Snapping a boolit in half with pliers.

[Centaur 1]

I just got a new RD tlc311-165-rf and I made a bunch of bad boolits before the mold was up to temp. My alloy is range scrap from an indoor pistol range, and I water quenched the boolits. I read on another thread where Madsenshooter grabbed one of his boolits at both ends with pliers and bent them. I tried doing that with mine to see what happens, and the boolits just snapped in half at the crimp groove. I did this with several more with the same results, they hardly bent at all before breaking. I was surprised at how little effort was needed to snap them. When I look at the boolit where it fractured, the lead is very dull and grainy. Is this a normal occurrence or is my alloy too brittle? With all the jacketed and plated boolits that I smelted, I was worried that it would be too soft. I think that tomorrow I'll let some air cool and see if they bend at all before breaking. Does this method of testing have any validity? I'm thinking that for a boolit to be ductile enough to expand properly, it probably shouldn't break so easily. If anyone could share any ideas with me, I'd like to hear them.

P.S. It just dawned on me that I had a small amount of Lee c309-150-fn boolits in a box out in the garage. I had two small containers, one marked air cooled and the other water quenched. The air cooled bent quite a bit before fracturing, and even though the water quenched ones broke before the air cooled, they too bent quite a bit before breaking. Both of them took a lot more effort than the RD boolits, so I grabbed a few more of the RD ones to make a side by side comparison. Just like earlier today they snapped without bending, and now that it's evening and it's quiet in the garage I could actually hear them snap. I'm definately gonna do some casting tomorrow and let them cool slower.

[stubshaft]

I fail to see how bending a boolit and/or breaking it has anything to do with how it shoots. A boolit that is "brittle" like lino still shoots great.

Much ado about nothing...

[btroj]

Yes a Lino bullet will shoot well. It is the end of flight for a hunting bullet where is matters. The Lino bullet could fragment on bone while a tough, softer bullet might upset some but it will stay in one price. This increase penetration.

Hardness matters not on paper but it makes a big difference on game.

[Centaur 1]

Hunting is what I was worried about. I barely applied pressure and they snapped. I'll use the ones that are already cast for paper punching, hopefully the next batch will be more malleable when I air cool them.

[btroj]

I bet air cooling won't make a big difference. They will be softer but not necessarily tougher.
D you have any pure you can mix it with? You range scrap may have lots of cast in it which means a bunch of hard alloy. Too much Sb in it which is why the bullets snapped.
A tough bullet can be made harder but I don't know if a hard bullet can be made tougher.

[Centaur 1]

That's the problem with range scrap, you never know exactly what you have. About a year ago is when I started casting. I made a comment to a close friend of mine to the effect of, "I used to make sinkers as a teenager and I still had my palmer hot pot. With shooting getting so expensive, I would like to learn how to cast bullets, but I don't have or know where to get lead". Well Joe said to me, "hang on let me check and see what I have". He had about 1000 pounds of range scrap which he was planning on selling for scrap, then using the money to order bullets from Berry's Manufacturing. He gave me the first bucket for free, which I turned into ingots in about five days using that tiny 4lb smelting pot. I didn't know that he had another 900lbs in the back yard. So when I returned his bucket the following week, I told him that if he gets more I'd love to have it and I'll pay him what the scrap dealer pays. By now I had the Lee 4-20 pot and a couple of molds. I even brought him a couple hundred boolits that I had made with the lead he gave me. Long story short, I took home the 900lbs and over the next month I smelted all of it into 2lb lead cupcakes. For my effort I kept half and gave half back. My buddy will be moving to Tenn. later this summer, and I agreed to make sure that his casting skills are good enough to keep up with the demand that his 3 Dillon presses put on him. I just realized that I'm rambling, it's late and I'm tired. I might not know exactly what alloy I have, but since I took care and made sure that it was smelted in a way that I know every ingot has the same proportion of ingrediants. So once I figure out how to treat the lead that's in the pot, I'll also know what to do with the rest of my lead.

If I had to guess, I bet that I'm going to end up adding some tin, then air cooling my boolits. If I get ambitious enough, I'm thinking about building a harness tester that fits in my press.

[stubshaft]

Yes a Lino bullet will shoot well. It is the end of flight for a hunting bullet where is matters. The Lino bullet could fragment on bone while a tough, softer bullet might upset some but it will stay in one price. This increase penetration.

Hardness matters not on paper but it makes a big difference on game.

I have shot hundres of animals with Lino boolits. From Hogs, Sheep, Goats, Wild Cows, Horses and Elk. I have never found any evidence on Lino fragmenting on bone. I think that some people imagine what may happen, rather than experiencing the realities. A boolit that upsets and deforms is also more likely to stray off course as opposed to one that maintains its shape.

Not only have I been an avid hunter for over 45 years I do Predator Control and herd culling for a couple of Ranches. I shoot paper only to make sure that I can hit the animal.

[nanuk]

Stubshaft: what caliber, weight, and velocity do you shoot?

[stubshaft]

7mm TCU 145gr 1875fps, 30/30 180gr 1800fps, 308 Win. 180gr 2487fps, 357Mag 170gr 1480fps, 454 Casull 300gr LFN 1525fps, 45/70 405gr and 425gr 1830fps/1700fps, 500 S&W 460gr. 1800fps.

[Bulldogger]

I don't cast rifle boolits, so have never mad a long one to try to snap, but when I make my angle iron WW ingots they often snap when I dump them out. I've heard that is due to the melt and mould both being too hot, which seems to make sense to me.

So I'd suggest you review your melt temperature and mould temperature. I don't think any common alloy should snap like that. I'd be worried about poor accuracy from it snapping/cracking during the pressures of firing. Someone with more knowledge is free to jump in, but those would be my concerns were these my boolits. Bottom line, it doesn't take that long to melt and recast.

BDGR

[mold maker]

Ya might try to anneal them and allow slow air cool to soften them. Self cleaning oven can do this. The worst ya can do is over heat (melt) them and ya can still recast them.
I'm lucky since almost all my range scrap is from JHP or FMJ and the rest is shot gun slugs and 0000 buck. That yields a soft alloy.

[BABore]

The first pic is a commercial "hard cast" boolit I used on a bison. The bison didn't go more than 15 feet and died. Technically the boolit did its job. It did not encounter any major bones even though bison ribs are plenty stout. Its performance is exactly the reason I got into casting. Yes boolits can be too hard for game and I would never shoot one with a hard, linotype alloy. Antimony is not your friend.

The second pic is also taken from a bison. This time from a boolit I cast myself. I purposely took a quartering forward shot and centered the heaviest portion of the front leg bone to get a high heart shot. This boolit alloy performed in an extreme situation. It's what you get when you go from 6% antimony to 3%. You can go even lower with smaller animals like deer. In these cases I go with half WW's and half Pb, then water drop it. Now the antimony is 2% or lower and you can rely on some expansion even when heat treated.

Casting too hot and fast, then quenching the boolit will cause large crystal formation and possible fracture at stress riser points like crimp and lube grooves. I like to test a booilit by clamping it in a vise and giving it a glancing blow with a hammer. Also standing one upright on concrete and appling a direct blow, straight down on the nose.

[btroj]

I blew the nose off a hard bullet this past winter on a deer. I was above the deer and hit the shouder blade. The hollow point was cast way too hard and the nose blew entirely off, bullet ended up in the neck. I dis recover the animal but a proper alloy would have held together and I would have put the animal down right there. The bullet started around 340 grains, what I recovered was under 200.
I prefer to use a softer alloy like Brice is talking about. For bear last year I used an alloy that tested 12 bhn air cooled right after casting and was 18 water dropped and tested after a couple days of sitting. Driven at 1650 it penetrated clean thru the shoulder, thru the lungs, and out the mid section of a quartering bear. The wound channel was straight and the near shoulder was basically destroyed. That was with a 420 gr plain base. This is what I prefer to use for hunting.

[Centaur 1]

I'm going to play around with annealing then testing, I might as well try and learn something new before they get remelted.

Bulldogger might be on to something as well. I'm still getting used to these larger 6 cavity molds. It seems like unless everything was hot enough to get frosty boolits, they came out with wrinkles in them. I know that I need to slow down a little because the sprue plate is tearing a divot from the base of the boolit.

[Centaur 1]

Casting too hot and fast, then quenching the boolit will cause large crystal formation and possible fracture at stress riser points like crimp and lube grooves. I like to test a booilit by clamping it in a vise and giving it a glancing blow with a hammer. Also standing one upright on concrete and appling a direct blow, straight down on the nose.

BA, I was writing when you posted, so I didn't see it. I think what you wrote is exactly what happened. I'm going to try the vise test.

[Centaur 1]

Now I'm really confused, HELLLLLLLLP!!!! I've been here at cast boolits for a little over a year now, so I have learned enough to get into trouble, but this doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard before. I didn't start with a clean, known alloy which makes it difficult to analyze my results. I didn't think that there was very much antimony since it was scrap from a pistol range. It's got pretty even amounts of jacketed, plated and cast pistol bullets. It's my understanding that without antimony, the lead won't harden very much. When I dropped the boolits from the mold into cold water, they became so brittle that they would snap instead of bending. When I struck one on the nose with a 3lb hammer, it shattered and a piece went flying across the garage.

Today I started over with the same alloy and the plan was to let them air cool on an old towel. This same alloy is so soft that it's hard to believe that it's the same stuff. I also added about 1/2 lb of tin and the boolits look much better and I was able to turn the heat down a little. The one thing that I'm curious about is how can they now be soft enough to scratch with a thumb nail, but when they're water quenched it's super hard and brittle? If there's enough antimony to make them brittle, how can they be this soft when air cooled?

I don't want to put a gas check on too many of them in case they're so soft that I get barrel leading. I was really hoping that this alloy would work since I have about 400 lbs of it. I'm also thinking about draining the pot and starting over, I do have about 20lbs of lead that was smelted from just cast boolits so I'm assuming that there'll bo some antimony in it. On the other hand maybe I should just add more tin to get it up to at least a 20-1 alloy. I wish that I knew more about what I'm doing. I appreciate all the help that you guys are giving me and I can't imagine doing this before the internet was around. I really need to build a hrdness tester.

[6.5 mike]

Save your time for casting, buy a cabintree. I bent a 311284 about 80 degrees with a framing hammer trying to break it. Mix was 11.5 bhn with 3% chilled shot added. You could see it just starting to crack in the crimp groove, figure it will hold up fine as a hunting boolit. I smelted some range scrap awhile back, mostly store brought pistole bullets, 1 j word rifle, & a few 45-70s, 90 days later bhn was from 11.5 to 23 in ingots. Just never know what it's going to come out at. The 311284 was A/C'ed. Clamped it in a vise. 2 weeks after casting the a/c'ed where 14 bhn, the wq'ed are 22 if that helps any.

[btroj]

Fear not Centaur. Those bullets may get harder with time. I shoot lots of bullets I can scratch with a thumbnail. I don't get lots of leading either. The gas check will also let you shoot soft bullets faster than you can without one.

Wait a few days, lube some up, and go shoot em. I bet they will be just fine.

[runfiverun]

about two weeks [10-14 days] will give you true alloy hardness.
waterdropping an alloy will vary in hardness depending on water temp and how hot the boolits are when hitting the water [speed in cooling]
don't panick and definately do not over do the tin it causes more problems.

focus more on a consitent alloy, cross batch what you have and practice. you may want more tin you may just need to work the mold some or break it in a bit more.

[Centaur 1]

I've been pretty lucky so far with this lead and pistol calibers, and i even plain based a 309-150fn for the 30-30 with trail boss. I don't get leading in anything, but this will be my first attempt with gas checks and higher velocities. I'm hoping to eventually work up full power hunting loads and it would be great if I didn't have to buy lead to get there.

This evening I went back and read the chapter on metallurgy in the Lyman cast bullet handbook. I don't think that I hardened the boolits properly, but rather created some sort of funky grain structure. I had the heat turned way up to try and get rid of wrinkles, and for the first time I put a lot of ice in the water. I saw on here where someone was using ice cubes in their water bucket and I tried it. In an effort to keep my boolits wrinkle free, I think that I was cutting the sprue before the alloy cooled properly and I dropped them in the water before the centers were solidified. I don't understand what's happening, but I think that I went from too hot, to too cold, too quickly.

Today I used my hotplate to keep my mold warm and I added tin to the pot, 1/2 lb in a Lee 20lb pot. My boolits were coming out with no wrinkles or frosting, and I waited waited 7-8 seconds after the sprues hardened before I cut them and opened the mold. The amount of tin that I added made the mix about 40-1, I'm going to try 20-1 next. I'm hoping that this will allow me to turn the heat even lower. Then I'll try and water quench with room temp water, that along with a longer wait before I open the mold, should be enough that I don't create any more of those super cooled crystalized boolits. Sooner or later I'm gonna figure out what I'm doing.

[Centaur 1]

about two weeks [10-14 days] will give you true alloy hardness.
waterdropping an alloy will vary in hardness depending on water temp and how hot the boolits are when hitting the water [speed in cooling]
don't panick and definately do not over do the tin it causes more problems.

focus more on a consitent alloy, cross batch what you have and practice. you may want more tin you may just need to work the mold some or break it in a bit more.

How much is too much tin, right now it's at 2 1/2% or 40-1.

[Centaur 1]

I read the article on heat treating on the LASC web site and I decided to give it a try. One hour at 460*F then quenched in a pan of water. I can no longer scratch the lead with my fingernail and they appear quite hard. When I tried the plier test none of them broke in half like the first batch, they just bent like the air cooledones. I think that these are going to work. Now I have to load some and go shooting.