Opposite of Hardened Bullets

[Blue Hill]

Hey Folks;
I've read a lot of posts that talk about water dropping out of the mould to quench the boolits and make them harder. I'd like to know if I cool the boolits as slowly as possible will that make the end product softer? With metal work, if I want to be able to drill a hole in a ball bearing, I anneal it by getting it red hot and burying it in a box of vermiculite so that it cools very slowly. Now it's gone from hard like glass to soft like brass. Copper works the opposite. If I want it to be softer, I quench it quick after heating. Have any of you ever tried to make lead softer by annealing?

[runfiverun]

copper alloys don't matter if you cool it fast or slow.
lead is the same way, it has a hardness that the alloy will go to. [you can kinda case harden it by cooling it rapidly in cold air]
if you water drop it it will be harder but will eventually return to the alloys original hardness.
you can work soften lead, but as soon as you melt it and cast it again it goes back to the original alloy.
you can soften an alloy with heat just like annealing brass, it however will harden to the original alloy also.
if you want a soft nose and a hard based boolit.
you can pour a two alloy boolit.
make a softer alloy and water drop it then soften the noses by working it or heat softening it [this will allow the nose part to return to the softer alloy's bhn].

[Nobade]

I anneal boolits in the toaster oven. Heat to 450F for an hour and turn it off. Remove the next day when cool. They will be quite soft, but as the above post indicates, they will re-harden over a period of several weeks back to what they originally were.

This works very well for using wheel weight metal in BPCR rifles. You just need to shoot them fairly quickly before they get hard.

[DLCTEX]

Your efforts will be better spent in using the proper alloy to arrive at the condition you want.

[Gohon]

When heat treating hard bullets and then allowing them to air cool they will get no softer than their original hardness would have been if cast and then air cooled. They will not get softer than when originally cast. All casts that are air cooled will increase in hardness by a point or so over a couple weeks time and remain there.

Yes, water dropped cast will over time return to their original hardness but what is that time period? "Randy Garrett (Garrett Cartridges) used to put expiration dates on his cast bullet ammo, but stopped after he'd found his water-hardened lead/antimony/arsenic bullets were still holding BHN in the twenties after a decade. A similar result is obtained by Marshall Stanton at Beartooth Bullets (http://www.beartoothbullets.com/faq/index.htm) who finds that his bullets heat treated to BHN 22 drop only to BHN 21 after their hardness peak, which they then hold indefinitely."