What we are really interested in is the ability of the lead to hold onto itself as one glob as the boolit travels down the tube. It appears the correlation between actual hardness and "shearness" is not that good for most of the alloys we seem to generate. This is why I have never bothered obtaining a lead hardness tester. It seems we need a tool to measure the weight of the boolit before and after being driven into some kind of die (a take off barrel section of sorts) with heavy duty lands. Ideally for us, the heavier boolit will have had its lead driven into the boolit rather than having been sheared off. (Cut off the tits caused by the lands before measuring). ... felix