heat treating/baking/water dropping

[samwithacolt]

Is there any advantage to baking boolits that were water dropped from the mold?
If you are'nt changing the alloy, will quenching it a second time do anything?
I'm just wondering if I can harden my range lead and stick ons without using up my clip ons.

[boog]

If it has antinomy it should heat treat, from what I gather from the info on this site.

[runfiverun]

when you re-heat treat them you have only the advantage of making the whole batch the same.
you cannot water drop then re-water drop and gain more hardness.
you can however de-temper the batch from an uneven 20 to 28 bhn back to the whole batch being 18 [or whatever] bhn consistently, or even take them all back to their original [air cooled] alloys bhn.

[cbrick]

Run is correct. You could oven heat treat them for a higher BHN than dropping from the mold into water but it's doubtful that you would benefit from that much hardening, by making them all a uniform BHN would be a benefit but higher than the 18 achieved by quenching, no.

You didn't say what your loading for but unless it's full house 454 at 60000 PSI making them too hard can be a detriment in itself. The percentage of Sb will determine both how hard and how fast they age harden after quenching.

Rick

[btroj]

Got a question for Run and Rick-

How big a difference is needed in hardness to begin showing up on targets? Rick, did you ever do any testing at 200 with your handguns to see if variations in hardness from water dropping made any appreciable difference in groups?

[cbrick]

Yes, a lot of such testing. It's all explained here.

Heat Treating Lead/Antimony/Arsenic Alloys (http://www.lasc.us/HeatTreat.htm)

Variation in BHN within the same group destroys accuracy and is the reason I completely gave up on quenching from the mold. If I need boolits as hard as 18 BHN (most don't need to be) they are oven heat treated for the uniformity. As with most things much closer range, say 15-20 yards and lower velocity will have less effect and it make it harder to detect.

Rick

[btroj]

Interesting reading. I like how a convection oven can be adjusted to give a specific BHn

Since I have a Convection oven for coating bullets I just need to find some pans to heat bullets in.

[runfiverun]

if you really get to feeling froggy about the oven treating.
do a bhn test over time, like once a week over a 3 month period] you'll think something is broke in your tester for the first little while then you'll see things start to even out and maintain.
my 22 and 30 cal rifle boolits for this summer have been cast/sized and mostly weight sorted since last fall.
they are just sittin there killin time.

[Jailer]

Since I have a Convection oven for coating bullets I just need to find some pans to heat bullets in.

Hardware cloth works really well. This is an 1/8" basket for 22 inside a 1/4" basket. I check and size them before heat treating and then run them through the lubesizer to lube them.

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b180/Jailer/posting%20pics/Heattreat_zps3151a56a.jpg (http://s19.photobucket.com/user/Jailer/media/posting%20pics/Heattreat_zps3151a56a.jpg.html)