HNB Coated Bullets Info & Advice Please

levers4life

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Aug 3, 2018
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Texas Hill Country
I bought out a reloading room and the gentleman has coated most of his bullets with HNB. He was a military rifle match shooter. Do any of you guys have experience with this? Are they ok to shoot in anything? Any special procedure to load? They are mostly .30 cal and .22 cal match bullets, but he also coated 30 Carbine and some hunting bullets. Advice and thoughts please....Thank you in advance.
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Looks like moly to me, not HBN 😳
He marked all the boxes "HNB" and there was a partially used HNB kit in with all the stuff. All the bullets are a uniform gray color. That first pic is a .224 80gr A-Max.
What would the appearance difference be? I've seen moly coated bullets before but never had any experience with the HNB.
Unfortunately, I bought it all from his wife as he had passed. I wasn't able to ask him.
 
Those rifle bullets look suspicious to me.
I don't think it's hex unless maybe he added graphite or something. They also look annealed.
 
May have left in tumbler too long? The process I use is to tumble in a medicine bottle with steel BB,s and HBN. I did a batch once and walked away and forgot about them for about 3 hours. They came out black…
 
I bought out a reloading room and the gentleman has coated most of his bullets with HNB. He was a military rifle match shooter. Do any of you guys have experience with this? Are they ok to shoot in anything? Any special procedure to load? They are mostly .30 cal and .22 cal match bullets, but he also coated 30 Carbine and some hunting bullets. Advice and thoughts please....Thank you in advance.
View attachment 367170View attachment 367171
That looks like moly coating
 
Just another thought, could he have used HBN but tumbled cast lead bullets in the jar or used lead shot as a tumbling media, which gave a Grey color to everything?
 
Just another thought, could he have used HBN but tumbled cast lead bullets in the jar or used lead shot as a tumbling media, which gave a Grey color to everything?
I had not considered this. I haven't heard of anyone using lead shot to peen the HBN into copper bullets, but I suppose it might work, and might give aa grey cast.
 
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