This is getting silly

[44man]

I made up some 50-50, WW, PB boolits for lapping. I wanted 12 to 14 BN. It has been a week now. I water dropped half and air cooled the other half.
The water dropped reached 12 in a day so I used them but the air cooled boolits still check 6 BN. The water dropped have reached 16 BN.
Those air cooled are checking softer then my pure lead ingots!
I am going to let them sit for a long time to see if they harden but it makes me wonder what my WW metal is. I don't put the stick on weights in the melt either. I know my WW stuff never gets as hard as some of you say your's does.
Some of the guys have sent me boolits that are much harder then mine are.

[LarryM]

Projectile disfunction???

[44man]

YUP! :killingpc

[Ricochet]

Projectile disfunction???
:mrgreen:

[SharpsShooter]

I use a 50/50 PB/WW air-cooled mix for almost everything, including BPCR and it has worked rather well. I do not have a tester, but wonder if this is why it works so good in BPCR applications.


SS

[44man]

Makes me wonder too. A lot cheaper then adding tin to pure. I have to try it. Thanks for the idea.:)

[leftiye]

My 50/50 WW/ pure mix tests air cooled at about BHN11, and heat treats at BHN27, FWIW. Your wws are definitely way softer than mine

[44man]

I have to add tin and antimony to my WW's to get what everyone else gets with plain WW's. Even with this mix my water dropped only come out 19 to 20 BN. I don't need them harder as it is perfect for accuracy and reduced leading. I would prefer the WW's themselves to be harder so I don't have to alloy.
I have always said that it depends on where the weights were made. There is no standard alloy for them that I know of.

[targetshootr]

That's bizarre if ww in one area are that much softer than everywhere else. Mine are straight ww and run 12bhn or so. Maybe the hardness tester or the mix needs another look.

[Dale53]

Is it possible that we are using different standards? The only way to tell is to use your various machines side by side to tell.

Personally, I use a LBT Hardness tester (if I were buying a new one I'd probably get a Cabine Tree Tester). I'm happy with my tester but really only use it to compare one of MY alloys with another. I haven't compared to anyone elses (haven't needed to).

On the other hand, I have used pure metals of various mixtures and they measure up to my expectations with the LBT Tester...

FWIW

Dale53

[EKO]

Maybe your WW's got rained on...no minerals in rain water so it's "soft" water making then soft! LOL

[waksupi]

Sonofagun. Sounds like some people may indeed be able to shoot WW's in RB Ml's, after all. What do ya know? I love experts.

[44man]

I like the rain answer best. :drinks:
If I use straight WW metal my boolits come out decent. Water dropped will be about 16 BN. Why the 50-50 air cooled is still reading softer then pure is funny. I use the LBT tester too.

[buck1]

44man:
I am a tightwad! Cheeper is better as long it its what I want. I have ran a few tests on this, and for me it takes my ACWW 2 full months to fully harden to BHN 13-14 (not even clost to the two weeks I have read about). I test with a cabin tree tester and a Saeco as well untill I got rid of the Saeco. I also throw in the stick-ons with the rest.
I was once casting ACWW and running two molds., one 44cal 420 swc and a .30 cal 165 gr. After a a coupple of days the 44s were dead soft and the 30s were at bhn 11. Same pot ,alloy,and cast at the same time. so how fast they air cool,also seems to be a factor as well... FWIW...Buck

[44man]

I figured it would take a long time. I am going to leave these boolits sit and check them over time. They sure are purdy though, nice and shiny. :-D

[dubber123]

Since I use an LBT tester too, maybe you should try one of the 45-70 slugs I sent you. I have some from the same batch, and I'd like to see how 2 of the same testers varied.

[Dale53]

I would expect LBT testers to check out quite well to each other. I was suggesting that maybe they might not check out with a "real" Brinell Hardness Tester.

My old buddy, Charlie Dell, made up his own hardness tester and it was done to an engineering standard that gave Real World Brinell hardness units (a particular diameter ball pressed into the test sample with a particular weight for a particular time. Since I had no reason to test my LBT tester against a known standard I have not done so. As I said before, it routinely indicated what my expectations were against published standard data but that is not quite the same as comparing a particular sample with a "real" tester...(and of course, we don't really need to know if it is 11 or 12 as long as it is consistent).

Dale53

[shotstring]

I understand that of the two major producers of wheelweights, one of them has half the antimony of the other. Most of the WW I get are made from one company so that may be the same in your case....but being the company with the least antimony.

[Bass Ackward]

Forgot about this test until I read this.

WW mix does seem to make a difference as does time to both harden .... AND soften.


1 1/2 year old 50/50 WW pure test results:

44 caliber water dropped or oven heat treated hardness never went above 16. Eight months later hardness had already degraded and remains about 11 BHN for the last few months. Air cooled hardness went to 8 in about a month and has stayed there.

Same batch of lead produced 35 calibers. Water dropped and heat treated maxed out at 19 BHN. They took longer to drop but are now 12 BHN and appear to have stabilized there. Air cooled hardness was the same at 8 BHN.

30s out of this batch went to 22 BHN and settled back to the same 12 BHN pretty close to the 35s.


So for using up my pure lead adding WW, I go 60/40 for 35s and below. 70/30 for 44s and up. These soften back to about 14 BHN in 6 months which is about what I want for hunting anyway. Since I mold all winter for the year ahead, this will be ideal for me.

My straight WDWW or HTWW stabilizes at 20 BHN no matter how hard it got after a year or so just so you can gauge it to yours.

Thanks for the reminder to check these.

[44man]

Dubber, I just checked a few of your boolits and they measure 25 BN. I have never had water dropped WW's get that hard.
I doubt any 2 testers will be the same and it is not real important anyway. I only use it to compare things and it doesn't matter if it reads true BN.
I have often wondered if hardness is that important. I have old boolits under the bench and they shoot the same as newer ones. I have always felt that the alloy itself is more important to prevent leading and if it age hardens or softens, does it change what the function of the alloy was made for?
I do know that the 50-50 water dropped mix gives me more leading the full length of the bore even if over lubed with grease at the muzzle and in the chambers from blow back. Straight WW's gives me some leading but by adding a little tin and antimony, leading almost stops even if the boolits have sat under the bench 2 years. That leading wipes out with a patch and is just a few flakes. Many times I have cleaned the gun after a few months and there is zero lead.
Now the 50-50 takes a lot of scrubbing with Butch's triple twill patches and a brush even if they test the same BN as my alloy.
Have we been depending on a BN reading for nothing? Are there alloy mixes all up and down the scale from soft to hard that won't lead where a small change in the alloy will?
I have to quit thinking! I don't want the task of working this out. :confused: [smilie=1:

[felix]

What we are really interested in is the ability of the lead to hold onto itself as one glob as the boolit travels down the tube. It appears the correlation between actual hardness and "shearness" is not that good for most of the alloys we seem to generate. This is why I have never bothered obtaining a lead hardness tester. It seems we need a tool to measure the weight of the boolit before and after being driven into some kind of die (a take off barrel section of sorts) with heavy duty lands. Ideally for us, the heavier boolit will have had its lead driven into the boolit rather than having been sheared off. (Cut off the tits caused by the lands before measuring). ... felix

[targetshootr]

If I remember right, Elmer K said the best boolits were plain base 11 bhn and could be pushed to 1200 fps.

[44man]

That makes me wonder how many different alloys, casting, aging and hardening procedures there are that will come out to 11 BN? That's what I am getting at, hardness alone doesn't answer the question. Exactly what alloy did Elmer use?

[OeldeWolf]

I think that this is getting interesting. The resistence to shearing very well may NOT be 100% correlated to hardness. I would really REALLY like to see more information on this.

[targetshootr]

This is greek to me cause I just use straight ww but after listing some hot loads in Sixguns, Keith said, "With all the loads listed in this paragraph, bullet diameter is fixed at .001 of an inch over groove diameter and cast to a temper of one part tin to sixteen parts lead, or a mixture of half tin and half antimony in the same formula".

[Bass Ackward]

It seems we need a tool to measure the weight of the boolit before and after being driven into some kind of die (a take off barrel section of sorts) with heavy duty lands. Ideally for us, the heavier boolit will have had its lead driven into the boolit rather than having been sheared off. (Cut off the tits caused by the lands before measuring). ... felix


Felix,

I don't know about this. I would say that impact speed might have to factor in. At slow (sizing) speeds all mixes and hardness's I have used elongate forward of the mid point and then back in the last half. (path of least resistance) Especially when the bullet is protected by hydraulic lube function. So pressure may make a difference too.

Baring galling, weight change comes from the loss of lube basically. The only area where this can be a problem is on a GC design where there isn't enough room between the check and the first drive band to allow the lead to flow back. Or on really hard / brittle PB as the lead displaces back.

[buck1]

My memory is'nt all that great , But if I can recall Keith used :
10:1 for autos.
16&20:1 for 44s. but mostly 16:1.
In those days tin was cheep and he used alloys very rich in it.
16 LB of lead to 1 Lb of tin! And in big ol 44s to boot!! YIKE$!!

[felix]

100 percent correct, 44man. There is no practical way, really, to measure what is needed for the reasons you stated. Static and dynamic characteristics are extremely important to what must be accomplished, and how to take this into account on a desk top would be nothing short of displaying our mutual insanity in progressing the techniques of processing the results of the silver stream. ... felix

[PatMarlin]

I just re-checked some boolits I cast for my 358 Winny in ACWW with my- HOLD your ears.. "LEE Hardness Tester", and upon casting on 9-7 they were 8bhn, and today the 15th they are 10.4.

[44man]

I just checked my air cooled 50-50 mix and they are now up to 8 BN. I will do this for a month. :Fire:

[Dale53]

Elmer mostly used 16/1 lead/tin. He didn't like wheelweights as he believed that you couldn't get all of the grit from them and was afraid that he would ruin his fine handguns. He used a softer alloy for hollow point bullets (without looking, I remember it as 20/1).

I started casting bullets about 1950 (at my father's urging) and my only guide was Elmer's little blue book, "Sixgun Cartridges and Loads". I would buy "plumbers lead in five lb pigs" and "temper" with solder to get 16/1 or equivalent. Then I went through a linotype stage (all bullet metals were cheap and readily available in my small (70,000 population) industrial city. I had almost no disposable income (heck, no one I knew did for most of my formative years even into adulthood ) so I either cast bullets and loaded my own or didn't shoot. I went YEARS before I used any factory ammo. I worked for my family and we owned and operated a small hardware store and appliance repair shop (my assigned duties were automatic laundry repairs). We had an FFL and did get everything at cost, so that helped. I really got into serious shooting about the time I turned 19 and joined a new local gun club (where I am now a life member).

The point of all of this is even I didn't start using wheel weights until later in life. The raw materials were not expensive, we knew what the content was (well, pretty much, as the "plumbers lead" was not entirely pure lead). Linotype was used to harden the alloy and was readily available for 20 cents a lb for many, many years. Of course, this was USED Linotype but it was pretty consistently good.

When tin started getting pricey that is when I started using wheel weights. This allowed me to use less Linotype and to dispense with pure tin for my cast bullets. I was shooting LOTS of cast bullets by this time (in one five year period I cast, loaded and shot 75,000 rounds for IPSC competition alone and my two boys together shot probably half as much).

So, we have to look at the times to see why some of the top people in shooting did what they did.

ON TOPIC:

My experience with hardness testing with my LBT tester was that NEARLY all of the hardness in most regularly used alloys takes place within two weeks (there is some additional hardening still taking place but it did not seem to be significant). This is with air hardened wheel weight alloys and other much used alloys such as Lyman #2.

I ran no tests to see what would happen one year, two years and longer down the road. However, I have recently discovered a forgotten trove of bullets that I had cast, sized and lubed probably 20+ years ago and have been shooting them in my .45 revolvers. They were lubed with Alox and while it had apparently shrunk a bit (the bullet lube) it seems to work extremely well. I have not hardness tested any of these but it might be interesting to do so.

I tended to load rather hard bullets for .45 ACP (8/1 ww/Linotype) and 5/1 WW/LInotype for magnum revolver loads (plain base as I seldom use gas check bullets in magnum pistol loads). I sized the bullets to the throats and had excellent results.

One area that I have little information on, is barrel leading. This is going to sound strange, but I have NEVER had a revolver or pistol that leaded to any extent. So, I have little to add when it comes to that discussion except to discuss what DOES work, don't know much about what DOESN'T work. Please don't take that as arrogance, it is just simply true. I believe that is because since I didn't know a thing about bullet casting and reloading when I started as a teenager (and knew absolutely no one else that did any of this). So, I did the logical thing and bought Elmer's book and FOLLOWED IT TO THE LETTER. I had excellent results and just kept on doing what worked.

In the years that followed, I met LOTS of really talented shooters and some were good reloaders. I discussed their problems and we came to conclusions that mostly were correct. Occasionally we would get off track but quickly solved most of the problems that arose. I am by nature and careers (plural intended) a trouble shooter so that pretty much came naturally.

I gave a few reloading seminars (both jacketed and cast with rifle, pistol, and shotgun) and through that broadened my perspective (we'll have to talk about that some time).

Dale53

[PatMarlin]

Thanks for the journy Dale. Is Elmers book still around?

[Dale53]

Elmer Keith's book, "Sixgun Cartridges and Loads" was written in 1936 and published by Samworth (as I remember) and was reprinted by Wolfe Publishing in 1985. It is now again out of print. You can sometimes find them at used booksellers at the larger gun shows but they tend to be rather pricey.

Here is a reference but please sit down before you read it:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-5220693-6243245?initialSearch=1&url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Sixgun+Cartridges+and+Loads+by+Elmer+Keit h&Go.x=12&Go.y=16&Go=Go

My original copy has been WELL read and it is becoming a bit fragile but I still find it most interesting to read from time to time. No, it isn't for sale:) .

Dale53

[PatMarlin]

Just went and checked some .35 cal 200 RCBS ACWW cast in 05' and the bhn is 15.4.