Checking hardness??

[catkiller45]

Ok folks I bought some ingots of so called soft lead of the web. I don't think it's that soft. Would I be better of melting a I got down and cast a few bullets before checking the hardness or just testing the ingot. I have the lee tester... johnny

[PJEagle]

My experience has been that ingots and bullets cast from those ingots will measure different hardness. I would cast 5 or 6 bullets from one of the ingots,wait about 8 days and then measure the hardness of each bullet and then find the average hardness. Others may have different advice.

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

Measure some boolits.
You may get accurate readings from your ingots, or you may not.

[bangerjim]

Don't sweat the hardness thing! PC everything.

But if you are concerned, I test ingots, sheets, boolits, everything made from Pb and it's alloys with my Cabine-style tester and find very little difference. The Cabine tester is far more accurate & detailed than squinting thru a gracile in a microscope (the Lee thingy). My tester has been checked against an NIST certified hardness tester.

Boolit and ingots will get harder over time, so worrying about hardness is a fleeting target you may never reach. Just cast them & shoot them, with PC of course! It eliminates all the worry of leading and hardness.

[mehavey]

From experience: Grind/sand a flat spot on the ingot and use the tester.
That will be more than good enough to tell you what you need to know.

(and the ingot is already . . . ."aged")

:groner: :bigsmyl2:

[ukrifleman]

The most difficult thing about the Lee tester is holding the microscope steady.
Here is my no cost fix.

294981294980

ukrifleman

[rockshooter]

since PC, I drop the ingots on the garage floor- if it thunks, it's soft, if it rings, its hard- then i just mix them together. Since the advent of powder coating, hardness, while not totally unimportant, is less important.
Loren