kamikaze1a
10-14-2010, 11:31 PM
Recently, I got around to melting the bullets I had been picking up at our club range. Most were commercial cast with a few jacketed and even fewer bp or shotgun slugs in the mix. Starting with my 30# pot heaping, I ended up with a half full pot once I scooped out all the slag, jackets and dirt. I ended up with over 50# of "free" lead.
Once the ingots cooled, I was surprised how "hard" the alloy was. They were very silver in color and clinked when bumped against each other. They seem to have considerably more tin and antimony than my usual 4-1 mix of pure lead and lino. I did not try casting those ingots straight but instead added a couple of ingots into the lead part of my mix. Later, when sizing, it was obvious that this mix was harder because it changed the sizing effort noticeably.
Another problem when sizing those harder boolits with my Lyman lube/sizer, the harder mix caused the die to drag the sized material towards the nose giving me a SWC looking TC boolit... The only cure I could figure out was to lube the die by running a boolit twice every few. That seemed to lube the top edge of the die and resulted in less effort on the handle and reduced the SWC look...
Aren't jacketed bullets cores pure lead? And does my mix of four parts pure lead to one part lino not sound "hard" enough? I am getting good results with my usual mix, no leading and good looking, good shooting boo's..
Once the ingots cooled, I was surprised how "hard" the alloy was. They were very silver in color and clinked when bumped against each other. They seem to have considerably more tin and antimony than my usual 4-1 mix of pure lead and lino. I did not try casting those ingots straight but instead added a couple of ingots into the lead part of my mix. Later, when sizing, it was obvious that this mix was harder because it changed the sizing effort noticeably.
Another problem when sizing those harder boolits with my Lyman lube/sizer, the harder mix caused the die to drag the sized material towards the nose giving me a SWC looking TC boolit... The only cure I could figure out was to lube the die by running a boolit twice every few. That seemed to lube the top edge of the die and resulted in less effort on the handle and reduced the SWC look...
Aren't jacketed bullets cores pure lead? And does my mix of four parts pure lead to one part lino not sound "hard" enough? I am getting good results with my usual mix, no leading and good looking, good shooting boo's..