how badly have you leaded up a barrel?

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How badly have you leaded up a barrel in a single range outing?

I was poking through my pics and came across one of my 460 S&W Encore. I had been experimenting with light to middle weight loads that I could use for long range target shooting. That heavy 15" pistol with a muzzle brake just wiggled when I lit off a case full of Trail Boss under a 300 gr bullet. 1200 fps was nice but I wanted something around 1400.

Experimenting with moderate lead bullet loads really made a mess out of that thing. By the time I was done for the day the lead was so bad it was caked in the muzzle brake ports.

I never did find the load I wanted. Everything was either too hot, too light, or left a trail of unburned powder. I ended up selling the thing and stuck with my Heavy Colt loads.
 

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When I got my first .357 Magnum, a Ruger Blackhawk, the only ammunition I could get was the Remington and Winchester factory ammunition, 158 gr. lead SWC.

These were around 1400 fps or so as I recall, and they were really soft. After about twenty five rounds fired, little lead "whiskers" protruded from the muzzle, and the muzzle end looked like a smooth bore.

In those days, ca. 1959~1960, there were no JHP or JSP loadings, so it was shoot and scrub. I was a young soldier, so reloading was out of the question.

Bob Wright
 
When I was younger and foolish I loaded some Hornady 240gr swaged SWCs with a heavy charge of H110 and shot them in a micro groove Marlin 1894, the results were after 2 rounds they started to keyhole, the bore looked like cast iron pipe and took hours to get clean
 
I had a Colt .22 conversion unit for a 1911 and leaded up the floating chamber so it didn't float any more.

I was using bulk lead nose .22.

With the floating chamber jammed up with lead the gun still functioned and I couldn't tell any difference. That was a very quirky conversion unit. Had to take a hammer to get the floating chamber disengaged from the barrel and it took forever to clean. The American Rifleman had an article about how to cure the problem and I took it to a smith who supposedly did the fix but I think he was very conservative and the problem still occurred. Accuracy was never very good with the unit either. Strangely enough the ammo it liked best was Remington standard velocity even though the manual advised against std vel ammo saying it probably wouldn't cycle the action. It did cycle the action pretty reliably, did not lead up as bad as the bulk ammo and had the best accuracy. Like I said, strange.
 
I had too use a Lewis Lead remover on my 7.5" SBH after a box of WW 240gr gas checks. The lead looked like long chips from a really sharp drill bit!
 
Not leaded and didn't do it myself but I cleaned a M91/30 a few years back with sweets and copper strips came out of the muzzle like a helix. Before cleaning, the bore looked more like a poly rifled barrel than land and groove. It ended up being toast, still shootable but printing a few inches at 50m.
 
When I first got my 44mag and got some factory ammo and some was lead bullets and it lead up my barrel bad and that was the last time I bought factory lead ammo.
 
More information is needed.
What did the barrel look like? The lead could be too hard or too soft or the diameter wrong.
I shoot lead Penn bullets and in 44 Mag and I have pushed them above 1600 out of a Ruger 77/44 rifle. It required buying his bullets in the premium grade to handle that velocity. There was a little lead but it was easy to clean out. Also it wasn’t very accurate up at the top load but in the 85 – 90% load with 2400 it worked very well. These were .430 Dia.
 
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