burn temperature.

Titegroup is a double base powder containing nitroglycerin therefore it will be much hotter.

As for powder charge, 3.8g of TG is what I use for 147's and likely not enough for a 90g. I would urge caution on starting with the recommended 90g load. All else being equal, pressure is inversely correlated to case volume. Those big nickel bullets measured to the same OAL as the 90's will greatly reduce case volume and therefore pressure.

Do yourself a favor and use some of that money you saved on those projectiles to buy a chroney. Saving money loading by not buying a chroney is like saving money on a car by not purchasing the steering wheel.
 
I wonder if that coating that X Metal uses on their bullets would help? It's way thinner than powder coating, and would be like moly I would think? I saw it for sale on their site last night.
 
Craig0ry said:
I've reloaded moly coated bullets in the past, is it quite the process to moly yourself? And is it expensive? I do like the looks for moly coated bullets!
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All I did to moly bullets is drop them in a vibratory tumbler with steel shot and moly powder and let it run for a few hours. Noisy as hell but it did a good job of coating them. However, you will have to invest in the moly powder, a few pounds of BB size or smaller steel shot and a separate tumbler bowl because the moly also coats the bowl & is nearly impossible to get off.
 
ted_dent said:
All I did to moly bullets is drop them in a vibratory tumbler with steel shot and moly powder and let it run for a few hours. Noisy as hell but it did a good job of coating them. However, you will have to invest in the moly powder, a few pounds of BB size or smaller steel shot and a separate tumbler bowl because the moly also coats the bowl & is nearly impossible to get off.
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I see x reload had a kit with two bowls for lyman tumbler, night give it a try
 
Before investing in a bunch of hardware to make your cheap bullets work for not cheap why not try some other powders? Oh and as stated before, use 124gr data and work up slowly for function and accuracy. Don’t be concerned with velocity or get a chrony just for this as you have no velocity data to correlate it to anyway. They will be fast at the muzzle but lose speed quickly.
 
An update on this if anyone was curious,
Tried 5 powders, and ran them as slow as I could, changed out to the lightest recoil spring I could and swapped the hammer spring,
Powders I tried were vvn310, TG, CFE, Clays, Universal.
So no matter how fast or how slow I sent them they still fouled the barrel very quickly.
The only thing I didn't get to try was moly coating them, all the kits are out of stock,

They will just be plinkers now, I could run 5 mags of zinc and then a mag of jacketed and start over again.
 
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