Moly question

[illusion]

Started Moly coating bullets for benchrest shooting about '93-94 using NECO products. Personally I'm hooked on the process of 'black bullets' and believe it significantly reduces bore cleaning. Have read a lot of pro-con comments but still prefer to use the process. I use NECO coated bullets in AR-308/ AR-15 rifles and believe the benefit offsets the trouble of bullet preparation.
Accuracy in the AR's has been stellar with 168 Sierras and 75 Hornadys.

[David R]

I do not blame the poor shooting to the moly. Of the different types tried, including OTM, the 168 grouped the best moly or not. This rifle has bedding issues. It is easy to clean the bore now that I got it clean once with JB bore cleaner and lots o elbow.

David

I

[illusion]

Sir; You appear to have a handle on moly, how about an opinion?
I have always used Kroil and JB non-embedding paste. I am not familiar with MolyMagic. In your opinion, is MolyMagic any better at maintaining or deep cleaning a barrel used extensively for shooting moly projectiles?
Thanks Kindly

[condor bravo]

Yes I would think Moly Magic is definitely the best way to go. Does a complete job quickly with little effort. The first application will look like it came out of a coal mine. If you want to order some and need the address let me know. I probably have it indicated in another post.

[illusion]

Thank You Sir. Much appreciate your input. Kroil/JB work when shooting bench with regular and periodic cleaning but I have thought when shooting through AR's something more expedient would be a better thing to find. Benchrest discipline and AR upkeep seem to be miles apart. But I plan to continue with the black bullets as I am getting very favorable results with the AR's.
Have a GREAT day

[condor bravo]

For some reason the system says you have chosen not to receive PMs so will respond with a post. Can order through their web page at www.boretech.com or telephone 267-347-4436. Cost is about $14 per 4 oz container, which is rather small, so you might want to get two. You will find this much more convenient to work with. For the initial application let stand for 15 minutes or so before following up with dry patches. Repeat if it seems necessary. Moly Magic can be left in bore for longer periods should that be needed. I think the instructions say to first do a standard cleaning job before the Moly Magic but I don't bother doing that. Apply a good saturation of Moly Magic and usually let stand for 30 minutes and follow up with dry patches.

[Unclenick]

Illusion is on the right track. I started with the NECO kit, too. The late Roger Johnston actually patented the process, but Wheeler engineering came out with a cheap kit and when NECO pointed out the patent violation, Wheeler pointed out that he was an attorney and could afford to keep NECO tied up in court for years, so NECO gave up. The problem is that Wheeler did some things differently from NECO and started a nationwide trend of making cheap kits and different methods of doing it, including junk moly powder, sprays and all manner of other things the quality of which is unclear for the intended purpose.

NECO uses laboratory grade, high purity moly that is extra fine. Enough of it to coat 100 bullets is about hlaf the volume of a BB, and even the small container they sell it in lasts for years and years. But it's not cheap. Cheap moly can have several drawbacks. One is that it is not so fine so it can build up small lumps in the barrel more easily. Another is that it can have more free sulfur that tends to attract moisture to create the acidic ions that initiate corrosion that leads to pits. It can also have free iron in it which helps promote corrosion. It can also have miscellaneous impurities that can make it abrasive, especially at high pressures. So a lot of people got started with moly using materials that tended to cause the problems described. I never had any of them using the NECO system.

The NECO process also coats the finished bullets with carnauba bean wax. This tends to keep it from rubbing off on your fingers. Other systems mostly don't bother. If you read the literature on moly, you find that if it is exposed to moisture it loses some of its lubricity, so I think the wax is good from the standpoint of maximizing the benefits of it.

The fact moly significantly reduces how fast copper fouling builds up in a bore has been misinterpreted by many to mean a gun using moly bullets didn't need cleaning all season, and would hang out at Camp Perry in 70%+ R.H. and complain moly causes corrosion later. High temperatures in the presence of oxygen and water vapor oxidize molybdenum and release free sulfur. Smokeless powder burns in an oxygen-starved reaction, so there the moly has to compete with the powder fuel atoms for that oxygen, and the reaction thus isn't bad while a bullet is in the barrel. Once it is out, if the barrel is warm and the gun is in humid air, you can expect some of this reaction to occur. Guns shooting moly bullets therefore need cleaning same as any other, or they need to be stored in very low humidity where rust does not occur (below about 40% for general purposes). But I haven't found they particularly need to clean a moly bullet gun more than any other, either, when the coating material quality is good.

The BoreTech product is probably the fastest cleaner. Gunzilla also works, but let it sit in the bore overnight before the final patch, as that gets it all out.

Finally, it takes more effort to adjust to using moly. Moly affects barrel time, increasing it if you don't adjust your load for the friction difference. This can move you off a sweet spot and make you retune a load. The bullets enter the rifling more easily, and slip down the tube more easily. This is why less copper fouling rubs off. But it also means they offer less reaction force for powder to build pressure against, have lower start pressure, and often lose 50 fps or so with a given load.

Moly doesn't just disappear from a bore without cleaning, so if you switch from moly to plain bullets without cleaning, it goes on to affect non-moly bullets, and if you switch between bullet types without thorough bore cleaning, you get intermediate results that don't reflect the behavior of either of those bullets in a barrel that shoots them exclusively. For this reason, the barrel needs settling time after a switch.

If you insert a moly bullet into a freshly trimmed and chamferred case, having done nothing else to it, then use a kinetic bullet puller to remove the bullet, you find the bullet bare of moly where the case mouth scraped it off on the way into the case. You can completely avoid that by burnishing a chamferred case mouth before seating a moly bullet into it. Bart B.'s recommendation to use the reverse thread of an E-Z out on a drill press to burnish case mouths is a good one.

There is evidence moly bullets self-center better in a rifle throat and the recovered bullets don't exhibit the little tails of gilding metal at the back edges of the grooves engraved by the rifling lands. This causes a very small, but measurable improvement in ballistic coefficient in most instances. There is less throat wear because of the pressure and temperature drop associated with direct substitution of moly bullets into a load, but since it is temperature and not friction that does most of the damage to a throat over time, the ability of moly to extend barrel life has been questioned and found hard to detect by some experimenters, but not by others. This result difference is likely due to variables that weren't controlled. With less friction, there should be at least a little less heat shooting moly bullets.

As to accuracy, it depends. If you have you moly load retuned for those bullets, there should be at least no loss of accuracy. If your guns is sensitive to bullet tilt, the better self-centering without distortion should improve accuracy. If your gun's accuracy deteriorates significantly due to heavy copper fouling, that can be prevented with moly. That's how I got started on it. My old DCM Garand's military barrel shot very well, right up to about round number 40, then would open groups up a point or two for the last rounds of a match. Switching to moly stopped that behavior completely. That gun had a very rough bore that accumulated copper quickly with plain bullets.

[illusion]

Condor Bravo- Sorry for the block/OK now. That stuff IS expensive but I'm going to have to invest

Unclenick- GREAT rundown of NECO moly. Lots of good stuff in one spot; really enjoyed the recap. I have noted the scrape off by the case mouth but am having trouble visualizing an EZ out remedying the situation. Burnishing, in my mind is polishing and removing any burrs. With fitted tight-neck chambers/brass any steel tool is going to readjust the clearance. Guess doing a steel burnishing to the brass BEFORE outside sizing the case mouth would be the proper procedure, eh?

Thanks again..

[illusion]

Allegedly a soap-based product.. Gonna check it out in the next couple days.

[condor bravo]

OK, good, let us know how it works out for you. I usually just give it one 30 minute application but sometimes will give two. The moly coats I use are commercially prepared cast bullets rather than ones I prepare myself.

[Unclenick]

Originally Posted by illusion

…am having trouble visualizing an EZ out remedying the situation. Burnishing, in my mind is polishing and removing any burrs…

Burnishing is just pressing ironing burrs flat or pressing them down into the surface as opposed to cutting or removing anything. In effect, it bends surface ridges over, leaving them rounded and unable to catch or scrape anything.

The EZ-out has a reverse thread that isn't sharp, but the steel is hardened at least some. I bought a cheap set of carbon steel ones maybe thirty or forty years back, and I picked a couple that fit my case mouth diameter range and chucked them in the drill press, then played a Dremel buffing wheel loaded with the blue Dico stainless steel buffing compound over them until the rounded surfaces of the thread looked like a mirror. Running in the drill press, that makes a case mouth burnishing tool that won't grab the case because the thread is left-handed or counterclockwise from the back of the spindle, while the spindle turns clockwise from that perspective.

[illusion]

Firstly, thanks for the replies- duly noted. I have a 3 flute 60-degree centering reamer that I believe reduces the burr from the run of the mill handloading reamers (VLD excepted) considerably..

Either the MM is over-rated OR my bore was much cleaner than I thought it was Hoping it is the latter..
I have had people who shoot Moly claim to never clean them until the accuracy starts to suffer; only then do they clean to rectify the problem and start anew. Seems a bit brutal but maybe there is something to it as my accuracy is remaining top-tier for an AR

Have a great week end!

[condor bravo]

Your point on the accuracy consideration rings true. I use the MM on some seven or eight rifles, mostly the larger calibers up to .458, and getting the black out seems to be the proper thing to do, like any other cleaning, but may not be noticeable as far as restoring any possible short term loss of accuracy due to moly buildup.

[Unclenick]

I'd be interested to hear how a pulled bullet looks after using your VLD reamer. I found that no steel cutter I used left the brass unsharp enough (and I have a 3-flute VLD chamfer tool). What I did first after I discovered the issue was whittle a wood dowel to look like a sharpened pencil and used a drill to spin that in the cases. That worked, but it wears out fast. I also tried Dremel with the Craytex rubberized polishing tips. Again, it worked, but wore out fast. I then tried simply running the chamfered case mouths over the carbide expander button I had in one of my Redding dies. I ran each one up and down about three times. That also worked to burnish the neck effectively and stop the scraping. However, it can pull a neck off axis if you aren't careful or you run it too far, so that has to be checked. Burnishing with the polished EZ-out in a drill just seems most expedient, as it doesn't wear out and doesn't bend the necks.

[illusion]

I was thinking the 60 degree center had more angle, but it is a 60-degree included angle; the same as on a new LYMAN combination (inside/outside) reamer and the later has a 6 flute cutter. I do not have a VLD reamer so cannot give any feedback. I would guess that even reaming with it would leave a scuff-edge.
The EZ-outs are four sided squares so would still dull edge ream lightly as well as burnish.
Try this: use the decapping stem out of a HORNADY sizing die. It's resizing button is bullet-shaped. The stem is an un-threaded rod adapting well to a drill press chuck. I tried to burnish the casing entry slope with one and found it works pretty darn well; + it is hardened and after running 10 casings it was not getting hot [expansion].
I seated moly bullets into two casings. The first was burnished with the 3-flute 60 turning backward, and it left light striations on the Moly bullet. The second was burnished with the HORNADY stem and it had almost zero markings left on the Moly bullet.
Of course, variables like neck thickness, sizing button diameter and sizing die tolerances will screw with any 'general' statement.
I have been aware of the bullet seating scrapes/striations from the get-go but have never notice any adverse results from it. Of course, the other side of the discussion is that usually things can be improved, and I'm always motivated to 'tinker' with the envelope