Heat treat 98/2

[Ronbo256]

My access to COWW is extremely limited, and even water quenched 98/2 is too soft to feed reliably in my 1911 (.40 smith with the lee plain lube groove 175 gr TC mold), the tip keeps deforming and sticking on the feed ramp. Can I heat treat boolits with no antimony in it, or will I have to obtain some antimonal lead or super hard from Rotometals to get my boolits hard enough to feed properly?

[cbrick]

Can I heat treat boolits with no antimony in it, or will I have to obtain some antimonal lead or super hard from Rotometals to get my boolits hard enough to feed properly?

The short answer is . . . Nope!

The long answer is . . . Not a chance!

Antimony is the reason a lead alloy will HT, without it you'll achieve nothing but wet bullets.

If you add Super Hard up to 5% Sb there should be no reason to HT, the Sb alone will give you the hardness your looking for.

Rick

[Ronbo256]

Thanks for the long and short of it, that's pretty much what I figured, if I added the Sb I would not need the heat treat. Looks like I need a BHN of around 12 and I'm running around 8.9 or so right now. A round profile boolit (or a smaller metplat) would eliminate the whole problem, so I'm looking at the NOE group buy for a round nose 10mm boolit!