Frosted vs Shiny Lead??

[Fish_N_Russ]

I have poured lots of lead/ww for my fishing lure biz, but until recently I havent really done much for boolits. I have always dumped all my ww's into a large pot and melted them down, and the ingots were always frosty looking. Here recently I melted down some 'mystery' lead that I got from a friend and it came out very bright and shiny......is that a higher lead content or ??? Also should I raise my temp so I dont get the frosty look or does it matter? Inquiring minds want to know :mrgreen:
thanks
Russ

[DLCTEX]

High temp is what causes that frosty look, but ww tends to look frosted anyway. The shiney is probably higher pure content, but could be other . Is it hard compared to ww? The boolits I have cast with some zinc contaminationtend to be shiny with the lighter color of ww. DALE

[Shiloh]

As long as it is a slight even frosting, I have found that the boolits shoot well. Slightly frosty works very well with the LEE Tumble Lube series of boolits. If there are cavities and craters in them, well that would be different.

Shiloh

[mooman76]

If I remember correctly I heard pure lead doesn't get frosty. I at least know it doesn't frost as much or takes more to frost pure or near pure lead. But I'd take a batch offrosty well formed bullets over a batch of shiny not so well filled out or half not well filled out ones any day.

[NVcurmudgeon]

I prefer frosty boolits as long as the frost in uniform all over the booolit. Frosted boolits are good shooters, and usually well filled out. If the heat gets too high, the boolit can show "shrunken band syndrome" which is charcterized by a failure to fill out on part of one band. Sometimes a long, slim rifle boolit can appear to be bent like a banana! The cure is less heat and sometimes a god scrubbing of the mould.

[AZ-Stew]

If the metal casts harder than wheel weights, has a very shiny appearance and melts at a lower temp than wheel weights, it may be linotype. Lino can be mixed with WW to harden it for rifle boolits, or it can be used straight for very hard boolits, but a lot of people here would say you're wasting good alloy if you're shooting it straight.

If you cast for small caliber rifles and plan to run your loads over 2,000 fps, straight lino may be a good choice. You'll want your boolits hard for this duty.

As far as the "frosty" thing goes, I find that I have a hard time getting good fillout with straight WW unless I run the pot at about 725F. This produces boolits with what some folks call a "frosty" appearance, but what someone else called "dull gray". I prefer the dull gray description. When the temp of the alloy and mould get to the point where the boolits appear to have a crystiline surface texture, that's what I call "frosty", and as NVcurmudgeon says, it's an indication of too much heat. Crank the thermostat on the pot back a bit or slow your casting pace. As stated earlier, frosting in localized areas is almost always accompanied by a sunken surface at those locations.

Regards,

Stew

[Fish_N_Russ]

I usually just crank my lee pot up to 8-9 when im pouring.....just to make sure things fill out (I cast a lot of fishing jigs with small heads so this is important).....but maybe im running it a little TOO hot....?

[Calamity Jake]

"I melted down some 'mystery' lead that I got from a friend and it came out very bright and shiny."


MHO, it's lino. if you can check hardness.

[mto7464]

my lee pot at that setting was around 850 so you likely are too hot. I learned this after I got a thermometer.

[ihuntbuck]

do the bullets change color over time

[Lloyd Smale]

you need to keep in mind that especially with steal molds frosted bullets can sometimes not be filled out properly. Your mold will get to hot where the two cavitys meet in the middle. theres not much metal there and if it gets to hot you will have bullets that have sides that arent filled out. Adding more tin or antimony usually just makes this problem worse. Where this problem really shows its face is with steal molds and big bullets. I have about resorted to using my ballistic cast .512 and .475 molds as a single cavity mold and rotate which cavity i use each cast to get really good bullets.