Snow to me would not be a very accurate way to go. Building a catch box using the proper catch material would be the only accurate way if one wants to truly seek the accurate information that he might want to know.

It would seem to me the only accurate way would be to catch the bullet as it ran out of steam and had slowed down so much that when caught it wouldn't deform it. Even water can deform bullets. The right media is what?
Anything that will take a bullet traveling 1300-1400 fps and stop it in the length of a box will deform it too. Maybe not much, but then nose slump isn't much either.

oneatatime wrote on Feb 18^th, 2019 at 5:13pm:


If we had know about nose slump and increased BC with paper patch back in '95, we might have beat the Canadian with their Martini target rifles and Central sights in Ottawa ? 

I only had very limited access to a  practice / test range long enough to test that if I had even thought about it. 

I suppose my experience with the 30:1 getting better results closer to the 20:1 at 200 yds probably is related to the lube and not alloy changes.

Might fit the needs of anyone interested in catching lead bullets.

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Christmas is coming! Just what everyone needs in their gun room!

I’m using 16:1 for Money bullets and 20:1 for most other BP castings.   I work mostly with WW+2%Tin for smokeless, Dan Theodor mix for a few longer profile with smokeless, and the first two mentioned with BP dedicated bullets.

For some reason I’ve had lingering leading issues with the BACo Creedmoor out of two 40-65s.    Not sure if its related to alloy or fit but I’ve shot three alloys there and tried different fits.  What should work so far has not eliminated leading.   Kind of soured me on bore riders with significant groove-diameter bore-riding dimensions in the section of nose just in front of the forward driving band.   

I scaled a Postell to a weight I desired, and made some other changes to the base band, for my Ballard 45-70 and had BACo make a mould (now in their catalogue) that eliminated the groove diameter bore-riding section from the nose and leading disappeared.    Go figure.    Conclusions would be questionable.   

There is a good thread over on Castboolits that poses some of the same discussion:
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I wish I could recall some of the links to Kurt’s (Leadpot on Castboolits) pictures of bullets retrieved from snow banks over on Shiloh or BPCR forums.   He is meticulous in his efforts and his pictures lead me to believe there is good efficacy in the snowbank-recovery method.   What distortion you’d have would be hard to measure judging from the visual integrity of his recovered bullets.   

I have never tried the alloys with antimony, but when I had a couple of chambers cut with Dan's reamers he sent me some testing results with his paper patched rifles. He ultimately decided that 16:1 worked better than the alloys with antimony.   But then bore diameter patched bullets are a slightly different animal then full diameter grease grooved bullets.

Chris.