Zinc and Lead Mixed?

[LouP]

I was wondering what would happen if you got a little Zinc mixed in the Lead bullet alloy, and you made boolits with it not knowing? Would it hurt the barrel on the gun any? I'm just talking a little bit of Zinc.

[dilly]

No it would be fine. Last I heard, they say up to about 5% (MAX) won't cause any trouble. Your barrel is not in danger either way, but it is hard to cast good bullets if there is too much zinc.

Incidentally, some people have cast zinc bullets without lead in the mix and they don't hurt barrels. They weigh only something like 60% of what the bullet would weigh with lead, shoot incredibly fast because of that, and have poor long range terminal ballistics.

[bangerjim]

This has been covered extensively many many times on here. Do a search for it in the little white box in the upper right of this site .
Got Zn??????????????????? Add Sn. Lowers the surface tension of the molten mix.

A little will not hurt anything, You castings may be a teeny bit lighter. And harder.

banger-j

[Walter Laich]

If it comes to the top resembling cottage cheese, of course silver in color) I just skim it off and keep casting.
.
Otherwise I just cast and add Pb to top off pot.

[coffeeguy]

Ditto. If you cast with wheelweights it's almost bound to happen, even with monitoring smelting temperature. At times I'll get some symptoms like a slightly stringy pour, slightly rounded edges, a little slush on top, etc so I just bump up my melt temperature, flux and use up the rest of that pot, then start over again with known good alloy. The large majority of my cast boolits are plinkers and other than aesthetics I've not had any performance problems with a little zinc in my alloy.

[LouP]

Thank you all for the information you have given me.