Wont pan lubing soften hard cast boolits?

[Matabele]

Hi all,

Im new to all this and tried my hand at pan lubing some boolits today. As soon as the lube touched the bullets in the pan it started to solidify, and didnt fill out the grooves well at all. So I tried again and this time put the boolits into the holes left from the first go. I put the whole pan into the oven, with the door open and slowly brought the lube up to melt point over about half an hour or so.

What Im worried about is that bringing the boolits up to heat like that and letting them cool slowly will anneal and soften them. They are cast from wheel weights and were dropped into water straight from the mold about a week ago. I dont have access to a hardness tester to check my theory.

Is this something to worry about, or is the temp too low to anneal?

[Calamity Jake]

If you heat the boolits/lube together as you did with just enough heat to melt the lube then you wll be just fine, it takes 250+° to anneal the boolits any.

[HammerMTB]

Some temp info for you:
200F should melt your lube just fine. Boolits @ 200F will not anneal.
If you heat lube to 400F it will be smoking like mad, may even auto-ignite, I can't be sure, but certainly would not want to test that. Somewhere between 400-450F your boolits would anneal.
So you have a pretty wide window in which to pan lube, and there are some clear signs of rising temps.

[BABore]

You have to be above 275 F, for WW alloy, to even begin to anneal the hardened boolit. I did a lengthy experiment, years ago, to determine what each 25 F temperature increase would anneal a 28 BHN, oven heat treated, WW boolit to after a 1 hr soak then left in the oven to cool. If your oven temperature is in the 150 to 200 F range you are likely speeding up the hardening process more than annealing it. Lower heat speeds hardening and putting them in the freezer retards it.

[Reg]

I pan lube about everything and have had excellent luck. Have found you want to be very careful how high you pre-heat the lube. If you get it too hot its almost like it is burned and looses the lubing effect. I usually use a small double boiler ( look at yard sales etc ) and just get the lube nice and warm until it flows well, stand the bullets in a small , square, aluminum cake pan ( make sure it has a flat bottom ) and pour the lube in until it covers to the depth I want. Let sit till cool, pop out the whole block then push the bullets through from the top. The one thing to help fill out the grease grooves better is to use a old hair dryer to warm up the bullets until they are very warm to the touch, not hot, you can still put your hand on them, but very warm. With these methods you will get properly filled grease grooves and not get either the bullets or lube too hot. When chilling the block have found you can also get it too cool by putting in a refridgerator. When pushing these too cold bullets out, not only does it take more pressure but also many times the lube will break and fall out of the grooves. Cool, not cold is what you want. I played with small batches until I found the temps I wanted, now its just repetition. Like most things, it takes a learning curve but once "gotton" on to it works very well.

:drinks:

[Bret4207]

I suppose my first question would be why you think you need HARDCAST in the first place?

[Matabele]

Great thanks for the replies everyone, Ive learned a bunch of stuff since joining this forum! Bret I can't answer your question to be honest, from what Ive read on here it seemed a good idea to water quench the boolits. Im going to be using these for hunting and so thought minimum deformation was a good idea. Am I wrong?

[Bret4207]

Depends on what you're hunting, what design you're using at what velocity and what alloy. Most importantly it depends on what your gun wants. I used to think HARDER WAS BETTER across the board. Nope, not better, just different. Keep playing with it and you may figure out what is best for you.

[RU shooter]

Should be no problems at all . I pan lube in a toaster oven I set the temp at 175 for 15 minutes and let it sit till cool and pluck out the bullets.

[mdi]

I've always thought water dropping boolits was a solution to a problem I don't have. Air cooled wheel weight or my version of Lyman #2, have always produced accurate non-leading ammo for me.

[Bret4207]

I think we all have to try different ideas and see what suits us. I just hate seeing people make assumptions, like I did, that there is this true road to cast success that REQUIRES hard alloys.

[Old Caster]

Back when I was on the army pistol team in Europe in 1965 the leader of our group always pushed very soft bullets for our 38 wadcutter guns. We used a four cavity 358495 and a load of around 2.5 grains of Bullseye at the time. As soon as I got out of the military the first thing I had to do was make harder bullets because everyone claimed that they were better. Every magazine pushed it with the thinking that linotype had to be the best. Guess what? I should have listened to him but why would the head of an army pistol team who broke 2600 way more than once know anything about accuracy when we all know that magazines never lead us down the wrong path.

[Wayne Smith]

One of the things I really like about this casting hobby is that EVERY gun is a law unto itself. This means we have to shoot each one over and over again, with multiple hardnesses of boollits, multiple lube recipies, multiple loads, etc. It magnifies our reasons to shoot, as if we needed that!

[Marlin Junky]

Just a heads up if you start alloying your WW metal (I'm assuming clip-on WW metal) with softer lead:

I stopped pan lubing heat treated boolits because they were drawing back a couple to several BHN increments. I heat treat BHN 10 to 12 alloy (clip-on wheel weight & whatever softer lead I can find) to whatever suits my needs which is usually less than 20 BHN but I was HT'ing up to BHN 30 for my M77 in .358 when I was trying to beat the ballistics possible with my pre Micro Groove 336 in .35R. With the lube I had concocted for pan lubing (which actually performed pretty darn well) I needed to pour at 250-275F to get good fill out. The melt point of my homemade lubes were in the 150-160F range because I was trying to develop a "Desert" lube while using beeswax as the base carrier which proved to be too much effort; i.e., use a mircowax if this is your goal.

Anyway, if the lube you are using to pan-lube will pour readily and fill out the boolit grooves at less than about 220F (use a cookie thermometer) while lubing something like HT'd 50/50 alloy (WW/PB), you shouldn't temper any further. I have actually drawn-back heat treated boolits a couple BHN increments when annealing at 225F in a convection oven for less than 1/2 hour (more like 20 minutes); however, this was while using 50/50 alloy.

MJ