When to pour ingots

[Charlie Two Tracks]

I have about 60 lbs. of linotype and monotype. At least that's the way it appears. Some of the letters test at 18BHN and some up to 28 bhn. I figure the best way to tell what I have is to smelt it and see what the average ends up being. Now to the problem. Awhile back, I poured some WW ingots when the temperature was at freezing. After a week they tested way too hard. The cold air, ground and muffin pans seem to have hardened the mix. I suppose I will have to wait till Spring to smelt the letters or I will get a false BHN. Correct?

[lwknight]

You will get false readings all the time unless you actually cast it in the mold that will be making your bollits. There is no accurate scientific way to similate how large ingots will compare to actual molded small ingots ( boolits) that will be in a different alloy anyway.

If you just want to compare the 2 typemetals , treat both exactly the same.
Same mold temp , same ambient , same cast temp and same ingot size.
All varibles must be eliminated or you are just comparing apples to oranges.

[Charlie Two Tracks]

I guess I might not have asked the question right....... If you have a WW alloy and want to harden it, how much of this stuff would I use. I would have to make it into ingots and then test the ingots, right? Once I knew that, then I could figure out how much to add. I suppose I will have to heat the garage up to 70 deg. and try pouring them like that. That's about what temperature it is in the garage n the spring and early summer.

[white eagle]

If I understand you correctly you want to add lino to w/w
to harden w/w up ?
I use 4-1 mix for my rifles
you could also use 3-1 but just check and see with a
small batch before you commit to a large pour

[Charlie Two Tracks]

I will try some small batches and see what I come up with. thanks.

[Von Gruff]

I ran up a big batch of 70/30 ww/lino a while back because someone gave me a bunch of 50/50 ww/lino ingots and I added enought ww to the smelt to get a more usable alloy for A D 1900fps rifle loads. Have lots of straight lino and 50/50 ww/Pb so the 70/30 was about as usefull as I could without using up too much ww. Ended up with enough to cast up over 3500 160gn 7mm boolits for steel plate plinking.

Von Gruff.

[WHITETAIL]

I concure,
Make a small batch of lead.
Then pour a few boolits and
then wait a week and then
test them for hardness.:castmine:
:coffee:

[fredj338]

The hardness of your ingots form water dropping or whatever will not have any affect on your bullets when casting. A WD ww ingot returns to BHN12 or so in the pot & you are effectively starting over. When I have lino in strip form, I use it just like that, no need to smelt & poor into ingots, just weigh up so many strips & add that to your pot.

[Charlie Two Tracks]

This must be monotype. It is individual letters and numbers. I will have to try the small batch and see what I get.

[Echo]

Just weigh out enough WW ingots to come up to about 75% of your smelting max capability. For example, I can handle about 50 lbs in my dutch oven. I would weigh out ~36 lbs of WW ingots, and add 9 lbs of monotype, and get an alloy of about 4/1 ww/mono, which would be a dandy alloy with about 2-3% Sn and ~7% Sb. Since the mono is in the form of individual letters, it is easy to be more precise with it than with the WW ingots.