I learned something today. I have always cast my rifle bullets with wheel weight lead and water dropped them as I saw lots of other people doing and why change what works. Do what the other say and you’ll get going faster. Then powder coated and water dropped from the oven. Worked for 30-30 and 30-06, but for the 6.8 SPC in the AR I wasn’t getting as not very tight of groups. But then, I am pushing the limits of powder coating and cast with everything over 2000fps and seeing how far I can go every time. So I thought to try heat treating for hardness as I had read about. I had also watched Elvis Ammo a couple years back talk about powder coating annealing bullets and he was powder coating at 250° and it works. So I tried that too and recorded everything. I still have to load and shoot them and see how they shoot and powder coating hold up.

I cast the bullets and air cooled them – saved a bullet for the test.
Heat treated at 460° for one hour and water quenched- saved a bullet for the test.
Did a group and powder coated at 400° as normal- saved a bullet for the test.
Did a group and powder coated at 250° trying Elvis’s way – saved a bullet for the test.
Smashed a 400 and 250 to compare.

The powder coat is not as strong, but I “think” it should b strong enough to go down a rifle barrel. The real thing to notice here is the bullet powder coated at 400° lost half the hardness gained and the 250° coated bullet stayed at the hardness that heat treatment gave to it. The bullet that was done at 400° powder coating annealed and lost hardness!

Bullets powder coated at 400

Powder coated at 250

The darkness in the lube grooves was translucent Purple I tried to use. Never use a translucent powder on bullets!!

The above picture is where is gets good. The bullets gained hardness when heat treated and water quenches. They held that hardness when powder coated at 250° and lost half the gained hardness when powder coated at 400°!!

This was all I needed to see. This experiemnt took a month to see it happen. Now I have to load some ammo with the 250 rounds and see if they shoot worse or better.

Enjoy!

The video on Rumble
And on YouTube until they pull it or spank me for more violations.