Water dropping bullets to harden?

[cbrick]

I just read, somewhere, that this only hardens the outer layer of the bullet! How do you know if it hardens the whole way thru or into the center of it?

The faster the molecules cool, the closer the the theoretical max hardness the lead will be. Based on this, what you heard is correct.

This is sound advice.

What you are asking as to the outside being harder than the inside is probable true.

This is all incorrect. If steel is quench hardened (case hardened) it does have a surface hardness but lead is not steel and does not respond like steel. Lead will be the same hardness all the way through. It's possible that the middle may take a day or two longer to reach the final hardness because it cooled last but it will be the same all the way through as long as it contains antimony (Sb).

That is the metallurgy of lead. You cannot "case harden" lead. Heat treated either by quenching from the mold or oven heating and quenching will be the same hardness all the way through. It is possible to work soften the outer edge of the boolit a bit by sizing which is why boolits quenched from the mold should be sized right after casting and oven heat treated boolits should be sized before heat treating.

Rick

[btroj]

Maybe this is why we need to wait a bit to know the ultimate hardness of the bullets........

[cbrick]

The crystalline structure doesn't form immediately on cooling which is what causes the increase in strength, it needs time to form.

Rick

[RobS]

Well damn Rick.....I guess I didn't wait long enough when I got to the middle of the tootsie roll pop of those 45 caliber boolits I tested. After a two weeks mine measured out 2 BHN softer in the middle........I did underline in the quote as to what I thought was "sound" regards to what I measured in my own tests.

[cbrick]

No problem Rob, I'll contact the metals industry and let them know they have it all wrong. The info I posted is from reading many papers on non-ferrous metals from the metals industry.

Some people file the boolit to test the inside hardness but filing will work soften the area that is filed so the results won't be accurate.

The bottom line is that you cannot case harden a lead alloy. It will be the same throughout.

Rick

[bobthenailer]

I normaly water drop all boolets from the mould ! have been doing so for over 20 years with no problems for loads from 800 to 2000 fps , if you file off about 0.060 or more off a bullet nose & recheck the hardness will be the same as the unaltered boolet

[willvabch]

Morning bump

[RobS]

No problem Rob, I'll contact the metals industry and let them know they have it all wrong. The info I posted is from reading many papers on non-ferrous metals from the metals industry.

Some people file the boolit to test the inside hardness but filing will work soften the area that is filed so the results won't be accurate.

The bottom line is that you cannot case harden a lead alloy. It will be the same throughout.

Rick

Yea after reading what you posted I figured that filing was the culprit due to work softening.

[1Shirt]

Good thread! I water drop everything, have for years, will continue to do so as much for convenience as for hardening particularly for hand gun. For paper I prefer harder blts particularly for the smaller ones for rifle. For hunting, like soft nose, hard base.
1Shirt!

[popper]

Cbrick is pretty much right but remember as R5R points out, AC allows the Sb to migrate to the out side surface. I did a twist to break both and looked at the core. Definitley a 'ring' of different structure, smaller for WDd. Oven treated and water dropped gave the best consistency of the ring.

[BAGTIC]

I started by water dropping but long ago switched to oven hardening. It gives better control over the temperature and seems to provide more uniform and consistent results. Problem with water dropping is that all the bullets will not be at the same temperature when they are dropped. In multiple cavity mold the first cavities filled will have longer to cool than the last. Also our casting rhythm is often inconsistent or some bullets hang up in the mold a little.

[Ranger 7]

My experience using range scrap (Hardness 10/11 brinel W/Lee tester) has been:
dropping into bucket of Ice Water, I get SWC bullets filled out to 0.4535 and 0.3575.
Have no leading problems, do not need to size. Air cooling (With range scrap, I only use range scrap) produces a smaller diameter. Has been working great for me for five (5) years.

Note: My first time commenting. Think the site and members are great.
Shooting since 1950, Reloading since 1985 (All Hornady, progressive) and casting since
2009 (All Lee). 9 MM, 45 ACP, .38, .357.

[stephen m weiss]

Ok, so water dropping produces 37% hardness improvement in ww. Impressive. I wonder how stable the hardness is, but I don't worry about the depth. The depth is a cosine funtion between the surface and the interior, which is from the wave equation of heat transfer. Meaning, the hardness drops off slowly at the surface and increases with depth, maximizing its rate of change at the centerline. The hardness is only needed at the surface, ala fmj bullets, specifically because the rifling and barrel wall contact stress is very local, at the surface.

smw

[stockerman]

My neighbor shot a nice bull moose the other day with a water dropped WW bullet, a 370 grain out of a 400 Whelen doing around 2000 fps. Don't know what happened to the bullet, it went through and disappeared. It sure made a mess of the innards though and the moose is in the freezer.

[Rugerman]

I am water dropping 45 RN. They were keyholing and I tried just about everything suggested on here and the water drop seems to be the solution. Still have more testing but I isolated the possible issues and the water drop was the winner. Not sure that is sound though from reading on here. It works for me with my alloy and this gun.

[facetious]

I the early 90's I started playing with water hardening after reading about it in the NRA cast bullet book and the little LBT soft cover book. I have tried dropping from the mold and oven heat treating. At the time all I had were .357 &.38's so that is what was used for my testing.

Some of the things that I learned are that thy are hard all the why through. I think this was brought up In the LBT book and the NRA book. If thy were soft on the in side and hard only on the out side wouldn't you see expansion more like a jacked bullet? Having plinked my share at different things that isn't what I have seen. SWC's shot through wood and found look more like RN's. The front edges worn a way but the center still there, if it was softer shouldn't the center have flattened too? When shot in to dirt The Lee SWC and #358156 did the same thing but boolits from my LBT OWC-150 tended to rivet when air cooled but as thy got harder from water dropping and oven heating thy riveted less as thy got harder so how big the flat on the nose must have some effect on it, the SWC's didn't seem to rivet the same why.

One test I did was to shoot the same boolit (LBT OWC-150) air cooled, water dropped and oven heated over the same load of 15 gr's of #2400. out of a Ruger BH 6" and a Security Six 4'. I wanted to see how it would effect leading. I found that when shot to the point that leading started the softer boolits would start leading at the muzzle and the hardest at the breech. The water dropped was more of a lead wash then what most think of as leading. The mix I used was WW with 5% lino and 1% tin added. all had gas check's. I shot fifty rounds of each.

Yes if you let them sit till thy are as hard as thy are going to get thy are harder to size. To prove this I managed to break one of the bolt's on my lube/sizer giving me a chance to up grade to stronger bolt's. So as to make life easy'er I started to use the Lee push through sizer's. TIP: get a sizer a bit smaller then you want and lap it to the size you want. By doing this you not only get just the size you want but you end up with it polished if you finish up with some thing like Flits. Polishing the die makes it a lot easy'er no mater how hard thy are. Then I polished the lube die out till a boolit sized in the push through die could just barely be pushed through by hand so that I could use to lube it with out any sizing.

I recall reading that sizing will soften the out side but the depth to which it softens was not much and was not that big of a deal for most uses. To get around the whole thing size them shortly after dropping them in the water in the push through die before thy have time to age harden. Then when lubed in the lube/sizer thy are not sized down and not work softened but are tight enough fit to lube OK with out lube coming out were you don't want it. When sized like that in the push through you can leave them to be lubed later. A little lube of some kind will make them go through a little easy'er. For the most part I have used one of the dry lubes for this. I have found that even boolits that were let to hard'en and then sized down .002 to .003 would go through a polished die with ease when sprayed with the dry lube.

For the most part I water drop every thing now. I am not much of a hunter so it dos not mater if thy expand or not. I used the same lead mix for boolits in my .308 and used 20gr's of #4227. Thy shoot OK but I have never found one in the dirt back stop. When shot in to sand all you will find is a gray spot. I have never shot them in to wet paper so I can't tell you what thy would do there. If I were to ever want to hunt any thing bigger than say a coyote with them I think I would want some thing a little softer. For that I have tried playing with paper patching and a mix a little softer then WW's. Not so much for hunting as to have some loads that are more like factory in power just for fun.

[donnrcp]

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/atta...1&d=1410758568

Water dropping seems to make sense.

[bigarm]

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/atta...1&d=1410758568

Water dropping seems to make sense.

Made something similar out of scrap wood. Got the idea from Bullshop.