As recently stated in the recent lube purging thread. i only use lube in for my competition bullets in the tiny gap ahead of the gas check. I sometimes do well against shooters who lube their bullets from stem to stern and sometimes not so well, but it seems this vanishing amount of lube is best for my loads.
Looking at one of these bullets it is hard not to ponder that if such a tiny amount is lube does the job, does the bullet need any at all, especially at the low velocities I shoot in competition. I decided to find out. Since I didn't want to be pulling bullets out of the remaining unfired rounds after leading up the bore, I only loaded ten cases. These were from the same batch of 85 grain bullets I fired in the recent CBA nationals and loaded to duplicate the muzzle velocity of 1,430 fps although with TiteGroup instead of 4756. Otherwise the load was the same.
I shot the lubless bullets this morning. Starting from a clean bore, and not cleaning between groups, one 5 shot group was slightly under 1 MOA and one slightly over for an average of 1.12 MOA. This is almost exactly the same as the average accuracy of these loads with lubed bullet and this load.
When cleaning the bore the first patch went through smoothly with no hitches indicating leading or hard fouling. The patch showed no signs of lead particles.
Of course two groups is far too small a sample to draw any conclusions but I plan to shoot more.
John