How long ?

[wayne5397]

After casting and sizing and lubing. How long can you wait to load your bullet. Will it change in month or year or just day? Will the hardness or shape change? Will the weight change over time.

[randyrat]

It take about 2 weeks or more to get your alloy to it's full hardness maybe more.
For 45 acp "lite" i cast and load/shoot the next day
Do a search and you can get the scientific theory explained in detail. I may get in trouble calling it a theory.

For rifle bullets air cooled i like to wait a month. If your in a hurry look into Water dropping your bullets.

[wayne5397]

I guess my question should be can you say cast in winter and load in the summer will there be much of change?

[missionary5155]

Good morning and MERRY CHRISTMAS !
I cast whenever the weather is fitting ! I am not much into 90 degrees amd 90% humidity casting secions.. I tend to leak all over and those drips have caused me some consternations.
But for rifle I WATER DROP... then I do not need to wait... and if-en they get harder over time it is just OK by me. But IF you water drop remember if you have to re-size much smaller you are possibly going to ne-gate some of the water drop effect.

[Green Frog]

My primary use of lead bullets is schuetzen rifles, both offhand and from the bench. I feel like my benchrest results are certainly a yardstick against which to measure my response to this question. I have shot bullets within less than 48 hours of casting and after a couple of years of storage with no discernible difference. Keep in mind however that this is with known alloys of pure tin and pure lead... none of the witch's brew stuff I see bandied about here. I cannot begin to speak with authority on the effect of antimony or other alloying agents in accurate bullets as I avoid it studiously for my bullets as they may end up being fired with BP, a recipe for inaccuracy, I have been told. JMHO&E, YMMV!

Froggie

[Shiloh]

For me, I cast a lot of boolits in my particular sessions. I use a little harder alloy for rifle and a lot of range lead and other acquired scrap for pistol boolits.

The tumble lube slugs get sized TL'd and stored in various containers. Sometimes I load them in a day or two and I will load some tomorrow that were cast in Sept. I see no difference in performance. I can shoot the center out of the black of a 50' NRA target with the 1911 whether they were cast 6 days or six months ago.

The rilfe slugs were cast in July and put in various containers. I lubrisize and load as needed.
They shoot fine and accuracy is better than I can shoot them. I am not greatly worried about them softening back up when lubrisizing.

My recommendation is to cast, load, shoot, and enjoy. I shoot through old military relics so a half inch doesn't bother me. If you are one who wants to squeeze the closest 2mm of accuracy from your loads, It can be done and there are those on this forum who can tell you how to do it providing you have a firearm capable of discerning exacting tolerances.

I like accurate loads. I just don't fret about the final nth degree like I once did.

Shiloh

[klausg]

wayne-
If you search around you will find copious amounts of information on the subject; but I'll try to give you a bare bones answer. Everyone else has given you very good answers, I guess it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're doing anything where .5 MOA or less has a real meaning then it may be worth your while to do a little experimentation. For plinking, general fun use the age of your boolits will have no real discernible effect. The real issue you're liable to have is how you're going to store your sized & lubed boolits. You may open your box of boolits and find that the heat has melted your lube enough to glue everything together into a boolit/lube conglomerate mess. Hope this helps.

-Klaus

[Glen]

If your alloy has antimony in it, it will age harden. Depending on the alloy, it will take anywhere from about 2 days to about 3 weeks to achieve its final hardness.

Binary lead-tin alloys will undergo a modest age softening (about 1 BHN unit) over the course of about 2-3 weeks.

To answer your questions -- the weight and shape will not change in any significant way, only the hardness. Yes, you can cast in winter, and then load and shoot in the summer. I have bullets out in the garage right now that I cast 5 or 6 years ago, and they shoot just fine.

[wayne5397]

Thank you gentlemen for the answers. I notice my bullet aged in about 24 to 36 hr and i get the hardness i looking for i didnt know if over time it might change cause i use them up in 1 to 2 week. I have some now stored up and been testing loads and have not got to reload them lately. I will probably go back and check them to see how they our.

[DLCTEX]

I try to age them long enough to cool off before loading. Does this help?

[JohnH]

I try to age them long enough to cool off before loading. Does this help?

Now that's mean ;) ;) ;) (but ya beat me to it) However, it's just about right.