to moly or not to moly

[TrapperDan]

I recently purchased a rifle that came with a thousand,Berger ,moly coated bullets.Berger does not produce molys any more.I talked to a tech at berger,he said the consensus is,once you use moly,your pretty much committed to molly.I know nothing about moly,cleaning, maintaining, shooting or whatever.Your thoughts.

[savageboy23]

I guess my thoughts are no moly. My only reason being your limited to moly only. In a situation like the one we have today you take what you can get to enjoy the hobby we all love. If you shoot moly coated bullets you're limited to those only. Just my 2 cents. Not saying its right or wrong but it's why I shied away from moly coated bullets when I started reloading a few months back.

[RAMOS]

FWIW, I have heard of guys cleaning the moly off. Might do a google search to find out how.

[Rick in Oregon]

Clean your rifle well to bare steel, load and shoot 'em all up. After you've depleted your stash of moly-coated bullets, just throughly clean your rifle again to bare steel and go back to 'naked' bullets. No big deal, done it before with no ill effects whatever with both moly and WS2 (tungsten disulfide).

I'm finding now that naked bullets are much less work, but from the experience learned from others, I now coat all my bores after cleaning with colodial graphite; it makes fouling a thing of the past and barrels much easier and quicker to clean up. The commercial "Lock-Ease" from Napa auto stores is the best source.

I've still got a couple of PD rifles addicted to WS2, but when those barrels are toast, I'll probably give up coating bullets. But it sure is nice in the rat patch to be able to shoot in excess of 100 rounds without cleaning when you're in a target-rich environment!

[Jim White]

When I was active in High Power shooting I bit on the moly craze with my AR-15. I moly-coated all of my bullets so for me it wasn't a big deal. I never really saw a downside and a few patches of Kroil and she was clean. Every 500-700 rounds or so I would scrub all of moly out, recoat and off I was again.

The one downside to moly I've read about is; in moist environments it may cause some corrosion. I live in the damp part of the PACNORWEST and I haven't experienced this.

As far as removal from bullets, I've heard a variety of things but the one thing I've never tried is tumbling, but I hear it works.

HTH,