10mmShooter
11-12-2013, 06:33 PM
Hey Everyone,
Got a new toy today, the Lee Hardness Tester. Been casting for a long time and just usually mixed "known" types of lead to yield something in the in the ball park of Lyman #2 in hardness roughly 14-16 BHN. I have on hand real Lyman #2 from Rotometals (90-5-5) and some dead soft fishing weights, and my real mono type/foundry type printers lead that I actually melted from the print letters, and a couple of my own recipes to test.
So heres what I had on hand to test:
1. Rotometals Lyman #2 (should be pure 90-5-5)
2. Foundry and Monotype that I melted I know its Extremely hard
3. Some very old dead soft old fishing weights(closest thing I had laying around that was pure Pb)
4. One of my mixtures of 5 parts COWW plus 1 part monotype
5. One of my mixtures of 3 parts recovered Range Lead plus 1 part monotype
As you can see the results where nicely in order, no surprises, the simple Lee Tool worked great and yielded repeatable measurements. Tomorrow I'll do some more samples but I expect no issues. :smile::smile:
87287
Repeatability is tricky you have to get your lighting just right and to use the microscope scale correctly, I made a fixture to hold the microscope tube to make it easy to get a good measurement. The Lee tool is good its not going to give you "exact" BHN but as long as you can read the microscope to a scale of +/- .004(which is easy to do) you get very good numbers to allow you control the hardness of your lead mixtures.
The Lee loading manual on page 107 provides a chart that converts the ball indentation measurement to PSI and then extrapolates a "rough" BHN number for you. Its the bottom line in GREEN
Got a new toy today, the Lee Hardness Tester. Been casting for a long time and just usually mixed "known" types of lead to yield something in the in the ball park of Lyman #2 in hardness roughly 14-16 BHN. I have on hand real Lyman #2 from Rotometals (90-5-5) and some dead soft fishing weights, and my real mono type/foundry type printers lead that I actually melted from the print letters, and a couple of my own recipes to test.
So heres what I had on hand to test:
1. Rotometals Lyman #2 (should be pure 90-5-5)
2. Foundry and Monotype that I melted I know its Extremely hard
3. Some very old dead soft old fishing weights(closest thing I had laying around that was pure Pb)
4. One of my mixtures of 5 parts COWW plus 1 part monotype
5. One of my mixtures of 3 parts recovered Range Lead plus 1 part monotype
As you can see the results where nicely in order, no surprises, the simple Lee Tool worked great and yielded repeatable measurements. Tomorrow I'll do some more samples but I expect no issues. :smile::smile:
87287
Repeatability is tricky you have to get your lighting just right and to use the microscope scale correctly, I made a fixture to hold the microscope tube to make it easy to get a good measurement. The Lee tool is good its not going to give you "exact" BHN but as long as you can read the microscope to a scale of +/- .004(which is easy to do) you get very good numbers to allow you control the hardness of your lead mixtures.
The Lee loading manual on page 107 provides a chart that converts the ball indentation measurement to PSI and then extrapolates a "rough" BHN number for you. Its the bottom line in GREEN