Add copper to your alloy for tougher CBs.

[tommag]

Thanks, Popper. I must've had a lot of sn in these old ww ingots, as most of the dross has been grey.
I cast a small bunch for testing. They are huge..3607" ww, .367 from this batch. Water dropped them, and 14 bhn shortly after casting. 31-32 bhn this morning. I'm thinking I messed up with the lee tester. Didn't have a big hammer, just a 20 oz one. Boolits flattened to .75" with multiple hits, no cracking at all.

[Magana559]

I must say, what a read! Learned lots and maybe I should try this with my HP molds.

[CrazyMan]

Great thread. I don't usually post but wanted to contribute my experience so far. I have been looking for the elusive brown ZnXX but have yet to get any. The base metal I'm using is from reclaimed bullet lead so its an unknown alloy but from my reading should be mostly lead with very little tin < 2%. My issue is that I add CS, a lot of CS, and it always comes out gray. Just today I estimate I put in 12 oz of CS into 110 oz of range lead and saw no brown powder, even after zinc'ing the melt with 6 pennies. I got the oatmeal, the melt was kept above 800 F but no brown powder. Every time I added CS, it stayed gray, the oatmeal would not disappear, it kind of stuck to the CS and made little lumps that I had to just finally skim off. In the end I probably removed about 1/3 of the original melt in skimming. After adding the pennies I got the color changing skin that goes from yellow to blue to purple. The purple skin is where I think I lost most of my melt in the skimming process. What do you think? Still free tin in the melt reacting before the Zn can? I even got a new pot to be sure it wasn't soot turning the white CS gray.

On a side note, I had a wad of the Grey powder that got trapped against the side of the pot and must have heated up enough to slowly combust. It sizzled a bit like sulfur and glowed red in the pot. It slowly spread to any other grey powder it touched and when I lifted the glowing lump from the melt it stopped glowing and hardened into a lump that would not melt at ~ 850F in the alloy. A bit of it is still stuck to the side of my new pot and I don't see it ever coming off.

[CrazyMan]

Thank you for the response. I haven't had the time to try again. Looks like the range lead must have more tin in it than I originally thought. I'll have to try just using CuSO4 first without any zinc added. It would be great to have some tough boolits I could use in full pressure rounds.

[Ido356]

popper, what are the percentages in your alloy of Pb/Sb/Cu that you have found to make tough pistol boolits?

I'm wanting to try making some Cu tough boolits but am not sure what the % you finally settled on.

Thanks,
Kenny

[Ido356]

What % of copper are members using in their alloy? from reading this post and the sticky post on High Copper Alloys, I see numbers from .3% to 2.5%.

[Ido356]

Thanks, popper.
I have another question; are there any problems using an alloy mix of 96/2/2, Pb/Sn/Sb and adding enough CS to convert 1/4th of the Sn, ending up with a mix of 96/1.5/2/.5, Pb/Sn/Sb/Cu or should the alloy be reduced to a direct Sn to Cu conversion and then adjust the Sb?

[Oklahoma Rebel]

anything over .5% is both un-needed and ,makes for harder pouring. the stream will develop a skin when pouring,which is the air cooled alloy on the very outside of the stream.this happens with anything over .6-.7% I think. and even .2-.4 will make a very noticeable difference. as far as that "oatmeal" add less cosu4 at a time, and crush that oatmeal up against the walls of your pot intil it is as fine as you can get it, skim it off and flux.

[runfiverun]

Popper is working on a zinc-copper alloy at the moment.
it's starting to show some promise, but he hasn't settled on a final number just yet.
we talked about adding some other metals but so far he has only bumped the percentages looking for the solution points.

[paraord]

Man, I must have hit the lottery then with this pile of high tin alloy from the wave solder machine. Lead 37.9%, Tin 61.6%, Copper 0.5%. I made some 405 grain flat point plain base with a 20:1 mix using this for the tin content, but it only makes it a .04% in the alloy when done at this rate. Poured great, cant wait to try them on game but looks like I have a good mess of posts to read on this thread!

[Oklahoma Rebel]

runfiverun, what other metals are you thinking about trying? I,ve heard talk of bismouth, but isn't it pretty brittle? and I am going to add some copper (zepp) to melted pipe lead, with quite a few joints, if I add the right amount of zinc, will the cuso4 replace it over the tin, or will it replace some of both? popper if you know this question goes to you as well. mainly does it prefer zinc over tin? thanks-Travis

[runfiverun]

it will replace the zinc but tin sticks to zinc like white on rice,,sooo.
Bi is a metal we have discussed, but it just duplicates antimony in the alloy up to a point and cost is a factor.
one thing that he mentioned was phases of the alloy and the Zn bumped alloy does a lot better under high stress situations right about where copper allows the flow of the alloy to occur.
but at low end situations it is able to be malleable, more malleable than in the higher stress
[higher velocity] impacts/pressures.
I'm still leaning towards an alloy containing Tin-Sn and Sb as well as the Zn and Cu.
this would surely tie everything but the Cu together.
this should allow the alloy to flow and be malleable when hunting while withstanding stress in the barrel because of the way the internal structure of the alloy is aligned/tied together.

[popper]

if I add the right amount of zinc, will the cuso4 replace it over the tin, or will it replace some of both?

Not a metallurgist but it appears Sn/Cu is more active a reaction than Zn/Cu. So, best I can tell is it takes out all the Sn, then I add the Zn and it gets replaced, if that is what I want. Then add Sn or Zn as needed. Bi works as a hardener but is light weight - and I don't have any. Roto did (or was given) results for Bi bullets, results weren't very good on IMHO. There are differing opinions of Cu/Sn - Cu/Sb but I will repeat mine. Pb will only 'take' a low % of Cu, you can put more in but it's just Cu metal, not particularly good. To get higher % to 'take', it mates with Sb or Sn. SbCu is a small molecule where CuxSbx is a large one. Size matters. Small molecules migrate through the Pb easier. Note - Cu saturation % at melt temp is pretty good so WD will keep the Cu in the lattice, but it may 'move' and soften.

[Traffer]

Wow, why didn't I see this thread earlier? Here I went and used pure sulfur to de-zinc a batch of lead and I coulda added copper in the process. Ugh. If anyone cares to answer this noob question. I have a batch of Sb 8.2%, Sn 5.7% Pb 81.6% that has an undetermined amt of zinc in it. I want to use it for alloying to add tin and antimony to my other lead. If I were to do the copper zinc replacement treatment, and lost a good portion of my tin, is there any reasonable way to reclaim the tin from the tin oxide? My experience with oxides is, once it goes to the oxygen there's no coming back.

[Traffer]

hi , ive been reading this post with great interest.
somewhile back i also was experimenting with copper sulphate , but i wasnt trying to get it IN my alloy , but ON it.
when you disolve your coppersulfate in water , mix it with some acid , and put in a piece of copper as an kathode you have a
device that will put on a layer of copper on a given object .
didnt get the right adhesion to the lead bullets though , but when this is sorted out , could it be a more simpeler system for the same goal ?

I know this is an old post but, if you read this, were you ever able to satisfactorily copper plate your lead bullets? I reload 22lr and copper plating the bullets would be fun.

[Grmps]

Could a person, not alloy copper in a pure lead/zinc alloy to reach the desired copper % fluxing the last time with sulfur to remove any remaining zinc, then alloy it into Sb Sn Pb alloy?

[popper]

Long time ago I sulfer'd alloy to add hardness. I don't remember any junk getting skimmed off but IIRC it does have an effect on Zn and Sn. It also effects the amount of Cu that the alloy will take. I quit cause it's SMELLY! It hardens but doesn't help malleability.
I have been starting with pure, add Zn, then Cu, then Zn to get the %s I want.
Last batch I did, had trouble getting the last of the Zn to melt. Don't know what caused that. it appears that the solubility of Zn in Pb is ~1.6%.

[runfiverun]

sulpher is a grain modifier [so the lead packs together tighter]
it can replace arsenic as a catalyst for hardening also, and it is great at grabbing junk in the alloy pulling it to the top [zinc too BTW]
what I don't remember about it is if it also increases the surface tension like arsenic does.

Traffer.
you can copper plate lead bullets, before the powder coat thing come along, home plating was starting to make a lot of sense to people and some pretty impressive contraptions were being built.
I bet about 20 minutes on U-tube will show you enough about it to build your own unit.

I made one with a plastic shoe box and a plug in the wall power converter.
but I used mine to plate same case necks when doing some H/V cast boolit work.

somewhere around here there is another copper thread [sticky maybe] where I outlined how I got copper into a lead tin alloy then used that alloy to cut a SbPb alloy to the percentages I wanted.

[Oklahoma Rebel]

I think I will cut out all the joints in the pipe ( that's were the tin is) and just use the pipe and a zinc ww to add the cuso4, then add the joints back in. this mix will then be used to dilute another batch I have that I want to lower the sn/sb in. it's basically lyman #2 w/cu, when I add the plumbing pipe it will drop to 3.5% each, sb/ and sn. and the cu should stay the same.

[Traffer]

Traffer.
you can copper plate lead bullets, before the powder coat thing come along, home plating was starting to make a lot of sense to people and some pretty impressive contraptions were being built.
I bet about 20 minutes on U-tube will show you enough about it to build your own unit.

Yes I should have checked youtube. I few years ago I tried cleaning old coins with electrolysis. I ended up learning how to sliver plate things. Hah! It's actually pretty easy.