Range Lead alloy, what is it?

[kens]

I have a barrel of indoor range scrap. I am smelting to seperate the jackets.
Any slug I pick up, can be scratched with a finger nail, it appears to be dead soft.
However, when poured into ingot form, it is too harder than fingernail.

Can anyone tell me what alloy composition this may be?
Ingots do harden more with water quench.

[twc1964]

All range scrap varies in hardness. the range scrap i get is mostly jacketed bullets and I'm getting between 9 and 11 bhn. each batch varies a bit. i add a bit of tin and a few 18 bhn cast slugs to the pot when casting. i recieved a bunch of cast 45 lc boolits that i can't use for shooting so i harden the softer batches with em. ymmv.

[dikman]

No way of really telling the composition without an X-ray test (or some such). Unless it's a Black Powder/muzzleloading range it's unlikely to be pure lead. I collect outdoor pistol range scrap (non-jacketed) and it tests to 12-15 BHN, if that's any help.

[375RUGER]

I'll tell you what my outdoor RL tested. 2-2.5% Sb/ 2-2.5%Bi/ .5% Sn
It is a mix of jacketed and cast. It casts a decent bullet just pouring it straight, but adding some Sn helps it out.

[a.squibload]

I separate jaxketed from cast before smelting. Cast should be harder,
lead from jax. softer. How much? Who knows? I've been using the soft
for swaging, and the hard for casting boolits. So far so good.

[coloraydo]

I have a barrel of indoor range scrap. I am smelting to seperate the jackets.
Any slug I pick up, can be scratched with a finger nail, it appears to be dead soft.
However, when poured into ingot form, it is too harder than fingernail.

Can anyone tell me what alloy composition this may be?
Ingots do harden more with water quench.

Anybody's guess what range scrap contains. If you are water quenching your ingots, there has to be some antimony in some of it. From what I understand, dead soft lead won't harden up by quenching.

[kens]

Alright, this brings up another question.
This member posted this yesterday, about a minute after my own post:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?245859-Alloy-mix-help-needed

From his tested numbers, then is range scrap about the same as wheel-weights?

[Bigslug]

From his tested numbers, then is range scrap about the same as wheel-weights?

Nope. Gonna depend on the range, who was there, what section of the berm you dug up - I.O.W. it's a crapp shoot. It's highly likely that your roll of the dice will come up between 8 and 12 BHN, but it's still a crapp shoot.

If you do a pickup right after the local P.D. does a qual with shotgun slugs, or pick up only jacketed, you'll have a lot of soft stuff.

Then again, you may hit a vein consisting of commercial cast boolits that were poured 25-30 years ago when pure linotype slugs were common as dirt. Maybe somebody finally got around to shooting them and now you've got a bunch of 22BHN in the bucket skewing the norm.

Start mixing those extremes and you'll get something in between, but you can't make a statement like "All range scrap is ____BHN" any more than you can say "All junk yards contain exactly 17% Fords".

If you want control here, you'll need to segregate your smelt materials into categories before applying heat as others have suggested and also pick up a hardness tester. If you do that, you can control the "mud" to turn it into whatever you need. OTOH, it's a pretty safe bet that random range scrap will turn into something totally usuable for non-magnum handgun applications - just don't expect super-consistency.

[RogerDat]

^^^ Yep what he said!

Whatever someone puts down range is what your going to get. If you require consistency I suppose you could do a big batch, test it then adjust with other lead or alloy to reach your desired goal of specific alloy with that batch. Or just hardness test and tweak to desired BHN hardness with whatever else you have.

I have been giving the eye to this 55 gal drum of range scrap at the recycle yard. But I keep reminding myself it will be a lot of work dealing with the jackets and I'm betting the scrap yard will get me in the wallet buying them and then again selling the jackets back.