Lead Recipies

[Jethro]

All of the time that I have been casting and reloading, I have always just purchased lead ingots, melted them down and used them. Very seldom when purchased is there a hardness listed. I have never been concerned about hardness. The cartridges that I have been loading have been the 45 long colt and the 38-40. These along with the 50-70 governments and round ball casts have worked fine with what ever lead that I have used.

I am starting to cast for the 30-06 and the Argentine Mauser. My question: Is lead hardness important with a higher velocity bullet or if a gas check is used will any lead work?

Most shooting is at range with max distance 100 yds. or just plinking and shooting bottles.

*****
"It is never good for an intelligent person to argue with an idiot when witnesses are present. After about 5 minutes, no one can tell which is which."

[onondaga]

Alloy hardness in BHN is a lot more forgiving with gas checked boolits. Give a try with what you have. Boolit fit is not very forgiving at all. many Argentine Mausers have bores that are large. Slug your bore and the least use boolits that drop or are sized .002" larger than your groove to groove bore diameter.

I use a BHN 14 alloy close to Lyaman #2 alloy with gas ckecked boolite in 30 cal and approach factory velocities with hunting accuracy.

Most shooters have the best accuracy in 30-06 with heavier boolits 170 -200 grains.

I'd recommend that you select a powder that has the lowest pressure and largest bulk for your desired velocity to avoid the use of fillers and still get good ignition. H4350 and H4895 fit that description pretty well for the 30-06.

A hardness test tool like the Lee kit along with the Lee 2nd edition manual is a basic way to get a good start understanding how strength of alloys is related to the usable load pressure with at least plain base boolits in predicting a sweet spot of accuracy for a particular alloy with a correctly sized boolit.

The over-sized cast boolits needed for a good fit generally need a larger neck inside diameter to accommodate that without worry of the bullet seating swaging the boolits undersize.

The Lee deluxe die sets have both a full size die and also a collet Neck Size die in the set that is great for adjusting to larger neck size for cast boolits and full sizing when you need that too.

Any softer scrap lead will likely be fine with gas checked boolits that fit correctly under 2000 fps and pressures 35,000 psi or so. But up from there, I suggest learning more and getting a hardness tester.

Gary

[Jethro]

Thanks for the great information and advice. I will be following your adviced with the hardness tester and learning a little bit more about how hardness affects accuracy and other issues.

Thanks again.