Heat Treating Wheelweight Bullets

[klw]

I was writing for the various gun magazines rather regularly up until about 1990. I stopped, somewhat unintentionally, because I started working on an article idea that just took a great deal of time. The idea was an Encyclopedia of bullet casting. Now, 22 years later, I've finished and am in the process of writing all this material up.

One of the areas that I am not going to cover, because I'm not really interested in it and know nothing about it, is heat treating of wheelweights. Wheelweight bullets will be included in great detail but I'm not going to address the subject of heat treating them. I would, however, like to include references to how this is done.

So my question is this. Are there any references I can site that would cover this subject?

[randyrat]

Possibly this will help http://www.lasc.us/CastBulletNotes.htm

[klw]

Thanks!

[waksupi]

KLW, with all due respect, an encyclopedia of casting, with out full coverage of heat treating, would be sadly outdated before it was published.

[quasi]

Layne Simpson had an article in Handloader magazine on heat treating cast bullets , or part of the article was. I am looking forward to your book Ken, I will buy one as soon as they are printed.

[cbrick]

Heat Treat (http://www.lasc.us/HeatTreat.htm)

Cast Bullet Alloy (http://www.lasc.us/CastBulletAlloy.htm)

You should pick up a bit of info at these pages.

Rick

[The Nyack Kid]

KLW, with all due respect, an encyclopedia of casting, with out full coverage of heat treating, would be sadly outdated before it was published.

+1

one could devote a great deal of book space to this important .... "black art within a black art" .

[crabo]

Heat Treat (http://www.lasc.us/HeatTreat.htm)

Cast Bullet Alloy (http://www.lasc.us/CastBulletAlloy.htm)

You should pick up a bit of info at these pages.

Rick

Rick, did you write the articles? Good info.

Crabo

[cbrick]

Crabo, yes, those are two of my articles.

[felix]

Rick, why not give permission to Kenneth to include your stuff in his publication? ... felix

[Shuz]

cbrick--Excellent articles!

[cbrick]

Rick, why not give permission to Kenneth to include your stuff in his publication? ... felix

Kenneth I take it is klw? Sure, if there is anything he wants to use and he asks.

Rick

[klw]

Thanks but I'm just going to include a reference to the on-line material.

[klw]

Article has been finished and submitted. Now it will probably take Gun Digest a year or so to decide if they are going to accept it and about that long again to pay for it. Assuming it gets bought it will probably be six to ten years before they print it. Nothing moves fast.

[jahela]

klw, don't forget that wheelweights are less available in the next time. Here in germany they get more and more rare. Because of this your book may be antiquated in a few years. You should add a chapter "Alloys and how to get them".

I was lucky and bought more than 900 kilogramm (??pound) of monotype with 20% Sb from my local scrap-dealer. I mix it to 4% Sb/2% Sn-Alloy.

[klw]

klw, don't forget that wheelweights are less available in the next time. Here in germany they get more and more rare. Because of this your book may be antiquated in a few years. You should add a chapter "Alloys and how to get them".

I was lucky and bought more than 900 kilogramm (??pound) of monotype with 20% Sb from my local scrap-dealer. I mix it to 4% Sb/2% Sn-Alloy.

The article turned out to be extremely long so I cut out the section you are suggesting and wrote it up as a separate piece. It covered how to buy bullet alloys on the web and how to analyze those alloys to be sure that you got what you paid for.

[Pepe Ray]

klw
Are you the author who was looking for an illustrator a short time ago?
JoeB posted an inquiry but it seemed to die on the vine.
Pepe Ray

[klw]

klw
Are you the author who was looking for an illustrator a short time ago?
JoeB posted an inquiry but it seemed to die on the vine.
Pepe Ray

Not looking for an illustrator.

[prs]

The Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook covers heat treating. Proper casting technique of WW alloy has to consider the effects of heat loss rates on the dropped boolits if consistency is an issue. Those of us using WW alloy in black powder arms need to make sure they cool slowly as dropped; or, better yet, heat treat for best degree of softness. For heat hardening, many sources neglect to remind the uninitiated to do any sizing BEFORE the hardening -- but in that case it is a quick learning curve, guess how I learned that.

prs

[cbrick]

Those of us using WW alloy in black powder arms need to make sure they cool slowly as dropped; or, better yet, heat treat for best degree of softness. prs

Correction in terminology, What you are describing as heat treating for black powder is actually annealing . . . not heat treating.

Annealing always refers to drawing the hardness from the alloy.

Out of curiosity have you annealed WW alloy and tested the results with a BHN tester. Your results would be very interesting, I would think that there would be very little difference in air cooled WW and oven annealed WW.

Rick

[45 2.1]

Out of curiosity have you annealed WW alloy and tested the results with a BHN tester. Your results would be very interesting, I would think that there would be very little difference in air cooled WW and oven annealed WW.

Oven annealed WW alloy reverts very closely to pure lead hardness. I used it in paper patched boolits as a trial, but at approximately one week the results started downhill as the alloy was harder and didn't open nearly as well. At two weeks it was as hard as air cooled WW alloy. This was approximately in the mid 80s when we had much better WWs.

[klw]

A time or two in the last couple of years I've mentioned that I've been working on an article entitled "The Encyclopedia Of Bullet Casting." Took me over 20 years of casting studies, 10+ tons of bullet alloy, 650,000+ cast bullets... I submitted it to Gun Digest back in July not knowing that its long time editor, Ken Ramage, was just about to retire. I've known Ken forever.

If this had gone as most articles do it would take a year or two to hear back as to whether or not the article had been accepted. I heard today. Once accepted it can take a decade literally for an article to see print. This one will be in the next Gun Digest. That was fast. It is even more unusual given that I don't know the editor at all.

The e-mail I got and the phone call message left on my answering machine have to rate as the most positive acceptance I've ever got. Given that I haven't been writing much in the last 15 years that was even more unusual.

This is unusual for another reason. The table of casting results was 13+ pages long, single spaced. I never thought that anyone would print that much. And the text is that long again. This is, by far, the longest article I ever wrote.

I guess this qualifies as self-promotion but, well, I'm thrilled!

[quasi]

I have not bought the "Gun Digest" for several years, due to it's dumbing down. I will buy the next one just for your article Ken, I know it will be excellent.

[klw]

Gun Digest said that it would be in their next issue. BUT that is probably the next issue that they put together and that may not necessarily be the next issue in the book stores.

[cbrick]

This is unusual for another reason. The table of casting results was 13+ pages long, single spaced. I never thought that anyone would print that much. And the text is that long again. This is, by far, the longest article I ever wrote.

Kenneth, did they mention if it would be a one part, one issue article or perhaps a 2 or three part series?

Rick

[klw]

My impression is that they would like to print it all at once but it is a very long article. There are 26 pages of text. A normal article would be ten. And the main table is 13 pages single spaced. And there are photographs, graphs and other tables. So how they are going to handle an article this long clearly hasn't been decided yet.