Heat treating question

[Blackhawk45hunter]

I want to heat treat some 200gr .309 gas checked bullets.

Do I have to stand them up in the oven or can they lay on their side?

Also, do you just dump them into cold water or do you carefully place each one into the water one at a time?

[btroj]

I would just let em lie down. Dump them in water quickly. The key is getting them hot as possible, without melting or slumping, then getting them I to water fast. One at a time would allow the others to cool and hardness woud vary.

[RobS]

It will depend on what temp you are wanting to heat treat to. If you are going to the point of almost slump (melting) then standing them up on their base is better otherwise I just throw them in the pan as they lay. You will want to take the pan of boolits directly from the oven and quench all of them at the same time so they all are treated the same. I find that if I have a small number of boolits in the pan that when I go and drop the pan in water it will want to float; the best way I've come to stop this is to add a few ingots to the pan of boolits. I usually heat treat some 200 to 300 boolits at a time so there is enough weight to the pan that it sinks easily when quenched.

Different oven temps will yield different BHN hardness> the hotter the harder the BHN for a given alloy.

[454PB]

You really have to watch the temperature.

Back when I was doing a lot of heat treating, I saw many beautiful boolits flow into a big blob of alloy.

I just HAD to heat them to "just below melting".

When I was careful, I just dumped them into the water in mass.

[btroj]

I know I get variations in hardness but I still prefer to water drop. Keeps my boolits out of the kitchen which I find improve marital harmony. Marital harmony seems conducive to gun purchasing. See, water dropping has benefits beyond hardnening a boolit.

[RobS]

I know I get variations in hardness but I still prefer to water drop. Keeps my boolits out of the kitchen which I find improve marital harmony. Marital harmony seems conducive to gun purchasing. See, water dropping has benefits beyond hardnening a boolit.

The Mrs. can be a bit touchy about their kitchens. I picked up at a garage sale a nearly new convection toaster oven that works perfectly.

[Blackhawk45hunter]

Thanks guys!

[10 Spot Terminator]

Heat treating like everything else in boolit casting needs to be kept as uniform as possible so you know how to repeat a batch of boolits at a later date or have an idea what needs to be changed up. Using wheel weight casts heated at 450 degrees for 1 hr. yeilds 22 bhn. As for heating and cooling them uniformly I went to the 2nd hand stores for my equipment buying a countertop toaster oven capable of 500 degrees and a shallow stainless steel steamer insert pan full of like 22 cal holes in it. I pack the pan full with them standing up and have a 5 gallon bucket of ice water standing by. The pan has a handle and can be lowered all at once to cool. Works very nicely. 475 degrees for the same hour will raise the bhn to near 28 but 22 has been fine for me so far. By the way I let these set for a good 10 days before I size em if they are going to be gas checked. The dunking pan as I call it keeps the boolits from getting jostled around when they are hot so as not to tweak them in any way and sizing afterwards smooths them out quite fine.

[fredj338]

I know I get variations in hardness but I still prefer to water drop. Keeps my boolits out of the kitchen which I find improve marital harmony. Marital harmony seems conducive to gun purchasing. See, water dropping has benefits beyond hardnening a boolit.
A cheap toaster oven could save you from that.

[mooman76]

If you use your oven preheat it good first. Ovens can have big temperature swings especially when preheating. My first time half melted a bunch of new boolits.

[RobS]

Preheat is a good point and also get a good thermometer so you know what's going on in there.

[Von Gruff]

I always kept a few scrap boolits for testing the heat of the oven simply because it saved my good ones. I would pre-heat the oven to where I reasoned it should be then tested it with the 'testers' for 15 min, then turned the temp up 5 degrees for another 15 till I got slump then backed it off to the previous mark and put the good boolits in a wire basket so that when I dumped it into the cold water the chill was as instant as possible for all the boolits.

Von Gruff.