ww-lino alloy

[hiram]

I want to make sure I will have an easy time casting the group buy molds of 32 cal 150 plinker and the 150 30 cal GC bullets. I was thinking about about 20# ww and 1# lino. I just want the extra tin content for fillout. Any feedback? Is this overkill with tin? Would half a lb. of lino do the trick just as well?

[FISH4BUGS]

I cast 5 lbs ww to 1 lb linotype. That is supposedly the Lyman #2 alloy. Plenty hard for everything you can do. Not sure about rifles though.

[grumpy one]

Linotype is 12% antimony, and only 4% tin. Adding lino is a lousy way to increase tin, since you increase antimony three times as much.

To add a little tin to your alloy, add radio solder, leadless solder (silver free) or pewter. You only need a tiny amount, because of their high tin content.

[Leftoverdj]

Fish and Grumpy are both right. Five or six pounds of WW to one of lino makes an excellent general purpose alloy if you have the lino to spare. If you are long on WW and short on lino, a quarter pound of lead free solder will sweeten 20 or 25 pounds of WW. That will be slightly softer, but good for your purposes.

[Larry Gibson]

All alloys vary a little but Lyman says linotype is 86% lead, 3% tin and 11% antimony. New WWs are 95.5% lead, 0.5% tin and 4% antimony. I use a mix of 2/1 (12 lbs WW/ 6 lbs linotype) that should be close to 90 % lead, 3% tin and 6% antimony. That is close to Lyman's #2 alloy which is 90% lead, 5% tin and 5% antimony. Lyman says #2 all's BHN is 15 and I find my mix is 15-18. It is close enough and makes good bullets for most rifle loads.

If you want to add tin the best way is to get pure tin to add. There are several venders of pure tin here at this site that will send you some at a reasonable price. Much better that way. I generally ad 2-3% tin to WWs to make them cast well and that alloy does well on most bullets up through 1800 fps or so for best accuracy. You can push that alloy to 2,000 -2100 fps for hunting in some catridges with a good GC bullet.

Larry Gibson.