Is there a point to water dropping cast ?

[gwpercle]

When I'm casting ... water is the last thing I want around ...
Dropping the hot boolits onto a folded towel works just fine for me .

Water quenched boolits are harder to size and as soon as you size them , you cold work the leads surface and soften them back up .

I don't powder coat so that's not an issue .
Gary

[gwpercle]

will sizing the boolit negate the effects of water quenching? my understanding ( i’m not a metallurgist but, delt with heat treating parts some in machining of auto parts) is that quenching would help with hardening the surface of the boolit ? so if we take off any where from .001-.003 in the sizing process it would take the surface harden part off. or am I off base ?


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I think you are right on base ... and I agree with you
Gary

[kevin c]

I kinda thought sizing moved metal around but thought it more of a squeezing and shifting and not so much a scraping. Wouldn’t you lose the powder coat and HiTek coatings and leave bare metal if there was scraping? Is it possible that the surface hardening would basically stay in place with sizing instead causing a volume shift into the non bearing surface parts of the slug?

[michael.birdsley]

I kinda thought sizing moved metal around but thought it more of a squeezing and shifting and not so much a scraping. Wouldn’t you lose the powder coat and HiTek coatings and leave bare metal if there was scraping? Is it possible that the surface hardening would basically stay in place with sizing instead causing a volume shift into the non bearing surface parts of the slug?

scrapping or cutting your still removing material from the surface. you can’t just move material on a solid object it has to be removed. to the removing quenched surface area. some maybe left depending on how much you are removing. if your only removing .001 per side there is a possibility that a lot of the water quenched area will remain. the more you take off in sizing the less and less of the quenched surface will remain in the sized area.


so this s complicated answer to powder sizing powder coated bullets. any metallic surface is not 100% flat there are peaks and valleys in the surface grain structure of what ever metal you are using. there is enough built in tolerance in the bullet and the sizer to not take the powder coat to bare metal. powder coat particles and layers are very very thin.

a mic and sizer kinda work the same way. they are are only picking up the high spots on any given diameter. let’s take a .450 sized bullet. that bullet in any given area that you are measuring is not a constant .450 diameter. the mic is picking up the peak to peak diameter 180 degrees from each other. we’re talking +-.00001-.0001 and could be more variance in surface profile.

a sizer being used to size down powder coat is only taking powder coat off the peaks if it’s taking any thing at all due to the built in +- tolerance on the sizer. meaning the sizer could be +- .0004inch and still be a .450 sizer. bigger or smaller by +- .0005 and the bullet still read .450 on a .000 mic

if your sizer is at the upper end of the +-.0005 tolerance or your bullet is under sized by .0005 and you just drench the bullet with 003-.004 of powder coat the sizer would take off .0025-.0035 of powder still leaving a layer of .0005-.001 of powder coat on the bullet which, is plenty enough.

bullet casters generally only need to go .000. i’m sure powder coat particle are way less than .001 micron in size. between powder coat particles being very tiny and with tolerance built into the sizing die there is enough powder coat left after sizing to .450 to not be scrapping down to bare lead in most instances. the high and low spots could be deviating +- .0004 inches and your .000 mic would never pick it and you wouldn’t ever notice it. on the low end in the valley’s your sizer wouldn’t touch the lead or the paint.


if you heat to powder coat. re-heating will suck the quench out of the bullet. however, powder coat after curing is fairly hard stuff and i’d probably be harder than the bullet surface.

sizing would cut the hardened surface from age Hardening off of the bullet. after sizing though it would re age harden given time.

we would induction heat treat axles at like 2000-2500F and quench them and hopefully get any where from 1/16-1/4 inch heat treat depth. most of our stuff was i think 49-65 bhn

probably not the most concise answer

of edited this probably atleast 5 times


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[Froogal]

will sizing the boolit negate the effects of water quenching? my understanding ( i’m not a metallurgist but, delt with heat treating parts some in machining of auto parts) is that quenching would help with hardening the surface of the boolit ? so if we take off any where from .001-.003 in the sizing process it would take the surface harden part off. or am I off base ?


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I've never encountered any issues when sizing and lubing my water quenched boolits.

[Dusty Bannister]

The heat treated hardness of lead alloys is not the same as working with ferrous metals. Heating and quenching the lead alloy (lead/antimony/tin) results in a grain formation throughout the cast bullet. If it was a surface hardening, like case hardening, the indent hardness tester would not work. The instructions with the LBT hardness tester tell the operator to file the base flat to remove high spots. If it is a RN bullet, file a large flat on the nose large enough to prevent the alloy moving sideways instead of making the indenter point actually penetrate into the inner part of the bullet.

If the Heat Treating of these cast bullets were only a surface "skin" the indenter would pass through the surface and then drop like poking a pin through an egg shell. Heating and quenching produces a hard and tough bullet not just a thin layer of harder material.