In another thread started this morning by mtngun, a fired bullet caught in a water type bullet catcher is shown. Speculation follows about what the unexpected land marks and damage tell. What are the possible causes? What could be done to avoid them?
I want to congratulate mtngun on doing a type CB research that I believe is absolutely necessary if we are ever to improve the level of precision cast bullet performance beyond where it has been for the last twenty years or so. Without knowing what the bullet looks like AFTER it comes out the muzzle we are flying blind with lots of opinion and speculation. This is all good clean fun but it isn't producing improvement in how precisely we can shoot cast bullets. I think I can contribute one little bit of advice about what not to do if someone decides to catch bullets so they can be examined. After reading on line that some commercial bullet catchers used fibers and having recently come into possession of a large quantity of wool fleece right off the sheep, I made a bullet catcher with wool as the medium. It was much lighter than oiled sawdust and didn't have some of the disadvantages of using water. My catcher was just a long plywood box glued together so I could use a metal detector to find the bullets. I fired eight bullets with color coded bases. Six were recovered. All were missing the gas check and so badly damaged that they were useless. I will try to repeat with oiled sawdust as Mann and Martin used successfully -- as I probably should have in the first place. Snow is also claimed to be a good bullet catcher. I expect there is going to be an abundance of that around here shortly but how to find the bullets in the spring and how to identify them so the ones found can be identified as from which load? I have some tarps hmmmm. John
