Moly coated Jacketed Bullets Question

Gunsmithing Ammo | Reloading
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Are there any advantages or disadvantages in shooting moly coated bullets? And what effects will it have on barell life and cold shot accuracy in a precission rifle?

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All I can say is I tried moly bullets once in a 308 and accuracy was horrible, I tried several powders and no change and gave up.

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You have to have the bore spotlessly clean or the moly will stick to spots. Never had good luck with them.

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I shot them in a .17 Rem.

Supposedly longer barrel life, running cooler, I forget all that it was supposed to do. It’s been years. Increased velocity?

One thing you’ll find is because the moly is a lube, pressures will drop so you’ll need more powder to get the pressure back up.

I also played with Fastexed bullets. I just looked up my data but it was incomplete. I don’t know which lube I was using, but I was seeing over 4200fps (unknown bullet weight but either a 20 or 25) but I was getting really strange results on paper at 100 yards. I think the bullet was coming apart in flight. I would see grey “dust” around the bullet hole and they all had a curved “tail” extending out from the grey dust area. Accuracy started to degrade too. I dropped velocity back to 4050ish fps and everything returned to normal. Heck, I didn’t need to coat the bullets to get that. End of experiment.

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Sounds like I wasted 68 bucks, if I cant get the moly off of them.

Tumbler maybe? My tumbling media is at its last stage anyway.

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Well, maybe not wasted $. I was able to get additional velocity and that might be valuable for PRS. But it has a cost in powder and erosion (I’m assuming increased erosion). Everything is a trade off, to get something one must give up something.

I know that if my bullets hadn’t started to do whatever they did in flight I’d have sucked up the increased barrel erosion and kept the velocity. I bought the .17 Rem for velocity and not barrel life. I knew just by looking at the cartridge that it was overbore. When I reload for it again I’m going to use monolithic copper and not have the problem and push velocity as long as the bullets are stable.

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When/if I start coating bullets it’ll be with HBN, not Moly.

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I ran the moly coated bullets through the tumbler and got most of the coating off of them. I will do a ladder test to see if there is an increase of vilocity compared to uncoated bullets of the same weight.

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I am curious about that also I also would be curious about powder coated bullets vs traditional lube or alox

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I wet powder coat (same coating just different application) but never having used the same load for the same bullet (just different lubes) I can’t say.

One would need to have the same bullet, use the same load, and have the 2 different lubes to compare. I always bought my greased bullets and I’m only set up for poly coating for my cast bullets at home.

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Post removed by BrianK

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I just loaded 10 rounds of 39.3 grs of AR Plus behind 5rnds of the 168gr Amax moly coated and 5rnds of 168gr bthp Hornadys to do a velocity test. The ladder test with 168gr bthp came out best at 2716fps to 2718fps with 39.2gr and 39.4gr respectivly. I loaded in the middle to test for the difference between coated or uncoated. I wil post the results as soo as I get back from the range the range this coming Saturday.

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Very interested in the results !!

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I haven’t got to the range yet but I loaded six rounds each BTHP and Moly coated Amax with the same powder charge to test at the next outing. I used 50 rnds of the moly coated bullets with 43gr of W748 for the M1A for hunting ammo. The rest will get loaded with 44gr to fire form some new brass and practice my recoil mangement which is badly needed.

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