Brittle Or Not ??

[RANGER RICK]

Hey master casters I need a little information about water quenching wheel weight bullets .
Does this method make the bullets to brittle for hunting ?? If so would heat treating be a better way to go for hunting bulets ??
I have used nothing but straight wheel weight and air cooled for my hunting bullets both out of my revolvers and rifles and have not had a problem with leading .
The reason I ask is I have a couple friends that want some bullets for hunting but want them harder than air cooled but also want to stay with straight wheel weights .
Thanks bullet heads

RR

[Lloyd Smale]

ive seen quite a few water dropped bullet fracture in penetration testing. Keep in mind though that our penentration testing is probably a little more severe then most and tougher on a bullet then any game animal probably is. I do know that weve had alot more failures with water dropped bullets then even with lynotype though.

[Junior1942]

I suggest telling your friends that what they want and what is best are two different things. They probably want high velocity with no leading. Maybe staying with jacketed is best for them. . . .

[Bass Ackward]

1.Does this method make the bullets to brittle for hunting ??

2. If so would heat treating be a better way to go for hunting bulets ??

3. I have used nothing but straight wheel weight and air cooled for my hunting bullets both out of my revolvers and rifles and have not had a problem with leading .
The reason I ask is I have a couple friends that want some bullets for hunting but want them harder than air cooled but also want to stay with straight wheel weights .
Thanks bullet heads

RR

RR,

By line.

1. Depends. Water dropping IS a method of heat treating. But it is uncontrolled. By that I mean, you get what you get. A lot of the bad wrap for fragmentation when heat treating comes from frosty bullets. Frosty bullets means that you have microscopic cracks in the bullets skin. Now, if something is going to fracture, it will likely fracture along those lines. In other cases, guys add bird shot to increase the arsenic content which is the hardening catalyst. It also causes surface cracks as it doesn't bind well in the HT process with the crstyline structure that is formed.

That is why I use tin. Tin or silver are binders that even out a mix and allow antimony and arsenic to bond cohesively with lead and evenly as well. Tin when it matches the antimony content will give you the toughest bullet possible. This is why lino fractures. Much higher antimony than tin content. This used to be plain to see when WW was 9% antimony and no tin, but harder now that WW is less so. So now more opinions abound. If you don't want to use tin, then go with the lowest antimony content posible. Some guys mix WW with pure lead and HT that. 50/50 of that mix will HT anwere from 12 to about 16. I have settled on 70/30 which gives me more temperature control from 14 to 22 BHN. I am hoping for a one year hardness range of 16-18, but I can report that next year :grin:

2. I like oven HTing. You can take WW anywhere from 20 to 35 BHN just by controlling temperature. But the bad news is you need a hardness tester to know for sure.

3. Neither have I. But I don't need a harder mix because I can always go up in bore diameter to get more weight for penetration if I NEED it. Lead strength comes from bore diameter, not so much from hardness. And that needs to be understood.

I am a soft bullet desiple based on my results. It all depends on what game performance level you are satisfied with and how you hunt. Everything pokes a hole and will eventually bleed out. If it is heavy enough it pokes two. Works on docile game, but is disheartening on adrenilin pumped animals. If you use a meplat it can poke a bigger hole. But only at high enough velocity that can affect your maximum effective range rapidly. And that range has to account for penetration slow down too. Not just strike velocity. And wide meplats lack aerodynamics that can slow more rapidly than you predict when you pull the trigger, especially in larger bore diameters with short for caliber bullets. The bigger the game, the more difficult to "plan" for game performance when you pull the trigger.

If you stalk close, hard "can" and "will" work for you. If you run a wide/ hard flat at high enough velocity, you can get expansion and add some shock too. This WILL be devastating .... as far out as it works. Otherwise you go back to strategy "A" that only works on docile game. Now you have to contend with the brittleness and fragmentation because you are asking lead to be something it is not naturally. This hunting strategy can have both a minimum (fragmentation) and maximum (no expansion) range requirement that you will or won't like. But some people never shoot far enough to notice. For them, this is THE strategy. The bigger the game, the longer the range, or the less perfect the shot though, the worse it is to predict. You must be disiplined on the shot.

But .... if you run high enough velocity AND a soft bullet, you get reliable expansion and shock across the widest possible velocity (and thus distance) range. It opens and rounds naturally. This is the most "error proof" way with cast and you mimic jacketed level performance across the widest possible range. IF the buck of a life time appears out at 200 yards, you don't have to risk the hole strategy. The negative to this strategy is that you need enough bullet mass to penetrate fully with an enlarged slug to get the two holes should everything NOT go as planned. Just like a jacketed bullet. Some drop instantly, and others go unpredictably longer distances. That is always my goal.

Wet newpaper in the same thickness as hide and possibly some estimated size bone from a grocery store placed in front of some water filled plastic containers of the proper thickness will tell ya everything you want to know about bullet performance at any range you want to test it. Just spray paint the location of the hidden bone on the newsprint and use a color you can see.

[44man]

I water drop for one reason, it is easier to cast without fussing with towels and shifting boolits. I have enough of that to contend with, with my BPCR boolits. They are just too heavy and soft to drop on top of each other in a bucket of water.
I have never seen a water dropped WW boolit fracture in game, they are not hard enough. In fact I add antimony and tin to make them even tougher because they shoot better for me. I have killed a large pile of deer with them, never recovered any and have seen no signs of broken boolits in the wound channels. One clean hole in and out. With the large meplats I use, there is no need for any expansion.
I am going to try a pure lead nose on a hard base this year just to see how they work but I have never had any problems with a hard boolit.
You have to get close to linotype to be too hard and brittle.
I just checked a bunch of my water dropped boolits with tin and antimony added and they are only 16 to 18 Brinnel, hard but tough. WW's are not as hard as they used to be and plain WW metal, water dropped will not be as hard as some say. I don't know how some guys get 25 Brinnel or harder unless WW's are made different in other parts of the country. This would be an interesting thing if everyone in every state would measure and post the hardness.
Surprisingly, my plain WW boolits also measure 16 to 18 Brinnel but lead my bores. I can stop the leading by adding tin and antimony or pure lead, either way. I never figured out why this is because all of my boolits in any alloy are large in diameter for my throats and bores. Just something to do with the WW alloy itself.
I find the same in my BPCR. I shoot 20 to1 with zero leading but a WW boolit, even though much larger for the bore, will fill the barrel with leading. I shoot a .461 boolit.