Reclaiming water quenched slugs.

[Gunslinger]

I was thinking about what happens when WQ'ed slugs are remeltet. My guess is the hardness gained in quenching is lost when the slugs are remelted. Is that correct?

[fatnhappy]

that is correct. You made no changes to the alloy, only to the crystal structure of the solid boolit.

[MtGun44]

Absolutely.

The heat treat just rearranges the molecules in a way that makes it harder for them
to move past each other, so they resist changing shape permanently or get "harder".
Think of it as tangling up some rope, it then will hold together in a tight mass. If you
heat it back up, the molecules all disconnect (turn liquid) and when they come back
into ropes (recrystalize) they are untangled, so they can slide past each other easily
again (the material is soft).

Hope this (mostly true) mental model helps explain what is going on when you heat
treat a metal to harden it.
Bill

[Gunslinger]

Absolutely.

The heat treat just rearranges the molecules in a way that makes it harder for them
to move past each other, so they resist changing shape permanently or get "harder".
Think of it as tangling up some rope, it then will hold together in a tight mass. If you
heat it back up, the molecules all disconnect (turn liquid) and when they come back
into ropes (recrystalize) they are untangled, so they can slide past each other easily
again (the material is soft).

Hope this (mostly true) mental model helps explain what is going on when you heat
treat a metal to harden it.
Bill

It most certainly did, thank you :-D

[Recluse]

The first time I tried casting, it was years and years ago when I was in the service. Me and a buddy had heard about water-dropping making boolits harder, so we figured same thing with ingots.

We wanted some really hard boolits to shoot through our Ruger .44's, so we did some smelting.

We water dropped the ingots, dried them off well (we thought), put them back in the smelting pot, learned about the tinsel fairy, smelted some more lead, made ingots, made SURE they were dry, re-smelted, re-water-dropped and repeated this process something like five or six times.

We were certain with all that water-dropping and re-melting that our boolits would be harder than our CO's heart. So we poured some nice Keith type boolits, and naturally water-dropped them too.

I can't remember how hot we loaded them, but we weren't worried about leading--hell, we'd water dropped those ingots and resmelted so many times, we figured the lead would be harder than cast iron.

After just sixty or seventy rounds fired, that poor barrel so was leaded and flying boolits every where, we couldn't have shot our smelting pot at point blank range. We scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed on that gun getting the lead out. Our armoror just laughed and laughed when we explained what we'd done.

I swore off lead bullets for a long time after that. Swore off casting, too. Finally came to my senses a few years ago when I discovered the Shooters board and the changeover to this one. Learned a lot.

But most importantly, learned to only water drop once.

:coffee:

[fredj338]

Yep, the amount of tin & antimony is unchanged, so remelting puts everything back to square one. Water dropping ingots makes no sense for that reason.

[runfiverun]

recluse: that needs to be in the " can you top this " sticky.
wq'ed can be heat treated in the oven to a higher bhn still too.
they can be back tempered to even out the hardness if so desired but you still have the same alloy.