I am trying to find the article or tips on how to slug my handgun bore with the lead egg sinkers for sale here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Whether you use egg sinkers or swaged muzzleloader round balls, the process is the same.

Clean your bore thoroughly and lightly oil it. Remove the bolt if possible.
Find a ball that's just a bit larger than your bore.
Lightly lube the ball and with it resting atop the bore, very lightly tap it until it just enters the bore. You do not want to hit it too hard or you will expand and deform it.
Now tap the ball fully into the bore an inch or so with a short dowel.
Using a wooden dowel almost bore diameter, tap the ball completely through the bore, making note of any tight- or rough-feeling spots. You might even want to mark the dowel as you encounter those spots.
As the ball nears the chamber, tap more gently. You do not want the ball to be forcibly expelled. Ideally, you want it to just drop free when it clears the throat area. Try to catch it in your hand or with a folded cloth.
Measure it with a good caliper or micrometer. Measure both the groove and bore diameters using the sharp jaws of the calipers held along as well as across the rifling grooves. Repeat if you have difficulty or if the ball is deformed.

__________________
To see my books and articles, just Google my name.

If you do a "Search" (icon on the upper right of the page) for barrel slugging, you'll find a lot of previous threads/posts on this subject.

__________________
NRA Benefactor Member
NRA Certified Police Firearms Instructor
NRA Certified Range Safety Officer
NAHC Life Member

"Firearms only have two enemies - rust and politicans" author unknown

You also might get a copy of Marshall Stanton's Technical Guide. He covers slugging barrels very well in this manual. It's available for a very reasonable cost by going to the Beartooth Bullet tab at the top of the page. It's probably the best tech guide on shooting lead thru handguns and rifles I've read.

__________________
Bob from Idaho

One more thing.
Real lead sinkers are getting hard to find.
I had a problem finding them,here in New York State.
They are being phasd out,all over the Country,in favor of non lead" ones
Frank

__________________
Frank

David Lapell, I no longer give advice on lapping and or slugging barrels, you will not believe this but the last time I gave advice on such matters 3 got dizzy and 4 passed out so that leaves me with asking questions: If pounding on something causes it to upset, why continue. anyone that has observed or been involved in an accident knows when an auto is hit in the rear damage will continue until the speed of the front catches up with the rear, and if the barrel has a forcing cone, why not force the bullet through the cone? and, why push it? Why not pull the bullet through the cone? Why not pore the slug into the barrel in liquid form?

F. GUffey

Note that I specifically advised against pounding, and always used the phrase "tap gently." With an oiled bore and slug, tapping is plenty of force.

I find that trying to get the slug in from the chamber end doesn't work well, especially if the slug is slightly elongated. It catches at the front of the chamber, wedges sideways and then gets mangled. But it's easy to guide the slug into the muzzle. A poured slug will shrink, but a tapped-in slug has to swage down to a tight fit. Tapping in gives you a better measurement.

__________________
To see my books and articles, just Google my name.

I, too, am unable to find any lead sinkers in my area now (Ohio), and the alloys are too hard and springy to work and provide an accurate measure. Marshall sells pure lead sinkers for slugging. Also, while the lead has to be quite soft, absolute purity may not be necessary. Bill Calfee uses swaged bullets pulled from standard velocity .22 LR cartridges for slugging .22 barrels, and believes he has learned to feel all you can with those. Check out Mr. Calfee's articles in past issues of Precision Shooting Magazine for more details on how he uses the process to check barrel blanks both to determine how much to cut off each end and which end should become the muzzle?

I remember reading that in his later years, Harry M. Pope was called to consult on a military barrel making problem at a plant. Mr. Pope pressed a lead ball into a muzzle and recovered and measured it with his micrometer to determine the groove and bore diameters. The plant supervisor thought this was impossible, believing lead to be too springy to give an accurate result. Out came the air gauges, and, it turned out, to the ten thousandth of an inch, Pope had got it right. Lead is a great measuring tool in this regard.

Not one to argue with the success of the late Mr. Pope, when a sale price came up a few years ago, I bought several different sizes of Hornady lead round balls. Hornady says these are pure lead, and the indentation my thumbnail puts into them indicates to me that they are. They seem to work for slugging.

I had occasion to firelap several M1 Garand barrels a number of years back. I quickly discovered that you need to slug them from both ends to find every flaw. Some flaws are more easily felt from one end than from the other, owing to constrictions narrowing the lead too much to feel subsequent lesser constrictions. In every case, the slug that entered from the muzzle revealed the most critical constriction, which, in that barrel design, tends to occur between the throat and lower band portion of the contour. I was using pure lead bullets cast in a .30 cal mold at the time. The process was to clean and degrease the bore, then run one patch with light gun oil through. I applied the inside of the same patch to the lead bullet and tapped it in with a brass rod. There is nothing soft lead or brass can do to damage a crown or any other part of a barrel in this way. After the bullet was in, I used a longer brass rod to slowly push the slug through. Every time I felt resistance from a tigh spot, I marked the rod with a magic marker so I could see how the curative steps were progressing when I re-checked it later.

__________________
Nick

__________________________
Orange Hat Family Member
CMP Certified GSM Master Instructor
NRA Certified Instructor
NRA Patron Member

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

what, prey tell, could tapping a soft lead plug down a EMPTY UNLOADED gun barrel with a wood dowel upset Guffey?
no one mentioned pounding, slamming or battering.....Rocky's advice was to TAP.....

In fact, all of Rocky's advice seemed safe to both operator and firearm, including catching the slug at the chamber...

__________________
Chris in NH.

"some days, I wish my dogs could talk"

That's a good question, because it illustrates why one needs to slug from both ends to get a complete picture of what is happening in a barrel. The most common constriction in a revolver happens where it is screwed into the frame, right where the forcing cone ends. When you have this common constriction and slug from the breech end, tapping the slug into the cone narrows it to the constriction diameter at the same time as it is being swaged into the rifling by tapping. You can't subsequently distinguish the feel of the constriction from the feel of starting the slug in because the latter takes so much more effort. When you next move the slug forward after starting it in, it just feels like it moves very easily and nothing is wrong. If you tap it in at the muzzle end, however, assuming no muzzle constriction, you will feel the slug push smoothly down the bore until you get to that frame thread-imposed constriction, at which point you will feel a definite increase in resistance to pushing, identifying the constriction.

Once identified, that constriction can be removed either by firelapping or conventional hand lapping. Failure to remove it causes leading and accuracy problems with cast and swaged bullets. A common complaint in a gun with such a constriction is that it shoots jacketed bullets fine, but is poor to terrible with lead bullets.

__________________
Nick

__________________________
Orange Hat Family Member
CMP Certified GSM Master Instructor
NRA Certified Instructor
NRA Patron Member

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

I always used one or two sizes larger of a muzzleloader round ball. That seems to work just great.

__________________
MikeG