Making your own quality alloys

[Wolfdog91]

Ask yourself why you want to formulate your alloys from scratch. IMO you will gain nothing in bullet performance over alloys you can purchase so that leaves trying to save a bit of money. Have you worked the numbers to determine the cost savings?

O I could honestly care less about cost saving and all that. I simply just wanna do it . I get bored really easy and just buy stuff dosent really appeal to me honestly. Seems more and more of an odd thought process now days but I wanna be able to say I made my own alloy from scratch and mean it. And the more people talk about it being hard just makes me wanna try it more
Same reason I started casting for a .223 instead of something else. Everyone kept saying how hard it would be and all I heard was " hayyyy ! That seems like it would be fun for a few months"

[BJung]

.22 bullet lead is said to have around 2%-3% antinomy in it than tin. You can start with that. Find a private indoor range that shoots predominately .22lr. My next project is to use this kind of lead and add 2% tin for a hollow point alloy.

[Lead pot]

The problem most run into casting bullets is having a magnum mentality. They try to push them at jacketed velocity's.
It looks to me like your wanting to cast for the HP rifles. Find a Lyman cast bullet manual, a old one if you can. It gives you a lot of good information for alloy mixes and load data for cast bullets.

[HWooldridge]

My recipe bins contain many pounds of the following items: (1) Pure lead, (2) 50/50 bar solder (lead/tin) and (3) linotype, and I also own a Lee Lead Tester. With these three source materials, I can get any alloy hardness from pure lead to pure linotype.

[farmbif]

if you have pure lead already. its just so much easier to add either super hard or foundry type with known quantities of tin and antimony in them and you will be able to make up just about whatever your needs might be..
I'm not real good at searching but somewhere on here is long discussion of real world experience folks trying to add pure antimony into an alloy mix.
to me most of it read like a living nightmare. id rather leave that kind of stuff to the experts that have proper knowledge and facilities
just my opinion anyway
and as far as pushing cast bullets to max possible rifle velocity has quite a bit to do with twist rate of barrel, lube and sizing .
like I say I'm no expert but back before the internet and places like this site all I had to go on were the Lyman load books and they would call for Linotype or Lyman #2 alloy. well just because back then I never had any Lino or #2 but had lots of wheel weights and that what we used and got those wheel weights to do what Lyman called for Lino

[dverna]

What you want to do is not all that difficult.
Lots of negative comments about alloying Sb(Antimony), but it's not like rocket surgery. Bit of a learning curve, but nothing most of us can't handle.
Finding the metals isn't difficult; get the Sn and Pb from your local plumbing supply wholesaler (not Lowe's). 95/5 lead free solder is about $40.00 a pound. It's 95% Sn and the 5% may be Silver, Copper, Nickel or whatever, doesn't matter. Ask for MSDS data sheets, tells you exactly what's in it.
Ask for "caulking lead", comes in 5 pound pucks, 5 linked together for about $120. Usually 99.5% pure; as good as you're gonna find.
Rotometals is probably the best source for small amounts of Sb. I'd go for the 5lb. ingot for $70 rather than the shot. I've never dealt with the shot but I'm concerned about the amount of surface oxide vs the ingot. The oxide is toxic and is more difficult to dissolve in your alloy.

So for 100 lbs of 3-3-94 alloy you're looking at...
100 lbs of Pb.........$480
5 lbs of Sb..............$70
3 lbs of Sn............$120

$6.70 per pound with some Pb and Sb left for the next batch. Not too bad for a couple days work.

Let us know how it works out for you.

Jerry

That makes no sense. You can get 94-3-3 cheaper and easier.

Buy 60 lbs of Lyman #2 from Rotometals - twelve 5 lb ingots
Buy 40 lbs of Pure from Rotometals - eight 5 lb ingoyd.

I just put those quantities in their "shopping cart" and cost came $365 delivered. $3.65/lb vs your cost of $6.70/lb by mixing stuff together. Rotometals ships to your door. No need for two days work.

Should not take more than a couple of hours to make a 100 lb batch.

But the OP is not interested in what alloy to use or the cost. He wants to make his own so maybe spending $6.70/lb is the way to go...LOL

BTW, I am not pushing Rotometals and in fact have never bought from them. I buy foundry alloy in bulk and can beat their prices, but they offer a good service for small batch users.

[30calflash]

Higher temps required to melt it as stated. Also, it is supposedly very toxic, like arsenic. I don't know if it can get you sick by handling it breathing it, etc. Something I read in NRA cast bullet handbook.

If you get it pre mixed the temps required to ally drop considerably.

[justindad]

I read somewhere about burning sawdust on top of the antimony to get it to alloy with the lead - I think the reason is that the combusting wood creates the high temperatures needed to melt the antimony without overcooking the lead. This implies slowly adding antimony that is in small pieces (dust?).
*
Wear a respirator when dealing with antimony.
*
I remember something about stirring the antimony in with the lead as it cools down. Heat up your lead to liquid state, put antimony dust on top, burn saw dust on top (don’t remove the slag yet), turn off the pot, stir the antimony dust into the lead as it becomes slushy, keep stirring until it is about solid. Reheat to liquid state, burn more sawdust on top, and then remove the slag.
*
Not sure how repeatable it will be to alloy in antimony (how much gets removed with the slag?). You will want to have your alloy composition measured. Might be more consistent & repeatable to use the 70:30 Pb:Sb alloy from rotometals.
*
If you are really curious about making your own alloy for rifle - look at the copper stickies in the alloy sub forum.

[Ickisrulz]

That makes no sense. You can get 94-3-3 cheaper and easier.

Buy 60 lbs of Lyman #2 from Rotometals - twelve 5 lb ingots
Buy 40 lbs of Pure from Rotometals - eight 5 lb ingoyd.

I just put those quantities in their "shopping cart" and cost came $365 delivered. $3.65/lb vs your cost of $6.70/lb by mixing stuff together. Rotometals ships to your door. No need for two days work.

Should not take more than a couple of hours to make a 100 lb batch.

But the OP is not interested in what alloy to use or the cost. He wants to make his own so maybe spending $6.70/lb is the way to go...LOL

BTW, I am not pushing Rotometals and in fact have never bought from them. I buy foundry alloy in bulk and can beat their prices, but they offer a good service for small batch users.

Missouri Bullet Works is a much better place to buy known/good casting alloy. Their "Magic Alloy" is 92% lead, 2% tin and 6% antimony. It is currently $2.48/pound plus shipping in a flat rate box.

[bangerjim]

What exactly makes it so difficult?

Sent from my motorola one 5G UW using Tapatalk

Hear me now and believe me later.

Check the temp of Sb melting!!!!!!! Very difficult for a home-brew guy like you and I to do. Just do what everybody else on here is telling you and buy the hard stuff from Roto and then alloy the Sn and Sb into it to get what you want at normal casting pot temps.

And it is VERY TOXIC to work with in it's pure state.


Good luck. I hope you find something that satisfies your rather unusual request.


banger

[popper]

Antimonial lead (3-4%) and superhard (12%) from Roto. Add tin if you must. Pure or whatever stuff you can find. Add a tad (0.2-0.5% Cu using root killer). Isotope medical lead is good too. Use the alloy calculator to blend whatever you want. I've shot 2% Sb from 30/30 and 4% with Cu from 308W with great results at jacketed fps.

[TurnipEaterDown]

BangerJim and 30calflash are entirely right. Antimony melts much higher than lead, is very hard to get from pure form into alloy w/ lead w/ home caster tools (if not impossible) and has toxic / hazardous materials properties.
Foundries alloy materials with equipment hobbyists do not have.

There is pride in doing something yourself, sure. But some things are best left to others.

Get the Antimony already in alloy at high enough concentration that can be used as an additive to bring your alloy up.
Years ago I got some Animony-Tin alloy bars from a seller in Arizona (I think, and I don't remember the business name). They were 60% Antimony and 40% Tin I think. Still have some. Drop in lead, melt right in. That's what works easy w/o creating problems for yourself.

Old skit: Don't go ahead and order the Time-Life guide to Home Surgery before getting the series guide to Stopping the Bleeding...

[405grain]

Wolfdog91: I think you'll find exactly what you're looking for here: http://www.lasc.us/SuperHard.htm
I use alloy #8. I take a 5 pound ingot of superhard and use a chisel & hammer to cut it into 2 each 2.5 pound bricks. You can get tin from rotometals, or scrounge up some lead-free solder (which is mostly tin). I've used both and they work good. I do alter the formula slightly by replacing one pound of pure lead with a pound of size BB shot to add a trace of arsenic to the alloy. The #8 alloy is very good as it can cast BHN 13 air cooled boolits, or 22 - 24 BHN water dropped boolits. I cut the alloy 50/50 with lead and it makes a great pistol bullet alloy.

There is a ton of casting related information on the lasc website. You should check it out because you'll learn a lot about the how's and why's of cast bullets.

[bangerjim]

BangerJim and 30calflash are entirely right. Antimony melts much higher than lead, is very hard to get from pure form into alloy w/ lead w/ home caster tools (if not impossible) and has toxic / hazardous materials properties.
Foundries alloy materials with equipment hobbyists do not have.

There is pride in doing something yourself, sure. But some things are best left to others.

Get the Antimony already in alloy at high enough concentration that can be used as an additive to bring your alloy up.
Years ago I got some Animony-Tin alloy bars from a seller in Arizona (I think, and I don't remember the business name). They were 60% Antimony and 40% Tin I think. Still have some. Drop in lead, melt right in. That's what works easy w/o creating problems for yourself.

Old skit: Don't go ahead and order the Time-Life guide to Home Surgery before getting the series guide to Stopping the Bleeding...

That was The Antimony Man....a real nice guy. Lived south of me. He claimed he has some magic way of letting hobbyists like us alloy Sb with Sn and Pb safely. Never tired it , although I have about 8# of the stuff safely sealed & stored away for some future usage.

He has since departed this mortal coil.

bangerjim

[Willie T]

Wolfdog, I admire your DIY attitude. Most casters share that. You need a thermometer to alloy your antimony. Build a small box out of hardware cloth to enclose your antimony in with a metal handle about 10-12 inches long. Do the math and weigh out the percent of antimony and tin for your desired alloy quantity. Heat your pure lead to a stable temp somewhere in the 625-650 Fahrenheit range. Pure lead melts at 621.5 F, so not far above melt point. Add your tin. After it melts, flux it two or three times. You want to see nice clean shiny silver lead. Submerge your antimony that is encapsulated in the hardware cloth box in the molten lead. The handle needs to be substantial enough that you have enough weight above the molten lead to keep the antimony submerged. Resist the temptation to turn the temp up. You are not trying to melt the antimony. Go have a few beers and leave the antimony submerged for 20-30 minutes. Flux once and then remove your hardware cloth box from the molten lead. The antimony will have dissolved and the hardware cloth will be empty. Flux well two more times. Temp should still be between 625-650. The hotter your lead, the more oxidation you will have to deal with. Your lead, tin, and antimony is alloyed now. The melting point of antimony is 1167 F. It is dissolved into the alloy rather than melted.

On a side note. Cleaning up your own lead and pouring into ingots rather than buying ingots will give you satisfaction and confidence in your casting material. Melting one contaminated ingot into my alloy is all it took me to decide to clean all my own casting materials and put it into ingots of known good casting material myself. Your alloy does not need to have the same precise hardness every batch. It needs to be within a specific range of what works best for what you are doing. The better the job of alloying you do the more consistent your casting can potentially be, depending on how you manage the rest of the details.
Good luck working it out.
Willie

[Bigslug]

Wolf,

I guess that aside from the fun of it, the thing to do is look at all the ingredients you have to work with and consider what cannot be self-generated in this hobby. Powder, primers and .22 rimfire ammo are going to be "the wall" for most of us, but in the final equation, we're not digging rocks out of a 500-foot deep hole and burning them up to generate metal either. Nobody's truly self-sufficient or off the grid here.

In Elmer Keith's earlier workings a hundred plus years ago, he was dealing with simple binary lead and tin mixes, which was easy enough to acquire separately and work with. Antimonial bullet alloys have ALWAYS been a scrounger's affair - either in the form of the various linotype printer's leads or wheelweights - and the hobby has always been about being able to manipulate what's "laying on the ground" to suit our needs. Type-set printing is well in the past and lead-based wheelweights are following it, so the questions (probably) to be asking are (1.) "What CAN I easily/cheaply/locally acquire?" and (2.) "What else do I need to work it to my purpose?"

If you look at what most guys here are scrounging, it's either nearly pure lead in the form of plumbing stuff, old building materials, or X-ray shielding; low-antimony content metal like jacketed bullets scrounged off a range berm; and sometimes a little higher antimony content in the form of shot from a trap range (but that's a really variable content). Generally though, most of it is pretty soft, and tin is getting fairly scarce.

So, if you're using any of those scrounged sources, you mostly need a high antimony content base like Rotometals Superhard for firming up that soft stuff and tin for fine tuning. If you're not scrounging, then the gentler manipulations of the pre-mixed alloys I suggested in my last post are probably more your speed.

Get a good hardness tester, and have fun.

[Forrest r]

willie t nailed it!!!

Glad to see you want to try different things and experiment/learn things 1st hand.

Just be careful and make your alloy in a well ventilated area like the great outdoors. Putting something like the clay based kitty litter on top of your pot/melt while you make it. Doing this will keep the oxidation/dross down to minimum.

good luck

[Larry Gibson]

Ok so I have no desire to buy pre made alloys. Not really interested in just getting random Lead from where ever and hoping I mix it right every time. Maybe for pistol but not for my rifle casting.I wanna be able to buy pure lead tin antimony and make my own alloys. What's a guy need to do this accurately and repeatedly?

You are correct. To get an alloy of known quality you must know what the metals you have to make it with actually are.

[bangerjim]

Wolfdog, I admire your DIY attitude. Most casters share that. You need a thermometer to alloy your antimony. Build a small box out of hardware cloth to enclose your antimony in with a metal handle about 10-12 inches long. Do the math and weigh out the percent of antimony and tin for your desired alloy quantity. Heat your pure lead to a stable temp somewhere in the 625-650 Fahrenheit range. Pure lead melts at 621.5 F, so not far above melt point. Add your tin. After it melts, flux it two or three times. You want to see nice clean shiny silver lead. Submerge your antimony that is encapsulated in the hardware cloth box in the molten lead. The handle needs to be substantial enough that you have enough weight above the molten lead to keep the antimony submerged. Resist the temptation to turn the temp up. You are not trying to melt the antimony. Go have a few beers and leave the antimony submerged for 20-30 minutes. Flux once and then remove your hardware cloth box from the molten lead. The antimony will have dissolved and the hardware cloth will be empty. Flux well two more times. Temp should still be between 625-650. The hotter your lead, the more oxidation you will have to deal with. Your lead, tin, and antimony is alloyed now. The melting point of antimony is 1167 F. It is dissolved into the alloy rather than melted.

On a side note. Cleaning up your own lead and pouring into ingots rather than buying ingots will give you satisfaction and confidence in your casting material. Melting one contaminated ingot into my alloy is all it took me to decide to clean all my own casting materials and put it into ingots of known good casting material myself. Your alloy does not need to have the same precise hardness every batch. It needs to be within a specific range of what works best for what you are doing. The better the job of alloying you do the more consistent your casting can potentially be, depending on how you manage the rest of the details.
Good luck working it out.
Willie

Whole lotta work...........................for something that is readily available commercially.

Could I personally do it with the stash of Sb I have? Yes. Would I do it? HECK NO. Not when all the materials with a known % of Sb already ACCURATELY industrially alloyed in and there for my easy melting, measuring, and use.

Good luck in your choices.

Just PC everything and mostly forget about hardness, like many of us are now doing.

banger

[Willie T]

Whole lotta work...........................for something that is readily available commercially.

Could I personally do it with the stash of Sb I have? Yes. Would I do it? HECK NO. Not when all the materials with a known % of Sb already ACCURATELY industrially alloyed in and there for my easy melting, measuring, and use.

Good luck in your choices.

Just PC everything and mostly forget about hardness, like many of us are now doing.

banger

Banger,
I started this stuff before the internet and before forums. I learned by reading books, doing, and making adjustments till I learned to get what I wanted. There is value to that and I learned a lot that way. OP wants to learn and that is what I replied to. Whether alloying soft lead with tin and antimony or hardball, the volume of work and outcome is similar. I did not weigh in on whether or not to hit the easy button. That is not my monkeys, and not my circus. The one other caster I know as well as me scrounge for lead and alloy what we find into what we need.

I’m happy to have stumbled onto this forum and hope I can fit in.
Willie