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Thread: Saving pellets and rimfire bullets

  1. #1
    Boolit Mold puddleglum's Avatar
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    Saving pellets and rimfire bullets

    Hello all,

    I haven't started casting yet but hope to get into it in the next few years and have been stashing away some lead.

    I have a pellet stop that I use for my PCP airguns. It is a paper box full of rubber playground mulch. Any time I am doing target practice with my pellets guns I shoot into this, and can recover the pellets, which are pure lead (sounds like a winter project to me). I have it on good authority this thing will stop 22LR bullets as well.

    Is there anything I should know about 22LR bullets, as far as metal content, in terms of saving them for future melting? Are they generally closer to full hard cast, or closer to pure lead? Obviously some of them are copper plated, but that can be skimmed off, right?

    Thank you,
    -pg
    If the founders gave us the right to bear arms so we can hunt, why didn't they also give us the right to bear water buckets so we can drink?

  2. #2
    Boolit Master
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    The .22 LR bullets are close to pure lead, and I don't think there is enough copper plate to matter, I just leave the .22 LR bullets in my range scrap and melt it all together.

  3. #3
    Boolit Master
    Bent Ramrod's Avatar
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    Back when I could mine the berms at the local range, I used a stack of sieves to separate the .22 RF bullets from the rest of the range scrap.

    No doubt it was slightly contaminated with the small fragments of Lino/wheelweight cast boolits, but it was still very soft and made excellent blackpowder cartridge grease groove boolits. I kept it separate for this application, along with the cores melted out of jacketed bullets, and used the rest of the salvaged lead for smokeless rifle and pistol boolits.

    If you have a blackpowder cartridge rifle, it’s worth separating the two. If not, melting it all together is fine.

  4. #4
    Boolit Buddy
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    It's nice to read a post inquiring about pellet and rimfire bullet lead. I have a My source of both and in a slow process of determining what the lead is best for. My goal is to cast LHP bullets using of pellet lead ingots and .22lr ingots and then increase the alloy with tin for other test bullets.. I also plan to add a test sample of jacketed lead bullet ingots with 2-3% antinomy and 1% tin according to internet research.

    My .22lr lead is mined from an indoor range and has some cast bullets of unknown alloy. I've also acquired a few hundred .22lr duds and plan to disassemble and measure the bhn of each brand. If anyone has a nice Lee bhn hardness tester, I'll be happy to send you samples for you to test and share! I'll be using lead pencils. From my research, .22lr bullets have 2% tin and should give 7-8bhn and 14-16 bhn when water dropped. This would make a good hunting bullet. I have about eight .22lr lead ingots and the few I measured had 13-15 bhn. No water quenching. I can measure them again this weekend along with the .22lr bullets this weekend. My pellet ingots measured 7-8 bhn. A jacketed lead core ingot was measured at 9 bhn. I've been using my jacketed lead core ingots for .38-148WC and .45-200 LSWC bullets so the bullet bhn and alloy is more consistent than a mixed bag from range scrap that could include hardcast lead.

  5. #5
    Boolit Buddy
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    Jan 2021
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    .22lr lead, pellet, and jacket bullet core

    Here are my results. Attached is a photo of the .22lr I pulled from my club's .22lr duds box. I cut the bullets crosswise with a wire cutter and attempted to scratch the exposed lead. Most could be scratched with a 6B Lead pencil which equals to 4-5 bhn. It's pure lead. I did not attempt to scratch the surface of the bullets. I've read on a forum that the surface is antinomy. A Feder copper top and a bullet with a cross & circle could be scratched with a 5B pencil with a bhn 7-8. Last, I had a Winchester copper top and CCI that could be scratched with a 6B or 5B pencil. It was scratched with a 4B pencil with a bhn = 9.

    I then pulled three ingots each to test them for hardness. These ingots were cast 3 weeks to a 12 months ago. The jacketed ingots could be scratched by a 6B pencil = 4-5 bhn. The pellet ingots could be scratched by a 6B pencil too giving the ingots a bhn = 4-5. And last I measured the .22lr range scrap ingots. There are hard Click image for larger version. 

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ID:	313540cast bullets mixed into o. These ingots could be scratched by 2B pencil. I think the hard cast bullets in the mix are effecting the alloy hardness.

  6. #6
    Boolit Master
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    Many, many years ago I mined and indoor range which was almost all 22 bullets. The range hadn't been c;eaned in God only knows how long and the angled steel backer plates had directed the bullets into the back corner. Each of the firing points (10 IIRC) had a strip of lead where the impacts had basically soldered the bullets into big piece about 2 feet long and 4-5 inches thick in the center. Didn't have a hardness tester back then but after smelting my educated thumbnail said they were close to dead soft. Used them as a base for for my bullet alloys for my handgun bullets like they were pure and mixed 3 to 1 with Lino made outstanding bullets.

  7. #7
    Banned
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    From my understand 22 rimfire bullet have a wee bit of antimony in them so they can swage they better.

  8. #8
    Boolit Master
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    Quote Originally Posted by puddleglum View Post
    Hello all,

    I haven't started casting yet but hope to get into it in the next few years and have been stashing away some lead.

    I have a pellet stop that I use for my PCP airguns. It is a paper box full of rubber playground mulch. Any time I am doing target practice with my pellets guns I shoot into this, and can recover the pellets, which are pure lead (sounds like a winter project to me). I have it on good authority this thing will stop 22LR bullets as well.

    Is there anything I should know about 22LR bullets, as far as metal content, in terms of saving them for future melting? Are they generally closer to full hard cast, or closer to pure lead? Obviously some of them are copper plated, but that can be skimmed off, right?

    Thank you,
    -pg
    I have been saving and melting them down for years and making bullets.

  9. #9
    Boolit Grand Master

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    I save pellets and 22 bullets but I just dump them into my next wheelweight smelt. A few onces or even a few pounds dumped into 350# just don't amount to much.

  10. #10
    Boolit Buddy
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    I like them for my soft lead, used for round balls and .224 bullet cores.

  11. #11
    Boolit Master
    Petander's Avatar
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    A friend shoots competition air rifle, moving target.

    I bought some pellet scrap from their club,it casts heavy boolits like pure lead and looks very clean. Saeco scale "1" suggests ~5 BHN iirc. Soft and nice alloy anyway. I may get it analyzed to be sure.


  12. #12
    Boolit Master

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    If it helps, this was my contribution on the matter about eight years back: https://castboolits.gunloads.com/sho...ed+range+scrap

    The jacketed core and shotgun slug samples I sent off for XRF testing came back at 0.3% antimony and 0.1% antimony + 0.1% tin, respectively, and both ran in the 8-9 BHN range. Given that those and your .22's are both typically manufactured by swaging, there's probably going to be a great deal of similarity in the alloys selected.

    I'd be very curious to learn if the high end match .22's run differently, but I can't imagine any manufacturer of plinker grade rounds doing anything that would increase production cost beyond what was needed to make an acceptable product. It would be worth finding out, since anybody mining a dedicated smallbore range might be getting a higher percent of metal used for "the good stuff".
    WWJMBD?

    In the Land of Oz, we cast with wheel weight and 2% Tin, Man.

  13. #13
    Boolit Buddy andrew375's Avatar
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    I got given about 80 lbs of (match)airgun pellets a few years ago and I melted them into ingots. I can definitely say that they are not pure lead! The ingots were slightly grey in colour and whilst they went thud when hit, they are not pure lead.

    Also, I was given about 150 lbs of. 22 rimfire lead, virtually all Eley match, and that too is far from pure lead. The ingots "ring" when hit and they are very shiny, suggesting they contain a lot of tin. When I first started shooting black powder revolver I started casting ball for it from .22 bullets out of the backstop of the small bore range I was a member of. Fortunately I didn't cast up many as they wouldn't go in! The diameter was ok,but they were too hard to ram. This was in a ruger old army. Balls cast of known pure lead loaded easily. So I keep the small bore lead for when I need to add tin.
    "Consciousness is a lie your brain tells you to make you think you know what you are doing." Professor Maria Goncalves.

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