Moly Coating Bullets - Quality Results; Simply and Economically
by Jon Wilcox

I now have three years production experience moly coating bullets. How I do it is a massively lower cost alternative to commercial kits in the marketplace. I started in 1997, wanting to coat bullets, but unwilling to buy more tumblers and other equipment. Since I already had a huge Dillon tumbler, I considered ways to use it instead. I purchased 10 oz. Corning Moly Powder from WI Bearing for about $28. Midway now sells 8 ounces for $20. Either amount may turn out to be a lifetime supply for you.

I tried a number of processes, settling on small containers which would fit inside the Dillon tumbler bowl. As it turned out, the best ones were 18 ounce plastic peanut butter jars. Skippy, Jif and the store brands have this size. The jars are clear plastic and small. The smallest size,12 ounce jars, will also work for smaller batches, but the 18 ounce size seems to work the best and allows the greatest throughput.

The beauty of this system is that tooling for this moly kit costs merely the cost of the peanut butter jar. This assumes that one already has all the other equipment from one’s reloading interests, and that one eats peanut butter. If one wishes to use steel shot as in the NECO kit, fine. Inexpensive Copper BB's will work, but I find this is not needed. My moly coat will not scratch off, and my bullets look every bit as nice as any I have ever seen with any process. One may be satisfied just coating bullets with moly; many are. There is some difference of opinion about waxing bullets and the benefit or detriment of same. For two years I did not wax. My bullets smudged little and kept their coating just fine. They shot just fine as well. The benefits of easy cleaning and the lengthened period between cleaning were completely realized. Barrel wear seems markedly reduced as compared with bare bullets. Accuracy does not seem to vary much from bare bullets, but groups seem to be more uniformly shaped, using moly.

In 1999, I decided to add wax coating. By then, I was learning of suspected intangible benefits from the wax. Boots Obermeyer, and Norma were speaking of having observed better results with wax. Boots spoke in terms of lowered standard deviations. Norma declares there is a benefit, but can not solidly quantify their belief. They just know.... Merrill Martin has posited that prevention of barrel erosion may be from an ablative effect which the wax provides. Until 1999, an obstacle to waxing was the difficulty in obtaining powdered carnauba wax separate from the expensive kits. After some searching, I was able to find it. You can now obtain Kincaid’s Custom powdered carnauba wax in three once bottles from Sinclair International for $8.00. This amount may also turn out to be a lifetime supply for you. If you wish to try waxing your molyed bullets, my easy process is quick and inexpensive, again using peanut butter jars and the tumbler you already own. When both molyed and waxed, my bullets look as fine as Janell’s hematite jewelry. In fact, grey hematite jewelry is my quality standard of comparison for properly molyed-waxed bullets. I am currently very satisfied with the beauty and cleanliness of my bullets when both molyed and waxed. My uniform results come from the following process which evolved from continuous experimentation and improvement over the past three years.