Originally Posted by
badgeredd
I'm not wanting to be offensive here guys, but you're making a lot of work out of it. Some of you are ignoring parts of our method that we are using to keep things as safe as possible in the air quality arena. The copper is being added to the babbit, NOT TO A LEAD MIX. The reason we do it this way is to avoid vaporizing lead into a dangerous gas as much as possible. Once we have a copper enriched babbit, we add it to a lead mix for our boolit alloy.
The babbit we are using is identical to the Rotometals Rotonickel (type #2) babbit. The reason we are adding copper to the babbit is it is cheaper for us to add the copper to our EXISTING supply of babbit. This babbit has almost no lead in it. You can get the same stuff (or very similar) we are mixing, by buying the Rotometals Super Tough alloy (type #3). Once our babbit supply is exhausted we'll likely turn to purchasing the already alloyed Rotometals type #3 alloy.
Now some are going to say this is an expensive way to go. IF one used the babbit for only casting boolits meant to go very fast, 5 pounds of the Super tough will last a very long time and be definitely cheaper than buying jacketed bullets. The basis for using the high copper alloys is to increase the strength of the alloy to resist deformation when fired out of a high pressure cartridge of 50,000 psi or so. We are trying to make a good Pb/Sn/Sb/Cu alloy that is consistent and accurate at high speed. It isn't a cure all for every ill of cast boolits. It is a specialized alloy for specialized applications.
Don't waste your time using this in medium and lower pressure loads. You're going to see little if any benefit. Our goal is to be able to push our cast grease groove boolits to the velocities of factory jacketed bullets in the 3000 fps range and perhaps slightly higher. One can get the velocities we are after with paper patching, but we're trying to get there without the jacket, copper or paper.
Edd