Lead alloy effects in swaging

[Metroxfi]

Like I said, I'm trying to learn, but I still don't see anything that is compelling. Please someone point to an article that is science based. In my mind, this fits into the category, "I read it on the internet, so it must be true!"

So you want me to cite a science based article but you're not going to believe anything on the internet? I point out specific lines about work softening then you point out a paragraph about age softening as if to prove me wrong when they are two completely different phenomena. How are you measuring hardness? I believe most that use the ball indent require different alloys of known hardness to be tested at the same time and used for comparison. I believe you are confused as to the subject the I'm trying to learn about, work softening and it's effects on the alloys and therefore the overall effect on the terminal performance of a projectile. I don't want to know about age hardening alloys or how hard of lead I should or should not run in my dies. If you want to learn if the work softening of lead exists then do the research and find out for yourself, it's not my job to convince you.

I don't believe for a second that you're making .185" wire out of a .75" billet with only a 2 ton press. Seems like you forgot a zero somewhere.

Runfiverun pointed out that Hornady's target 38's are 'dead soft' while containing upwards of 5% antimony and also pointed out that commercial lead wire contains up to 2% antimony, even though antimony is used as a hardening agent it's also used as a type of lubricant and helps the lead to flow. Granted I just 'read that on them internets' but if an alloy contains more antimony than clip-on wheel weights then shouldn't it be harder than the weights? And yet I've never heard someone refer to clip-on weights as dead soft... The amounts of antimony in commercially swaged bullet cores must have to do with a consistency issue or because of its effects on the alloy itself during forming. It could even be because they might buy recycled lead and when you take all the scrap lead available and mix it all together you come out with about 2% antimony and a trace of tin. But even 2% antimony would make an alloy decently hard, but commercially swaged bullets are notorious for being extremely soft, why is that?

There seems to be a base level of hardness for lead, obviously pure lead is soft at 5BHN, and if you work soften an alloy I don't believe it will get any softer than pure lead but I do believe it will get softer than the cast version of the equivalent alloy.

[Forrest r]

Ok that's great you were able to get things to work the way you wanted but what effects do the alloys of lead have on the performance? You mentioned that there are huge differences in the alloys used for cores but then only mention BHN's. What are the alloys? Are the BHN's measured after the cores are cast? after they're swaged? If you start with a cast core of 10BHN and work soften it with swaging does it matter how hard it started out? How much of a difference in performance between the 45acp and 44mag is due to the differences in amounts of notching, meplat size, and hollow point cavity depth? I don't think it's a fair comparison to say that softer lead makes the bullet more frangible then build the bullets entirely different from one another.

Runfiverun you mentioned that Hornady's swaged target 38's contain 5% antimony but also described them as 'dead soft' so does the content of the alloy have any effect on the internal or terminal ballistics of the projectile? I've never heard of a cast bullet with 5% antimony being described as 'dead soft' so obviously the swaging has an effect.

If your lead wire contains 2% antimony what exactly does that mean for the bullets you're going to make with the wire? The ingots used to make the wire were probably ~10BHN but have you measured the BHN of the wire itself? I would guess it's nowhere near 10BHN. If the wire starts out at 10BHN then gets extruded into wire and work softened, then bent around and straightened and cut and work softened some more, then swaged to weight and work softened again, then seated into a jacket and work softened yet again does the original hardness of the ingot carry over to the final product at all? Does the chemical make up of the original ingot have any effect on how the bullet will peel apart inside a target?

Does working the lead so much make the molecular structure irrelevant?

Some people play checkers, some people play chess.
Why don't you do some testing and post what you have tried???

It's extremely easy to wave your hand and except one thing and dismiss another when everything is laid at your feet.
Some people trip over dollars to pick up dimes.

Perhaps you would bother to make 1000+ bullets with different alloys for cores along with different size/depth hp's and post your results.

Then you might have the ability to begin to find the answers of the questions you ask.

[Zbench]

Metro,

You can read about how I measure hardness here as I wrote the article: http://leadandbrass.com/hardtest/hardness.html

I did make a mistake about the pressure on my hydraulic extruder. Cylinder pressure only goes to 2100#, so that's only 1 ton. .185 wire starts flowing at about 1600#, and then drops to about 1200#. I didn't leave a zero off. You can watch it in action here, although I'm extruding .390 wire in the video: https://youtu.be/a6dws0mYU6w

You write:

"I don't want to know about age hardening alloys or how hard of lead I should or should not run in my dies. If you want to learn if the work softening of lead exists then do the research and find out for yourself, it's not my job to convince you. "

When I have time, I'll do just that. Having said that, I typically don't waste my time on stuff that isn't real. Except that one time when I was in boy scouts and we went camping looking for Bigfoot. But then again I was only 14 at the time.

[uncle dino]

2100# hydraulic pressure on hydro press is 20204#s of force or just over 10 tons. On a .75 ingot..id guess just under 40 ton of die pressure. D

[Zbench]

Dino, that's something I can't wrap my mind around. I know it's real as I've seen it in the tables of Corbin's power swage book, but it still mystefies me. The press pressure is nominally 2000#, but the ram pressure is 16,500#? How can that be? That is, how can the force behind the ram only be 1/8 of the ram pressure? Doesn't make sense, but I'm glad it works.

[uncle dino]

Depending on model, your press either has a 3.5 or 3.75 inch hydraulic cylinder. Gauge reads lbs per square inch..if you have 7 square inches of hydraulic cylinder ram surface area, that's your multiplier..the larger the cylinder the more force it has at a given pressure.. a 6 inch cylinder with the same hydraulic pressure will give you 59,300 lbs of force or almost 30 tons. Now you take that force and put it on a smaller area..say, a swage punch, the force multiplies..because you have less surface area pushing with same force... Hope my explanation is clear enough..d

[runfiverun]

in hydraulics diameter and length matter a whole bunch.
look at how your cars jack or ram on a back hoe works, low pressure high volume on one side and high pressure low volume on the other.

[jsn]

I have the RCBS Cast Bullet Manual #1, on page 32 (the heat treating chapter written by Dennis Marshall) this is what it states:

"Sizing, even a little bit, will cause any portion of the bullet which is worked to soften. The total loss in strength will vary somewhere between 25 and 75% depending on the bullet's age, hardness, and alloy content. The loss is most dramatic in the case of heat treated bullets as the driving bands may actually end up softer that if the bullets had not been treated at all."

A couple of points from further on...hardening begins immediately after the quench, and softening requires minutes to months depending on the alloy.

[Zbench]

So, what that means to me is that if you "heat treat" the lead, and make it artificially hard, and work it, then it devloves back to it's normal hardness, which was the baseline to start with? Do you interpret that also to mean if you just cast some lead, let it air cool and then size it, that it will be the same hardness as before you started it? Seems like we are talking two different things here.

[Valornor]

Bullet makers use different alloy's of lead to achieve different terminal ballistics. The gentlemen mentioned that they recycle lots of led from an indoor shooting range and it's about a 2% antimony content which would make sense. The vast majority of ammo shot in a indoor shooting range will be range ammo, where manufacturers don't care about terminal ballistics, and its all about economy at that point. It is likely the 2% is the cheapest alloy available to them that gives them the characteristics they desire for large scale production.

However if they are looking for terminal performance, whether it be deep penetration or explosive expansion they will use different alloy's to achieve the hardness they need. Also different methods of bonding or locking the core to the jacket.

Dead soft lead/pure is going to expand more readily then a chilled harden lead, like Lyman #2 or Linotype. To answer the original posters question on how can he maximize terminal performance on coyotes and small game, use soft lead, or better yet try and find some lead shot like #9 shot and compress it into a core. The bullet will penetrate and comp apart. Leaving lead exposed at the top of the bullet will help to initiate expansion. With the thin jackets your making from the 22LR cases I would expect any way you go the bullet is going to fragment and you will see significant core/jacket separation. I don't think this is an issue for small game. I wouldn't count on it to stop anything larger then a coyote.

One thing I might try is doing something like a half jacket. Where the bearing surface is jacketed but the ogive is largely just expose lead. Varying the length of the jacket with help you figure out what portion of the ogive should be jackets to ensure reliable feeding. Then I might go with a higher antimony content. The lead should expand fairly readily, and varying the hardness of the lead will help control how quickly and how much the lead expands. You'll lose the jacket, but it's really only there to prevent leading of the bore anyway. Just a thought.

[Metroxfi]

The biggest hang up I have right now is that had been using straight clip-on wheel weights for the cores of rifle bullets and they could be classified as frangible. Now while clip-on alloy is relatively hard, it can also be brittle compared to stick-on or pure lead. If I went to using pure lead I honestly don't think anything would change in terms of performance. If, however, I swapped the antimony in the clip-on alloy for tin would that help the bullet hold together like it would for a cast hollow point or would it not change a thing due to being worked. The reason I was using clip-on alloy is that I only had the four cavity adjustable mold from corbins, they recommend not using alloys with tin because the alloy will solder itself to the steel mold. I had that happen multiple times with stick-on weights and even lead salvaged from the hospital, I never had it happen with clip-on alloy though. I also got much better fill-out with the clip-on, resulting in more consistent weights. I now have a different mold made of aluminum and split, not the push through design like the corbins mold, so I can use the different alloys without wrecking my equipment. If I began to use, lets say, stick-on wheel-weights with a couple percent tin added would that make more of a hunting bullet instead of a varmint bullet? I figured instead of wasting time and materials to make bullets that may or may not work they way they're intended I would make a post and ask to see if anyone else has played around with the subject at hand to get an idea of what would work and what effects the different alloys would have when swaged versus cast, then do some experimenting.

If I added tin to soft lead and I ended up with bullets that acted the way runfiverun mentioned his 22LR jacketed bullets did when he first started well then there's no sense in going through the trouble of buying tin and making a special alloy just for that. If I added tin to my 243 bullets and it kept it from fragmenting, allowing it to be used for deer then it's all worth it. Right now everything I swage seems to absolutely explode, which is perfect for a lot of my shooting, but I was just curious if changing one aspect would change the outcome. I would love to do my own test and I'll probably have to but, what do you learn when the bullets with the harder alloys explode within inches and the bullets from the softer alloys explode within inches? So far on game the differences are essentially nonexistent. I extruded some hospital lead (x-ray shield, not isotope canisters) into wire and made about 1,500 55gr .224" bullets for my friend. They seemed to be more explosive on prairie dogs than the 36gr poly tips at 3,900fps out of his 204 ruger. I swaged and loaded a few hundred 80gr in 243win for a friend in SD with the stipulation that he NOT use them on deer, not because it would be a humane kill (i'm sure it would turn the organs to slush) but because I'm sure he would ruin a ton of meat and risk jacket material nicking the digestive tract. So would doing a special alloy do anything to change the terminal performance of the swaged bullets? Obviously changing jacket thickness and bonding would solve the issue but I'm using this as an example: would changing only one thing, the core alloy, effect the terminal performance? Changing the alloy of the core can be the easiest thing to change if you're casting them. So, by changing the alloy of a thin jacketed bullet's core could I make it perform like a thick jacketed bullet soft alloyed core?

I had emailed Dave Corbin on this topic back in 2013, just before I ordered the 243 kit, and asked him about the effects of lead alloys. His response was:

"Yes, softer cores help expansion and you can heat treat alloyed lead to make it hard after forming. Swaging does tend to start a softening process in hard alloy that can continue over several hours time after the stress has been removed."

Not quite the info I was hoping for but it does help back up my findings about the expansion I've been having when using the clip-on wheel weight alloy for cores. His response notes a combination of work and age softening when using harder alloys in swaging. Look up pictures of clip-on alloy bullets fired out of 30 caliber rifles look like, generally they're one big piece. If they were hollow points they might have fragmented a bit but still hold together or maybe broken into a few pieces, not turned into dust like mine. Now obviously there are differences, cast bullets out of rifles are much slower and all that jazz but compare a cast bullet made of clip-on alloy fired from a 30-06 into a wetpack to a bullet made of say, 20-1 and fired at the same speed into the same medium. Now if the alloy makes a big difference in the expansion of a cast rifle bullet, why does it seem like I have no distinguishable differences between harder alloys and softer in my swaged? Are they going too fast and they just have more impact energy than the core alloys can handle? The farthest I've shot a prairie dog with a 223 was about 360 yards, even that far it still vacuumed the innards out of him and threw him a few feet in the air. So at 360yds I've already lost a ton of velocity, enough to make a traditional soft point not expand at all, yet the bullet was still devastating.

Again, I'm only giving examples to let you know how my current bullets perform. I'm not trying to fix any particular problem, I'm just giving you something to compare to. Like I said, I now have a different core mold and I'm able to play with different alloys for core now, and it's finally in the positive temperatures to go out and cast, but is it worth the trouble even trying different alloys if they're all going to act the same? I know how different alloys play in cast bullets but this just seems so different.

Thanks to the guys giving useful information, even 'what-if's and opinions do help. It gets me thinking of different things to try, or different techniques I could use to vary the outcome. But it is true, it's hard for a teacher to find a good student, it's even harder for a student to find a good teacher. Yep, that's a Karate Kid reference.

[Zbench]

Metro,

I think you might be overthinking it. Check out the attached picture. It is a 22 caliber bullet I swaged made with commercial .705 jackets, exposed lead tip, 62 grains. I fired it into ballistic gelatin. The big difference is that I core bonded the jacket to the core using Corbin's Core bond. It retained 95% of the weight after firing. I don't think you could ask for a more beautiful expanded bullet in my opinion. I think it matters less what the core is made out of, and more how it's attached to the jacket. I used pure lead for the core, cleaned with solvent, bonded with a torch and seated and pointed as usual. I think the 5% of weight I lost was in the tip. You might consider shifting your focus from what the core is made of to how it's attached to the jacket.

[jsn]

zbench,

It said what it said--driving bands--not the entire bullet. The topic was sizing a bullet, not swaging a larger mass of lead through a small orofice, which, other than the calculation as to how much force was being used, you appear to understand very well. I accept your tests on what you have tested and appreciate the knowledge.

Some people come here to learn.

[Zbench]

JSN,

I was merely trying to point out an extreme example. How could anyone measure the change in hardness of .008" of driving band lead? My thought was that if a slug of lead wasn't changing hardness after it has been forced through a very small hole, then the affect on the .002" of lead affected during sizing would appear to be beyond insignificant.

[Metroxfi]

Metro,

I think you might be overthinking it. Check out the attached picture. It is a 22 caliber bullet I swaged made with commercial .705 jackets, exposed lead tip, 62 grains. I fired it into ballistic gelatin. The big difference is that I core bonded the jacket to the core using Corbin's Core bond. It retained 95% of the weight after firing. I don't think you could ask for a more beautiful expanded bullet in my opinion. I think it matters less what the core is made out of, and more how it's attached to the jacket. I used pure lead for the core, cleaned with solvent, bonded with a torch and seated and pointed as usual. I think the 5% of weight I lost was in the tip. You might consider shifting your focus from what the core is made of to how it's attached to the jacket.

How would that bullet expand if the core wasn't made from 99.99% pure, bonafide, laboratory grade lead? If it was made exactly the same way except changing only the core alloy would that effect how much or how quick it expanded? I'm not overthinking it, I'm looking at things from a completely different angle that you are. If I wanted to make a hunting bullet that would hold together I could absolutely do it, I was only giving examples of shooting varmints to help explain just how fragile my bullets seem to be. I do understand that bonding the cores allows the bullet to hold together as one piece on impact, I understand that thicker jackets slow expansion considerably. I'm giving examples of 22LR jacketed bullets because a lot of us either make them that way or started out that way so we're familiar with them. My goal in all this isn't to just make a hunting bullet and that's it, my goal is to get an understanding of how the different lead alloys with different characteristics effect expansion in swaged bullets.

It's like I'm trying to find ways to get better gas mileage with my car and you just keep telling me to buy a different car. I have control of what alloy I use for cores and I want to know what happens why I exercise that control. It may be a completely useless venture to find out what effect the alloys have but what happens if we learn something in the process?

[Valornor]

It greatly depends on what you are trying to do with the bullet.

A hunting bullet, you want some control over expansion. There are numerous ways to do that. Harder lead alloy, thick jackets, pre-scribe jackets, partition, ect. You can learn a lot from adjusting the hardness of your lead. This is probably the most difficult type of bullet (outside of the fun stuff AP, API, Tracer...ect) to produce. It's one thing to get a bullet to shoot well and then its another to get it to shoot really well and then expand and deliver all of its energy into a target at the proper depth. There's at least ten different variables, and you can spend a life time studying them. Lead alloy and lead hardness are likely only two.

A plinking bullet has different requirements, cheapest source of lead that allows for a cheap bullet that will punch a hole in a target with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Simple to make, simple to shoot. Equates to a cheap bullet.

In a long range target bullet you want to maximize case capacity for a given bullet weight to be able to drive that bullet to a target velocity while achieving a low pressure and consistent internal/external ballistic performance. Usually this means you want pure lead, as the density is higher and results in a higher Sectional Density, for increased B.C. You also want consistence, everything much be the same every time, that translates to accuracy. The R&D doesn't cost much, but the cost of precision and time put into testing does. That's typical what makes these bullets more expensive.

To answer you question in the simplest of terms. Softer lead leads to quick, explosive expansion, fragmentation and overall poor terminal performance in terms of raw penetration. Harder lead alloys penetrate more, tend to be more controlled in expansion, and penetrate deeper. Softer lead is easier to swage and better for making plinking and target bullets with, while harder lead is harder to work and is better suited for making hunting bullets or cast bullets.

This has been my experience, your mileage may vary.

[Metroxfi]

It greatly depends on what you are trying to do with the bullet.

A hunting bullet, you want some control over expansion. There are numerous ways to do that. Harder lead alloy, thick jackets, pre-scribe jackets, partition, ect. You can learn a lot from adjusting the hardness of your lead. This is probably the most difficult type of bullet (outside of the fun stuff AP, API, Tracer...ect) to produce. It's one thing to get a bullet to shoot well and then its another to get it to shoot really well and then expand and deliver all of its energy into a target at the proper depth. There's at least ten different variables, and you can spend a life time studying them. Lead alloy and lead hardness are likely only two.

A plinking bullet has different requirements, cheapest source of lead that allows for a cheap bullet that will punch a hole in a target with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Simple to make, simple to shoot. Equates to a cheap bullet.

In a long range target bullet you want to maximize case capacity for a given bullet weight to be able to drive that bullet to a target velocity while achieving a low pressure and consistent internal/external ballistic performance. Usually this means you want pure lead, as the density is higher and results in a higher Sectional Density, for increased B.C. You also want consistence, everything much be the same every time, that translates to accuracy. The R&D doesn't cost much, but the cost of precision and time put into testing does. That's typical what makes these bullets more expensive.

To answer you question in the simplest of terms. Softer lead leads to quick, explosive expansion, fragmentation and overall poor terminal performance in terms of raw penetration. Harder lead alloys penetrate more, tend to be more controlled in expansion, and penetrate deeper. Softer lead is easier to swage and better for making plinking and target bullets with, while harder lead is harder to work and is better suited for making hunting bullets or cast bullets.

This has been my experience, your mileage may vary.

Not to sound rude but that doesn't answer my question at all. What effects do tin and antimony have on the expansion of swaged bullets?
I'm currently using clip-on wheel weight alloy, which in the world of swaging is pretty hard ~10BHN, and having absolutely explosive results. Even though the alloy is hard it seems to almost splatter on impact, if I were to use an alloy with tin instead of antimony would it act differently? Is the antimony in my alloy causing it to break apart easier? If, by swaging, you're damaging the molecular structure of the alloy therefore ruining any attributes the additional metals give to the alloy, does it even matter what it's made of?

It just seems so different from the cut and dry world of cast.

[Zbench]

Metro,

I'd suggest that at the extremes it matters, in the practical area we are working in, it's insignificant.

In my day job, I work as a Quality Engineer. We're interested in what causes variation in some thing we are trying to measure and perfect. These things are called "factors". The factors influence some outcome that we want to measure. The factors are theorized to impact the measurement. All may impact it some, some not at all. We want to figure out the biggest "levers" to get the change we are trying to achieve in the output.

In your case, it sounds like you want to measure and impact how much a bullet expands and stays intact. Some possible factors that could cause a change in your desired outcome:

Fired Velocity
Jacket Thickness
Jacket Composition
Core Composition
Core Bonded or Not
Work Softening

Just to name a few. All likely impact it some, but some are likely insignificant, and other hugely significant. If you ask me, the biggest lever to get your bullet to stay together has nothing (or very little) to do with the composition of the core, but everything to do with the jacket. When you consider that a rimfire case is about 10 thousandths (many times less), and the standard rifling depth for .224 is 3 thousandths, you only have 6-7 thousandths of soft brass holding the bullet together. Contrast that with a commercial jacket made of copper that is tougher and usually on the order of 15 Thousandths thick. You have almost double the jacket thickness when accounting for rifling cutting into the jacket with the commercial jacket as opposed to the rimfire jacket.

I've fooled around quite a bit with the rimfire deal, from core bonding to just regular seating, and all blow up on impact. Corbin says as much in his literature found online. I tried and tried to get a bullet to hold together firing into gelatin with all sorts of variations of nose tip and bonding approach, and none would. Not to say that you couldn't find some magic combination of super hard lead and tip approach, but in the end, you can only expect so much from 6 thousandths of brass case.

Have you considered this in your approach?

[Metroxfi]

Metro,

I'd suggest that at the extremes it matters, in the practical area we are working in, it's insignificant.

In my day job, I work as a Quality Engineer. We're interested in what causes variation in some thing we are trying to measure and perfect. These things are called "factors". The factors influence some outcome that we want to measure. The factors are theorized to impact the measurement. All may impact it some, some not at all. We want to figure out the biggest "levers" to get the change we are trying to achieve in the output.

In your case, it sounds like you want to measure and impact how much a bullet expands and stays intact. Some possible factors that could cause a change in your desired outcome:

Fired Velocity
Jacket Thickness
Jacket Composition
Core Composition
Core Bonded or Not
Work Softening

Just to name a few. All likely impact it some, but some are likely insignificant, and other hugely significant. If you ask me, the biggest lever to get your bullet to stay together has nothing (or very little) to do with the composition of the core, but everything to do with the jacket. When you consider that a rimfire case is about 10 thousandths (many times less), and the standard rifling depth for .224 is 3 thousandths, you only have 6-7 thousandths of soft brass holding the bullet together. Contrast that with a commercial jacket made of copper that is tougher and usually on the order of 15 Thousandths thick. You have almost double the jacket thickness when accounting for rifling cutting into the jacket with the commercial jacket as opposed to the rimfire jacket.

I've fooled around quite a bit with the rimfire deal, from core bonding to just regular seating, and all blow up on impact. Corbin says as much in his literature found online. I tried and tried to get a bullet to hold together firing into gelatin with all sorts of variations of nose tip and bonding approach, and none would. Not to say that you couldn't find some magic combination of super hard lead and tip approach, but in the end, you can only expect so much from 6 thousandths of brass case.

Have you considered this in your approach?

I have considered it, I believe I mentioned it a while back that I know I'm not using an ideal jacket. I'm only posting about the rimfire bullets because it's very common ground that most of us have experience with. I know that everything plays a role in making things work, and I'm not trying to make a perfect hunting bullet out of garbage. I'm merely trying to focus on one thing at a time to fully understand it, I understand how jacket composition and thickness change things, I know how bonding changes things, dude I get it. I'm trying to learn about one particular aspect of a science that has many. Confucious say: "If a man tries to chase two rabbits both will get away."

Referencing the picture of the bullet fired into gel, how would that bullet be different if everything was the same except the core contained 2% tin? 2% antimony? Would it be affected or would it look exactly the same?

[Zbench]

Metro,

I've done that experiment too, and I couldn't detect any difference. The conundrum is, I imagine if you could make a core of linotype, it would hold together fantastic. Not sure what you could use to seat and expand a bullet like that though.

Also, keep in mind, that the rimfire jacket thing is a "hook" to get people interested in swaging with the lure of free bullets. If they were superior to commercial jackets, commercial bullet makers would make jackets from thin brass jackets which is cheaper than the more expensive copper jackets. Just saying.