Fluxing and Bullet Appearance

[AlaskaMike]

After looking at some of the gorgeous looking bullets some of you folks have posted pictures of, I have to ask myself what I'm doing wrong. Those beautiful bullets I see photos of here are nice and shiney, but mine are kind of whitish looking. I'm not talking about a frosted appearance--I know now about when to expect the bullets to start dropping looking a little frosted. I'm also having sporadic fill-out problems. I might cast 10 or 12 good looking ones, and then the next couple might have a small void or rounded band. The alloy I'm using is straight wheel weights, and lately I've been adding some 95/5 (tin/antimony) solder to it.

What I'm wondering is if it might be possible I'm not fluxing enough. I have no visible dirt or grit in my bullets, so I'd assumed I'd been fluxing enough, but maybe that's not the case.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mike

[MacGregor]

straight wheel weights, fluxed with nothing but old candle stubs, cast hot around 800-850..
http://source.lakey.net/hooch/casting_take2.jpg
there's one bullet in the second bullet that the mold was a bit too hot for, is this what you see?

[AlaskaMike]

Nope--I've got them frosty before. Frosty sort of has a grainy whitish appearance, where my bullets have a very smooth whitish appearance. I'll see if I can take a picture of some samples when I get home from work so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.

Mike

[Beau Cassidy]

It looks like he has a flash on. That may make them looke a little shinier. Mine look pretty shiney until I handle them with my gloves and drop them in a box with the rest. Just getting dinged up takes the brghtness away. Let's not even talk about how dull they are after I size them!

[Joey]

I use the Franklin fluxing powder and my bullets come out semi-shiney. Does it really matter? I water quench them and use Lee's Alox lube. After the lube bath they look butt ugley.:)

[GLL]

MacGregor:

Beautiful HP bullets ! :)
Especially nice for straight WW !

What is the mould ?

Jerry

[MacGregor]

lyman gould express... #457122

hell of a bullet... kills some hogs dead i'm tellin ya.. good shooter too... i can do 3" offhand at 100 yards pretty consistent with it... good enough for putting dinner on the table, maybe not good enough for the anal paper-hole cutter types, but will put dinner on the table...

[AlaskaMike]

I use the Franklin fluxing powder and my bullets come out semi-shiney. Does it really matter? I water quench them and use Lee's Alox lube. After the lube bath they look butt ugley.:)

It does matter, not so much because of the appearance, but mainly because of the sporadic fill-out problems I mentioned.

But yes, it would be nice to be able to cast beautiful shiney bullets. :mrgreen:

Mike

[mag_01]

Polish the in side of your mold with buffing compound like 3m or rubbing compound---run your mold hotter and add more tin---If you polish the mold good enough you wont need to smoke it---Tin and heat will help you fill out hope this helps yaa ----Mag

[Bret4207]

I sometimes get "picture pretty" boolits. Most times not. I flux and flux and flux and it makes no difference. I think it's my using near 100% WW most times. It may be a surface adhesion type thing. For me it's strcictly cosmetic and I don't worry about it. Your fill out problems could be a venting problem, slightly rough cavity, dirt, not enough head pressure from the flow (are you dipping or using a bottom pour?) or an alloy and heat problem. I tend to run my melt fairly hot and cast as fast as I can. I get good fill out if I mind my manners and sweet talk the mould. But each mould is different and requires different techniques. Some demand the dipper spout be in cintact with the sprue plate, others need a 1" air gap and enormous puddle. If ALL your moulds have problems I'd look at my heat and alloy. A little tin can help, but heat almost always helps for me. I like frosty boolits, especially when using Lee's "Frog Snot" Liquid Lube, and I almost always get full fill out on frosty boolits regardless of alloy.

[BABore]

I ran into the same problem with several of my molds. The mold's hot, the alloy (WW's) is between 700 and 800 F, you start making some really good bullets and pick up the pace, and whamo you get rounded bands and fine white frosty spots here and there. I cast with a ladle.

I listened to another member here and tried it his way and it worked great. First off I was using WW's. I occasionally used 1-2% Sn if I got PO'd enough with fillout. I now use 50% WW's and 50% Pb. My alloys are well fluxed when smelted. I no longer flux at all when ladling from my 40 lb pot. I just skim the crud and keep on casting. This has reduced the slag inclusions to nil and sped things up. I also went back and cleaned all my molds twice. Once with Dawn detergent, really hot water, and toothbrush scrubbing. The second time with brake cleaner and a toothbrush.

I now run my alloy at 650 to 750 F depending on the mold. I have a high speed fan mounted to the table my bullets drop onto. Preheat the mold or start casting until your bullets have good fillout. Look for the sprue to freeze in 3-4 seconds after you stop the pour. Hold the sprue plate by the fan for 3-4 seconds, then cut it. Dump the bullets and then hold the open mold in front of the fan for a 3-4 count. Keep up this sequence. You may have to adjust your count at the different stages, or the pot temperature for your particular mold.

The problem you are having is that the mold is overheating. Smaller aluminum molds, or aluminum in general, are not as susceptable to this as heavy iron or brass ones. The faster they heat up, the faster they cool due to mass. After you get a handle on things, you will find that you can cast at lower temperatures. I may start a mold with alloy at 725-750 F. After I've achieved a steady pace I will gradually lower the temp. and adjust my cooling times shorter. Lower temperature casting helps reduce pot oxidation for less skimming, and usually results in a bigger bullet.

If you are ladle casting how you pour will have an effect on the fillout to. Some molds like a pressure pour and some you can get away with a slop pour.

Before this process was kindly relayed to me I tried everything to achieve consistent fillout. My casting session started with a few wrinkled bullets at startup, then perfect ones, then onto SBS or shrunken band syndrome. Adding tin, increasing alloy temp. and changing pour technique all helped somewhat, but really just was a bandaid and hid or confused the real problem. An additional benefit to this method is all of my molds now drop bullets at +/-0.1 grains or less on individual cavities.

[44man]

I melted down hundreds of pounds of cable sheathing and lead pipes for BPCR boolits. I mixed up a 20 to 1 mix and could not fill the mould and had that frosty look on the top edge of the bands. I could not get a good boolit so I dumped the pot into the ingot moulds. When they cooled I found a galvanized appearance on the ingots. Now I don't know where the crap came from and don't know how to sort my lead to get rid of it.
I mixed another batch with known pure lead and the boolits are perfect.
This is a big mess and really cut into my lead supply.
I would try a different lead and see if the problem goes away. You might have contaminated lead, a piece of zinc might have gotten into it.

[44man]

Someone mentioned that the new wine bottle caps are tin so I had a friend save some for me. When my pot got just over 400* I dipped the corner of one in the lead. It doesn't melt, it is aluminum!

[powderburnerr]

I think your lead is contaminated . I had a batch that did the exact thing . what I figgered out was it had calcium in it from an old water tank I made a smelting pot from. ..I been using it up in pp bullets and it is ok for them but will not fill in a groved mould . .you might try resmelting and just let it cook ,hot, outside for a while and see if it will burn off . I have resmelted mine twice and it appears to be less on the bullets now then the first time..................Dean

[AlaskaMike]

This is exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping for! 44man, I was starting to wonder if maybe I'd missed a zinc weight or two when I was sorting through the buckets. It sounds like inadequate fluxing isn't the problem. I've been trying to maintain about 2% additional tin in my pot (a 10 lb. Lee bottom pour) using 95/5 tin/antimony solder. I also tried varying my pouring technique--holding the mould an inch or so from the spout instead of in direct contact. The problem also happens regardless of which mould I use, although I did prep them all the same way (hose 'em down with brake cleaner and scrub the crap out of them with a toothbrush). I've looked over the moulds carefully, and I can't see any problems (burrs, blocked vent lines, etc.), but then I'm just starting out with this stuff and I could easily have missed something.

From what you guys are saying it sounds like maybe it's an alloy problem, or casting/mould temperature. At first I was definitely casting too hot. I had the temp setting on the Lee pot up at 9, and started to get frosty bullets pretty quickly. Later, when I got a thermometer I could see that the numbers on the pot's thermostat seemed to correspond to hundreds of degrees (for example, 8 was about 800 degrees, 9 was about 900 degrees), so I turned it down to between 7.5 and 8, but that didn't seem to make any difference, other than no frosty bullets. I also played around with the speed casting techniques I've been reading about. I got a small butter dish and put some rags soaked in water in it, and touched the sprue plate to it, and sometimes the base of the mould if it seemed like the mould was getting too hot. This really helped speed things up, but I'd still get voids or rounded bands sometimes.

I did just pick up some thin sheet lead and a bunch of stick-on wheel weights, so I might try playing with the alloy a bit. I'm really hesitant to try to polish the mould cavities, because I'm sure I'd just screw them up. Especially my new Ballisti-cast moulds--those things weren't cheap!

I'd meant to get some pictures, not only to show the galvanized appearance, but to show some examples with voids and rounded bands, but it appears that my wife has very effectively hidden the digital camera. :-?

I'll play with it this weekend and post an update.

Thanks very much for all the ideas!
Mike

[montana_charlie]

Although I don't use any WW, my experience rather mirrors the advice of BABore. I still feel there is much to be learned, but I can now cast good bullets.

However there was a 'hump' I had trouble getting over where I was bedeviled by rounded edges and wrinkles (that you might call voids) on about 70% of my bullets. In the end it appears it was due to DMS (dirty mould syndrome). The mould was an NEI aluminum, which was almost new. I had cleaned it several times, and cleaned it well...I thought.

I finally resorted to using an ultrasonic cleaner, which did the trick. I'm not advising you to go buy one...just illustrating that your cleaning may not be as effective as you believe it is.
Try boiling...

I think I infected myself with DMS due to some misunderstandings about mould lubrication. Now I use spray-on graphite and anti-seize compound...and carefully control how and where they get applied.
I also don't allow anything which resembles 'lube' to get near my dipper or casting alloy.
CM

[georgeld]

When it comes to contamination only two things will cure it.
Throw it all away and start fresh, OR dilute it til it's no problem anylonger.
another thing that does help cook it out. Set your pot to the highest temps and let it set there for 10-30minutes, then dip out the floaters and scum. But, that wastes the good stuff like tin too.

The biggest solution I've found after about 45yrs casting was getting thermometer stuck in the pot and cast only when it's over 700 and keep the pot at least 3/4 full.

Fluxing will help keep the inclusions out, always when fluxing, stir the melt and scrape the bottom and side's a few times all around to get the build up out of the pot. I just a couple yrs ago got the Lyman therometer and that did wonders to solving my casting problems. Last spring I got a jar of Midways' fluxing compound and it seems to help. At least it don't smoke like wax always did and I haven't had it flame up either. Sure don't take much of it. Just a pea sized amount is more than enough. Much more and it's just wasted and clumps up.

A few days ago I broke in a brand new Lee .45 cal 250gr SWC. It worked great from the beginning. Then due to a broken arm from last year this time that arm started aching so to ease it up and keep right on pouring I started setting the mold on the bottom of the ProPotIV. When I sorted that batch out at least half of them had bad wrinkles and were junked. The next batch I was holding it about an inch below the spout and they almost all came out nice with seldom a wrinkle.

This was a new lesson for me. I do like them frosty as it seems to hold the Alox much better. But, I don't usually have many problems. I'm also not near as particular as many of you guys are either. That in itself seems to help matters a whole lot for me.

Most of my bullets are for plinking and for the kids and women to learn to shoot, or just plinking. I also do a LOT of whirl and shoot without aiming pistol practice at various distances from 5-75 feet. This type of shooting a few wrinkles won't hurt anyway. I'm not a bench rester trying for tiny groups either. Plus when I get the pot going there's usually 30-100 ingots on the bench and many times that needs to be replenished too. Most times once I get started the goal is to fill up a two gallon bucket with one bullet type. Then they're aloxed and sealed with a lid on the bucket til I get around to loading them whether it's a few days, or few years. They don't seem to change that much long as the dust and contamination can be kept off them.
The last inspection is when they go into the case mouth. Until then, they're not much more than looked at to pick out the nasty one's.
That's just the way I do it most of the time. Some of you will cringe reading this I know. But, it seems to work for my needs.

Wish you the best,

[44man]

Since my lead is unuseable as is, I won't worry about losing tin. I will stick it in my large pot on the plumbers furnace and let it get as hot as it can get and keep skimming it to see if the contaminents will be removed. I wish there was something to add to the melt that would seperate the stuff out.

[montana_charlie]

I wish there was something to add to the melt that would seperate the stuff out.
I hope you're right, and things will separate eventually. Whenever I have proposed that idea, somebody always tells me it won't work.

As for adding something...almost anything you could find to stick in there would produce carbon, and that makes it 'flux'.
Flux causes things to blend better...

But, I've been thinkin', again...

Idea 1:
Say you have some zinc in your mixture, and you think it's ten percent (or less) of the total volume.

Heat the mix up as high as you can and let it cook for a while.

If you could have it sitting on a vibrator, (I'm wondering) would that make the various metals stratify within the molten mix?

If you could let it cool, dump the whole 'ingot' out, and slice off the top eighth-inch...would that catch the zinc?

Idea 2:
Heat the mix up real hot and let it cook with no stirring (again hoping that the mixture stratifies).

Then reduce heat to barely above the melting temperature of lead (621°) say 630°-640°. If the top layer solidifies, it isn't lead...therefore it gets picked out.

Dunno if either idea is worth the time it took to write 'em down, but I was just thinkin'...
CM

[44man]

I am glad to see you thinking, some of which just might work. I sure didn't mean to add anything that would flux the metal! Maybe some chemical. Most likely poison anyway.

[AlaskaMike]

After reading Glen Fryxell's article on fluxing ( http://www.lasc.us/FryxellFluxing.htm ) I decided to much more aggressively flux using sawdust just to see what the effect would be. I ended up casting a bunch using my Ballisticast #928 heavy .44 Keith type mould, and had very few fillout problems. The appearance is still the same, but I'm not real concerned about that.

Boy, I have to say I *love* those Ballisticast moulds--the bullets just fall freely from the cavities most of the time, and once I got a good rhythm going I cranked out a nice pile of decent looking bullets in no time!

This wasn't much of a test though, since this was basically the first time casting with this particular mould. I need to go back and do the same thing but using my RCBS and Lyman moulds to see what effect it has.

Mike

[GP100man]

fellas

when i have fillout problems ,i run pot up hot, then let cool to 630 600f ,then aclump of some thing (zinc more likely) & a little of the good stuff to.will form.
then i skim & flux with parrifin candle wax.
but at least i can fill out, if it fills out good enough to judge if i have gotten out a good % of bad i will add 1/2 # of 50/50 solder.
usually turns out decent plinkers,