Repeated water-dropping to increase hardness
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, 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. So we went full-bore magnum-plus with the loads.
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: