Hardness of water dropping

[solderboy]

I'd been reading about water dropping, I've never done it.

How hard can I expect clipon ww boolits to be ?
and how hard will clipon ww mixed with about 50% soft lead come out as?

I don't have a hardness tester, I think I just want a ballpark idea.

[bangerjim]

Get a set of artist pencils if you cannot afford a tester. Chart is on this forum.

Get the free alloy calculator spreadsheet on here to calculate A/C'd hardnesses based upon % Sb.

bangerjim

[Mitch]

to many things can change a metals hardness the content of the alloy is a big thing and the temp when they are dropped into the water.if you are going to play with water dropping or heat treating you need a hardness tester.in most loading a harder bullet is not better.what are you loading that needs to be a very hard bullet?harder may lead much faster than softer.bullet fit to the gun is king then everything else.

[Nose Dive]

Well...as a 'water dropper' when casting...I do it as a matter of practice.... I will wade in on this subject just a bit.

But, let's back up and try to determine what is your 'GOAL" of hardness. I have on occasion mixed WW's and "pure' lead,,,( really don't own any).. in a 50/50 by weight mix. These little honeys were cast and NOT WATER treated and come out 12 to 16... Most come out much harder...A wide variation to say the least and this is a statement about my smelting effort. But, the notable issue is ...to me...for my boolit needs... this is just a bit too hard. I like the 10s or so for my 45 pistol at around 900ft\sec or so.... Nothing hot here...nothing fancy.... So... water dropping a 50/50 alloy really, in my opinion, for MY USE, is not needed.

Soo....Let's back up the mix a bit and lower the WW's down to 25% or so and dump in my 'lead' to make up the 75% remainder. And now we get into 'castability'... does the alloy fill out my molds...do they 'look good' or nasty,,gaps...frosty..??? So, generally, when smelting, (I smelt some 'road kill' materails)... I always start my smelt with plenty of sawdust and sulfur in the bottom of the pot...dump in the 25/75 mix, and get on after 'et! I reflux at least twice with the same dust and sulfur and mix well...and, really, out of habit.... I finish with some wax. Oopsss...sorry... if this is a 'resmelt' effort... I always like to add a bit of tin or pewter if I have it. And, I do 'resmelt' alot of stuff as my beginning smelt material is 'bad news bears' and rarely do I 'start out good...finish strong'.... Friends bring me a lot of their smelt ingots they 'cannot use'... Who knows what I am starting with. So... there I am... 100lbs of smelt ingots and most of the time...they look suspect...... Oh...I never cast from my smelt pot. I have a small casting pot to use for my 'alloy ingots'.....

So..now to your question... (sorry for the lengthy diatribe above)...'What can I expect when I water drop my boolits vs dry drop in the Hardness Scale? I hope I got the question right....

My Answer:... Well, it really has alot to do with what you start with. Your 50/50 mix may put you as much as 10 points HIGHER water dropping vs Dry Drop. I have seen this with a 50/50 alloy. And,, your starting temp of the alloy plays a part...and the temperature of the water plays a part... I drop into ICE WATER.... (two ea. two liter frozen ice 'cubes' covered by a clean cotton towel,,,held to the bottom of the bucket of some old ingots).... I have a cold, clear, water drop of about 12 inches or so. Alloy is generally around 700 or so... "WHY ALL THE GRIEF" with the bucket of ice water?... Well... I have the time... I do not alloy a 50/50 mix... and...well,,, this is the way I have fun making boolits.

Testings show 10 to 14 generally,,depending on the smelt ingot quality...which...as said above,,,,is in some cases...very suspect. I do make a lot of boolits that go back to the smelt pot. yep...bad back fillin...frosty..caky... nasty.... Time to resmelt! Did I say my 'solution' for these 'waste of time and money' boolits is pewter...tin... flux till the cows come home? I had a friend bring me about 500LBs of his smelt ingots he had 'no use for'... 4 resmelt efforts latter,,, I cast some sweet .30 calibre boolits for his 30/30... When I took the to him, He called me a liar that those boolits came from his ingots. I think they has some aluminum in it......

Oh...yea... I do not resize water drops for about a month or so. They will soften over time and will soften once sized and lubed. And keep in mind...I am one of those 'softies'....10 to 12 for my 45....

Don't be afraid to do it!! Mix some 50/50s...25/75's... heat up to 900...DROP"EM WATER.... cool down to 800 DROP"EM... test and learn...

It's fun! And you are learning with every batch!!

Good Luck.

Nose Dive

Cheap, Fast, Good. Kindly pick two.

[Hannibal]

The answer to your question is really entirely dependent upon the alloy you are casting. Both COWW and SOWW can vary quite a bit, and if you bought your lead rather than smelting it yourself, the fact is you really have NO idea what you're trying to work with.

Buy a hardness tester, or look into the 'Bubba' hardness tester discussed on the forum. No, it's not completely accurate. But I tested it against a LBT hardness tester and the difference was 1 BHN or less.

Hope this helps and good luck.

[lightload]

Some of the boolit literature from 35 years ago claimed that sizing heat treated cast boolits reduced their hardness level. If this is correct, would not sizing water dropped boolits also reduce their hardness?

[tazman]

Some of the boolit literature from 35 years ago claimed that sizing heat treated cast boolits reduced their hardness level. If this is correct, would not sizing water dropped boolits also reduce their hardness?

That depends on how quickly you do it after casting/ dropping and how much you resize them. If you do it right away after casting/water dropping it seems to have little effect on boolit hardness. Also the less you need to resize them works the boolit less and effects the hardness less.
Sorry, I don't have numbers to show since I have no hardness testing equipment beyond my thumbnail.
Right after water dropping I can still scratch my boolits. I do my sizing then because it is much easier on my equipment. After a few days, I can no longer scratch the boolits as they have hardened. At this point they are difficult to resize.
Others have tested my boolits and said they are around 18bhn. I start with range scrap so my results are probably not consistent. They do work fine in my handguns though.

[solderboy]

let me re-phase the question.

Just to help me get a grasp of what's happening, I'm looking for a "ballpark" idea of what hardness my boolits will achieve when water dropped into cold tap water using the two alloys I like to use?
clipon WW,
clipon WW blended with pure (50-50)

from what I've read, clipon WW is about 12 BHN and I've seen people post that a 50-50 is around 8 or 9.

[MBTcustom]

Depending on how hot your bullets are when they hit the water, you can get about 24 BHN from water dropped COWW.
50/50 is about the same.
If you run your mold on the hot side, or if you heat your air cooled bullets in an oven and quench them suddenly, you can easily get 27Bhn from either of them.
I mix enough tin in my COWW to balance the antimony and the tin, and I routinely get 27 BHN from standard water dropped bullets if I run hot. If I run at my most consistent pace, I get 24 BHN from the same alloy.
This is all highly dependent on your personal casting style.
I disagree with Hannibal about COWW varying greatly (although his point about unknown being unknown is valid). I find I can pretty much hang my hat on less than 2.5% antimony (but more than 2%) and almost no tin and half a percent of various horse hockey elements that are floating in there from former uses.

[outdoorfan]

I use those two alloys, as well. air-cooled, they are around 12 bhn for the coww & 8.5-9 bhn for the 50/50 mix.

Oven heat-treating the 50/50 alloy will net 20-22 bhn. Waterdropping will net usually 18-20, depending on the factors Goodsteel pointed out.

Coww's wil go around 30 bhn oven heat-treated. I haven't tried waterdropping them, so I can only guess at maybe 25+ bhn.

[P Flados]

Lots of good info here. The real question that needs to be answered at this point, is what do YOU need for YOUR gun.

Even general recommendations are hard to get right without having some idea of the application. This is cartridge, gun (Auto pistol, low pressure revolver, heavy duty revolver, single shot pistol, old rifles and new rifles) and use (hunting, plinking, paper, action shooting, cowboy, etc)

I am a pistol nut, but I push some of my boolits fast (30 Herrett and 357 maximum). However, I also do plenty of mid level and 38 special level shooting.

I am no boolit guru, but getting more out of boolits is a fun little challenge and I do like hobbies that involve systematic problem solving.

Even though I started casting back in the 70s, I was never serious about going for full power, full accuracy performance from cast. Finally, lurking here and reading all of the hype about PC pushed me over the edge. I tried PC and it worked. This in turn lead me to get more serious and started working toward controlling my boolit alloys.

I got a couple of buckets of WWs, did the sorting and smelting. Got some roofing lead. I cobbled together my own $0 out of pocket hardness tester that works pretty good on ingots. I got some of the drafting pencils and found them to be pretty useful for testing my bullets. I also played around with adding a little Cu, but am no longer continuing that specific game.

I like dropping boolits into water, but I think I need to get more consistent with methods. I have seen stuff from reliable sources indicating variations in hardness can affect accuracy.

After playing around making up small batches, I ended up mixing up a sizeable batch of 3xPB, 1xCOWW, 2.5% Sn and a less sizeable batch of 1xPB, 3xCOWW, 2.5% Sn. The low COWW batch can give me a medium soft choice with air cool, or a medium hard with water drop. Water dropping with my high COWW blend gives me something that should be plenty hard but noticeably less brittle than pure COWW. Since I am not doing the bolt action rifle thing, I probably have no reason at all to try for the mid to high 20s in BHN.

All of the above just really confirmed what my lurking here seemed to indicate. I really did not need to do it, but the "I want to see it for myself" urge took over.

From what I gather, more problems are created from being too hard rather than too soft. This message can be hard to swallow, but the evidence is strong. I also feel pretty strongly that the range of shooting where "go soft" can work out just fine has been extended significantly (assuming you are willing to powder coat).

If I start with "go soft until it causes problems" I think it will be easy to decide what to do next. I always want to both a mid range load and a full power load for my guns. If I find that my softest boolit shoots good at low or mid levels, but does not shoot good when pushed, it will then be easy to see if "go harder" fixes the problem. Since I have narrowed my next choices to three basic variable (go from air cool to water drop, go from low COWW to high COWW, go from tumble lube to PC) the testing is not that complex. This is all just simple, systematic and logical. The testing also gives me a "reason" to make all those trips to the range ;)

If you want to get an idea of what I got from some of my mixes, check out http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?291890-WW-and-pure-50-50