Another type metal question

[beemer]

Hello everyone. I found this sight about a week ago so i'm new here.I have been playing with milsurps and cast for years and I still have questions. Not long ago I bought 2 five gallon buckets of hand set type.This stuff melts easily and pours a beautiful boolit but it is as hard as chinese arithmetic. A mould that pours at 140 with WW pours about 125. It also has a purple hue to the metal. Acurracy has been poor in every rifle I have tried. Sometimes the bullet will break off at the case mouth when it starts up the feed ramp. I would like to know what kind of metal this is? Does any one know what ratio to mix with WW to make a good boolit.
beemer

[454PB]

A good alloy for rifle use is 50% linotype and 50% pure lead. Another is anywhere from 25% to 50% linotype and wheelweights.

If you have boolits breaking in half, you are using a very hard type metal.

[felix]

Boolits that break do not have enough "toughner" to keep them stable. Tin is a great additive, but the amount needed must approximate at least, but not over, the same percentage of antimony. This would be a pure waste of tin in terms of amount required, so dilute the base metal with WW, roofing, pipe material by 100 percent. In other words, cut the antimony in half or thereabouts. Now add the tin necessare for easy casting. It sounds like you folks have been getting some wild stuff from these print shops. Babbit metals made for bearings are not brittle. If anything they are too tough for shooting metal into the dirt, if they can be made into boolits, that is. Tin based babbits can, but that is a pure waste of good tin. ... felix

[garandsrus]

Beemer,

I bought some type metal a year or so ago. Here's the composition:
Here's the composition:
Lead 52.5%
Antimony 24.5%
Tin 15.8%
Copper 3.0%
Bismuth 3.0%

I know this doesn't add up to 100%, but it's close!

My metal is very close to Foundry Type, and in fact is a little higher in the Tin and Antimony. I cast a few .30 cal boolits out of straight type metal and had some that broke in half when trying to seat the boolit. They are definitely brittle! The texture at the break was very grainey. These were air cooled.

I wrote an alloy calculator in Excel to figure out how to mix my type metal to Taracorp (2% tin, 6% antimony, 92% lead). If you mix wheel weights (0.5% tin, 4% antimony, 95.5 lead) 9 WW:1 FT with the Founday type you will end up with Taracorp. This is considered to be a very good alloy.

John