Casting pure lead bullets for light rifle loads

[njc110381]

Evening all. I'm new to this and have just ordered myself some basic casting kit to try to learn with. So far I have a Lee bottom pour pot and a 405gr Lee two cavity non gas check mould.

I also have a 50lb pile of flashing lead from the roof of my house. We're extending the property so I thought I'd keep hold of it in case I can use it.

The rifle I'm going to be casting for is a .45-70 Marlin of some kind. Looks like a guide gun but I haven't actually picked it up yet to be sure. Can I use pure lead in this gun? I'll only be playing with it at the range so am thinking it should be ok if I select my loads carefully and keep the pressure low?

I'm sure you must hear this question a lot but a quick search of the site didn't reveal anything obvious. I'd be very grateful of a little help.

[Cowboy_Dan]

If you can get a hold of some tin or pewter you could mix up some 20:1 which should definately work with light loads. I don't shoot .45-70, but I think pure would work best with black powder. You might be able to paper patch pure for smokeless.

[bangerjim]

You still need Sn for mold fill-out. And be sure to stock up on copper chore boys and lead-remover chemicals if shooting pure!

Hard lead is not that expensive. Buy some to harden your soft a bit and enjoy shooting rather than mining lead out of your rifle barrel. Even COWW's will help.

[Outpost75]

Soft bullets will do fine for light loads approximating black powder velocity, about 1200-1300 fps. Only a slight addition of tin is needed to improve wetting characteristics of the melt to get good fill out. Harder than 1:20 tin/lead is unnecessary and as little as 1:75 tin/lead will cast well and give good performance on game. The loads listed for Trapdoor Springfields are well suited for soft bullets. A popular load here is 14 grains of Unique with a 350-405 grain plainbased bullets, which approximates the 1080 fps velocity of the old 55-grain black powder carbine load. Very accurate, low recoil, cheap and fun to shoot.

[njc110381]

Thanks for your replies. It seems that opinions do vary slightly but that everyone agrees that there needs to be tin in the mix. I'll have a word with my local scrap dealer and see what he can come up with. I'll make the mix mostly lead at first as I can always add more tin if needed.

The 14gr Unique load sounds ideal for me. To start with I simply want to cast and shoot as much as I can. Doing that with so little powder will really help with the cost! The load does sound light though. Does it involve a filler to keep the powder in place?

[big bore 99]

I mix mine with a few wheel weights with good results. Make sure you use a good lube in the grooves or what I do is size them down to .452 with a push thru Lee sizer and paper patch them back up to size. That really shines up my bore with great accuracy and I use the light unique loads too. I don't use any filler. A word of caution: be sure you don't double charge any by mistake. I use a piece of a wooden dowel marked on it to show you the powder level before seating bullet. Have fun!

[njc110381]

Regarding the double charging, my mentor when I started home loading taught me a very useful habit. I size my cases and prep them and seat the primers in a big batch but the powder and seating operation is done individually. I measure a charge, pick up a case and tip it upside down before adding the powder and capping it off with the bullet. Any chance of a double charge lands on my lap, and it has happened

[bangerjim]

I also fill a single case at a time and then cap it off with a boolit to prevent double charges in big cases with fast powder. That is why I prefer a single stage press. After filling and capping 50 (my loading tray capacity) I seat them.

Works for me every time.

[Outpost75]

Thanks for your replies. It seems that opinions do vary slightly but that everyone agrees that there needs to be tin in the mix. I'll have a word with my local scrap dealer and see what he can come up with. I'll make the mix mostly lead at first as I can always add more tin if needed.

The 14gr Unique load sounds ideal for me. To start with I simply want to cast and shoot as much as I can. Doing that with so little powder will really help with the cost! The load does sound light though. Does it involve a filler to keep the powder in place?

NO FILLER! Unique ignites easily and gives uniform velocities without it.

[njc110381]

Good to know. I've never been keen on fillers.

Thanks for all this advice. I should be pretty good to go when the rifle arrives

[LAGS]

I dont think that mixing COWW to the lead is going to give enough tin to the mix to really make it fill out any better.
But it will add Antimony that will harden it up a bit to reduce the leading.
Cast some boolits with the pure lead, and see if they fill out properly.
Then if they do, the COWW would help for the hardness.
But even the Best COWW have 4% Antimony.
The Percentage of Antimony greatly reduces when lead is added in large enough amounts to make it economical.

IE, 10 lb of COWW only would contain 6.4 oz of Antimony.
But that is already in 9.5 lb of lead.
So if you add another 10lb of lead, you just reduced your Antimony percentage to less than 2% which should be a bare minimum for any kind of hardening effect.
So your mix is more of a 50/ 50 mix rather than Add a Few COWW to the lead.

[RogerDat]

You might want to look in S & S for some COWW ingots or post in wanted to buy because at 50/50 with a little tin you would probably save enough in barrel cleaning time to make the $1 a lb. for the clean COWW ingots pay for itself.

Antimony and tin combine in a way that is greater than the sum of their individual percentages. Tin to get to 20:1 or about 5% is probably more expensive than the COWW ingots bought from the forum.

[LAGS]

Most of my lead flashings is smelted into a 1% tin and 3% antimony for Handguns and low Pressure Rifle loads. BHN of 11 ( COWW is only 12 as cast )
Then I alloy it with Linotype or Monotype (that I smelt and blend myself), to bring it up in Hardness or Flowability for the Higher PRESSURE rifle or Handgun rounds.( BHN 15 or better)
Pressure has more to do with leading than does velocity in most cases.
For rifles that were generally BP and kept at BP velocities the 1/3 blend works fine, but you may still have some leading like they did 150 years ago.
I buy raw Tin and Antimony, and weigh it and smelt it with the lead I get for free off jobs, or pay scrap .40 cents a pound.
The Tin and Antimony runs about $16.00 a pound to my door, so it isnt the most Cost effective solution, but at least I know what my mix is for future alloying with other alloys.
The Tin in raw form is a whole lot cheaper than buying plumbers solder at $20.00 for a half pound.

I will have to figure out what it costs me Per Pound to make my own WW blend out of lead flashings.
BTW, lead flashings or Sheet lead is not Pure Lead with a BHN of 5, (but I treat it that way).
It is more like a 6 or 7 depending on the hardning alloy they use which varies like Arsnic or Antimony, but it is NOT Pure Lead.

[Lloyd Smale]

ive cast thousands of pure lead bullets without using tin. Just run the pot a bit hotter and cast as fast as the lead will let you. Fill out will be fine. Tin makes it a bit easier especially for a beginner but its not absolutely nessisary.

[aspangler]

I use a 60:1 pure/tin for my 45-70 with 25 grians 2400. Approx. 1450fps lubed with 50/50 beeswax/ crisco. Works for me and kills deer with a bang...flop.

[RogerDat]

Bang...flop is that technical hunting term down in Tennessee? It seems more specific than our Michigan whack em and stack em. For putting venison in the freezer.

Just to toss this out there. Pewter is nearly pure tin and in some areas plentiful in thrift stores, garage sales, or scrap yards. Can be one of the cheapest sources of tin if you are buying it from those sources. Read the really long thread on pewter hallmarks, there is some junk that looks like pewter and a bit of a learning curve about "weighted" pewter but by far the sweetest tin source. That and sometimes scrap yards or garage sales will have solder, see a fair amount of bar solder show up at scrap yards. Roll solder with core is a little bit messy to melt down into ingots but cheap. Have had batches of misc. go 60% tin, none less than 37%. Melted in a thrift store pot kept for just that purpose. Did I mention that core can be messy and acid is not good for casting pot?

Sometimes pewter appears in swapping & selling for around $10 a lb. so if you can find a 1/2 lb. pewter vase for $1 at a thrift store you should snatch it up. Would give 29.5 lbs. of WW's 2% tin or 9.5 lbs of plain 4.6% tin.

[Toymaker]

Good information here, but remember, every rifle is different. I have a rolling block 45-70 and have been working with 535 grain bullets case of pure lead. I've pushed them to 1,750 fps with single digit standard deviations using IMR SR 4759 and no leading. While the groups were good, I don't want to shoot that load in a competition.
I don't need tin for good fill-out or consistent weight. I have cast and used 60:1, 30:1 and 20:1 bullets from the same mold as above. The rifle works well until I get to 20:1. It doesn't like it.