Oil quenching boolits? has it been done?

[oldpara]

Working with different steels, O-1, D-2, W-1, H-12 etc.
Some are oil hardening, some are air hardening, and some are ideally water hardening.
Quenching in oil slows the cooling processes down.
If I were to take my O-1 out of the oven and quench it in water it would cool far to quckly and most likely crack, but in oil it cools slowly and hardens properly.
Lead is a totally different critter, dumping it in water will chill it quickly and harden it immediately.
Depending on the alloy it might continue to harden over time through precipitation. So finding a way to check hardness relative to dead soft, or what you have/want could be important if your picking nits.
Quenching in oil ? Why not ? Try it, see how it works, thats the fun of it.
If nothing else, no harm done and your slugs are prelubed to a certain extent.

[TheDoctor]

Have never done any quenching of lead myself. I would have a concern using oil, that if it was not TOTALLY removed, might contaminate powder/primer.

[Frozone]

Not sure that brine would do any more than chilled water. The brine quench for steels is so the quench liquid doesn't boil so fast. With boolits there is little boiling when they hit the water. It certainly wouldn't hurt though and it might help with some lead alloys but as Randy says you would probably need a pretty good hardness tester to determine the differences in hardness.

I do find that when I oven heat treat, boolits are noticeable harder than just water dropped but that is a subjective comment because I don't have a hardness tester. What I can say is that oven heat treated boolits easily dent ACWW and they ring if tapped together.

Longbow

I doubt it would make a Major difference, but it couldn't do worse.
And it's the best method/material I can think of that wouldn't be a pain to clean up - as oil would be.

I think I'll try a heavy brine next time I oven treat.
Lead (with antimony and arsenic or a few other alloys) cooled from 'slush' is harder the smaller you keep the crystals.
Fastest quench = smallest crystals. Slow cooling = large crystals.

My molds run below 300º well below 'slush' temp.
That means the lead has already begun to slowly crystallize before the mold is fully filled.
Even More importantly it's on the outer part of the boolit.