By Duane Thomas
A lot of people these days kind of turn their nose up at loading bare lead bullets, instead going for jacketed, plated or coated. Partly this is due to concerns over lead poisoning due to inhaling lead-laden smoke after firing, but a large part of it is the huge amount of time-consuming, frustrating hand work required to remove caked-on lead from the barrel’s lands and grooves. In my experience this is not necessary if the bullets are truly hard cast lead.
I don’t normally mention company names in my Reloader.com articles, but in this case I have to, in order for the rest of the article to make sense. Okay, here it is: Laser Cast, a.k.a. the Oregon Trail Bullet Company. Now, moving on…
Back when I was shooting IDPA hot ‘n’ heavy, in the space of few years I fired well over 21,000 rounds of 200-grain LSWCs through my Wilson 1911 .45. Once, just to see if I could do it, fired almost 5,000 rounds of lead bullet handloads (4,744 if we want to get excruciatingly precise about it – gotta love that obsessive record keeping) without cleaning, and without malfunction. I told myself I’d clean the gun when the slide action started getting sticky, but that just never happened.
The only reason I finally broke down and cleaned the thing was that I happened to be replacing the recoil spring, and I said to myself, “Okay, as long as it’s apart anyway….” But the point is, I didn’t need to clean the gun, it was still smooth. When I looked down the bore, after nearly 5,000 rounds of lead bullets, not only was there no leading, the bore was so clean it looked polished.
The aforementioned LSWCs were in my gun when I won the 2002 Washington State IDPA Championship in Custom Defensive Pistol with my Wilson 1911 .45. Not only did that load feed perfectly throughout the two-day match, it had enough accuracy to make easy work of a 35-yard El Presidenté. One of the reasons I won that championship was I had the single best score on that stage – and I don’t just mean in Custom Defensive Pistol, I mean of anyone at the match.
With a bit of attention to load development, and decent skill on the handloader’s part, in my experience hard cast lead bullets have enough inherent accuracy to deliver the goods. And, granted the “hard” part of the name is actually true, they certainly make cleaning your gun after shooting them one hell of more pleasant, and not nearly as frequently necessary, compared to soft cast lead.
