Howdy, I'm very new to casting. A couple of years ago I cast a bunch of Lee slugs. It was fun, so I decided to try casting bullets. This past fall I bought a Lee .45 230gn 6 cavity tumble lube mold. Using a Lyman Mag 25 I cast a bit less than 100. They have been sitting since the fall.
Last week I purchased a Lee Lead Hardness Tester. It is fairly simple to use. Followed the directions about filing off some lead and the rest of the directions. I tested commercial .45 bullets I purchased about 5 years ago, two ingots from wheel weights I smelted last fall, and a few of the .45 bullets I cast last fall.
The commercial bullets BHN is somewhere around 17. The ingots were about 17 or 18. But......
The .45 bullets I cast from the same lead as the ingots were around 27 BHN.
I tried all of this two days in a row and came up with the same results.
The only difference between the ingots and the bullets is when I made the bullets I water quenched them.
Does it make sense that the water quenched bullets are 10 BHN higher than the ingots?
TIA