Commercial cast bullets

[nighthunter]

Today I came into about 3500 commercial cast bullets at a good price (free). They are various sizes from 357 to 45 ACP. They seem to be extremely hard. The fellow that gave them to me said they are at least 35 years old. The lube on them is in very bad shape and some is contaminated with dust from the years in storage. I plan to just melt them down for the alloy. My question is mainly what do I have as far as useing this alloy to harden WW. I mean ... these bullets are HARD. Has to be a good antimony and tin content. Do any of you have any suggestions on how I should consider this alloy?
Nighthunter

[Jack Stanley]

I think the alloy of two percent tin , six percent antimony and the ballance lead has been around long enough that it's possible to be that type of mix .
Maybe someone here has the production records of all the casters for the last forty years or so ...... with the knowledge I've seen here , I would not doubt it [smilie=1:

Jack

[44woody]

nighthunter I would melt them down and not add anything to them and keep the new bullets the same hardness another thing I would do is get a old pot of boiling water and drop them in a few at a time and boil the lube off them let it cool down and cut the cake of lube off the top of the pot and use it for flux that is what I would do with them :castmine: 44Woody

[garandsrus]

Nighthunter,

If you want an idea of what alloy you have, you can download this article and follow the steps to measure the density (specific gravity) of a boolet: 3.3.4 HOW AND WHY TO MEASURE ALLOY SPECIFIC GRAVITY.doc from the Cast Bullet Association (http://www.castbulletassoc.org/). The file is under the forum/files path.

I have tried their method and it seemed to work well. It was certainly easy! You will want to remove the lube from a boolit before measuing it. If you can't get to the file, let me know and I will email you a copy.

John

[slughammer]

Clean em and lube em.

Unless you have no use for the profile, are hurting for lead or have hopes of sweetening your alloy.

As 44 woody said you can boil the old lube and dirt off. Then add your favorite clean lube and shoot them.

[Bass Ackward]

Nighty,

Too hard to tell. There were a lot of commercial casters in your area back in those days. You can get an idea how much antimony is in them by measuring the hardness.

The real question is if anything is in a diameter that you need. If it isn't, then you might as well consider remelting those. But just because the lube is dried up, doesn't mean you can't lube right over top of that and drive on with the mission. That is unless you actually know that the bullets were contaminated somehow. I got some from Grove City from back in the 70s and the lube was all shrunkin up. Why they lubed up in the lubrisizor right over top the other stuff and exited right smartly. Someday they will be dug up and THEN recycled. :grin:

[Four Fingers of Death]

If they that old, London to a brick they are pure linotype! :-)

[trooperdan]

If they that old, London to a brick they are pure linotype! :-)

Hey Mick! "London to a brick", now that is an expression I've never heard before!

[Leftoverdj]

With 35 year old bullets, Lyman #2 is as likely as linotype. Put one on an anvil and smack it hard with a hammer. If it breaks, it's probably lino. If it flattens, it's probably #2. If it squirts off, and hits you in the leg, it's your fault for listening to me.

[Jammer Six]

I wanna know about London and bricks. :coffee:

[Lloyd Smale]

a good many comercial bullet casters set there machines to drop in water. Not necesarily to harden bullets but to prevent damage when dropped. Most people dont want to by dented bullets. But the side effect is very hard bullets. Theres a good chance your bullets are nothing but water dropped wws and when you melt the alloy to reuse it your going to find you have softer bullets then the ones you have now.

[Four Fingers of Death]

London to a brick referred to race horse odds. A popular radio announcer used to use the expression to describe sure things, which didn't make sense to me, as sure things had close odds. I think what he meant was you could takje the longest odds and still be confident. I Australia, you would probably have to be almost as old as me to remember it.

Mick.

[kodiak1]

Nighthunter if I had them slugs I would
1 If I didn't like the bullet or had nothing to shoot it out of would remelt it and cast into something I could use.
2 If the bullet was just about anything usable would look real close at the relubing and shooting or if to dirty run them through boiling water let cool and relube then seed them into the back stop of your local shootinf establishment.
Ken.

[Leftoverdj]

After 35 years, the effects of any form of heat treating would have long since worn off.

[Jammer Six]

I will never understand the British...

[Lloyd Smale]

are you saying that all of the effects of heat treating go away after a period of time I will buy the fact that they will soften some over the years but not soften to the point of the alloy air dropped. If so wouldnt knife steel and other metals that are heat treated go soft after time too. I not a scientist and surely could be wrong here.
After 35 years, the effects of any form of heat treating would have long since worn off.

[felix]

Lloyd, it just depends on the metals involved. Lead compositions tend to go back to a normalized state over time, i.e., back to a stress relieved graphical point. Most ferric compositions tend towards having a new normalized state after some kind of heat treatment. In other words, for our lead purposes, we have to go with experience, and not facts here. Some lead alloys will surprise you and not fall off in hardness for many years. Others, just the opposite. Long ago I personally quit caring, and just shoot when I am ready, not the alloy per se. But, I do make BR 22s for LONG term storage to make sure there is some sort of equilibrium within each boolit, hopefully the same, after two years or so. ... felix

[KYCaster]

Yes, Lead-Tin-Antimony alloys will eventually stabilize at the same hardness as if air cooled. That's why I would rather get my desired hardness with alloy rather than heat treatment.

I have some boolits on the shelf that I cast in 1968. I don't have to worry that the hardness has changed since then.

If you kept your knife in an oven at about 400 deg. it would eventually soften to the same hardness as the air cooled steel, just like lead alloy does at room temp.

Jerry

[grumpy one]

If an iron carbon alloy (i.e. some kind of steel) has more than about 0.4% carbon, and if it is quenched from a temperature higher than 723 degrees C, it will freeze in a body-centred cubic crystalline structure called martensite rather than the face-centred cubic crystalline structure called pearlite that would have occurred if it had cooled slowly. As-quenched, martensite is very hard (64 Rockwell C) but can be tempered down to a minimum of somewhere around 35 Rockwell C. Tempering has no effect on pearlite, and martensite cannot be converted to pearlite without heating it to more than 723 degrees C. Tempered martensite cannot be re-hardened except by heating to more than 723 C and quenching.

So, it doesn't matter how long you keep a piece of steel, its hardness will not change. And if it started out as martensite, tempering it will not make it soft (or not in any reasonable amount of time anyway) - you'd have to heat it way up to 723 C or more to do that.

I needed to slightly soften some ISO 30 milling cutter toolholders a while ago, and they were file-hard - around 60 Rockwell C, they hadn't been tempered at all. I didn't want them soft, but I needed to cut a thread in the back of them. The "right" answer was to heat them above 723 C, cool them slowly, cut the thread, then heat them above 723 C again and quench them. If I'd done that I'd have had to regrind every precision surface afterward, and anyway I didn't have a furnace. My solution was to heat only the part I wanted to tap, to a medium red, then let it cool slowly. That tempered the martensite in the area I'd heated, to about 35 Rockwell C - about the limit of what I could tap with a new high speed steel tap. I had no way to reharden it afterward, but I'd only softened it locally.

[Lloyd Smale]

again your never quit learning. Heat treating bullets is surely not one of my expertises. Ive never been a big fan of it from the git go. Ive allways had better luck with accuracy in my handguns by alloying to get the desired hardness i needed. Ive always thought that it was because of the fact that every bullet hit the water at a differnt temp and this cause the hardness of each to vary to much. Ive also had waterdropped bullets fracture in severe penetration tests alot more often then even lynotype bullets and would never trust them for busting big bone in big animals reliably.