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Post by tullymars on Aug 31, 2015 17:10:38 GMT -5
Have any of you guys (Hoover, Sixshot) ever powder coated anything as soft as pure lead or even down the scale lower than say 10 BHN? If pure lead could be coated and fired at say 1000 fps or less with no leading in your sidearm wouldn't that be an easy and less expensive bullet to produce. I've been a little under the weather lately with too much time on my hands so if this isn't the best idea I've ever had its ok to tell me so.
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Post by AxeHandle on Aug 31, 2015 17:24:43 GMT -5
If you are casting the soft (pure) lead may not flow into the mold well. The soft lead bullets I see are swaged and lubed with straight up lube or powder. We run them 600-800 FPS. Properly sized, lubed, and run through a good barrel they shoot good.
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shorty500
.327 Meteor
too many dirty harry movies created me!
Posts: 912
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Post by shorty500 on Aug 31, 2015 17:50:16 GMT -5
Pure lead definitely has a few disadvantages when casting in my experience, but add just enough tin/antimony to get a good fill on mold and might b e doable! Aint got into the powder-coat fad yet myself. It seems to work extremely well for others, but for now as pressed for time as i am, guess will stick to what i know
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Post by hoover on Aug 31, 2015 20:17:35 GMT -5
Tully, I mostly use WW, or an alchemists mixture to duplicate it. After baking the powdered bullets, I have measured them at a bhn of 10. I water quench when casting because of my fast pace and dropping them on a soft cloth would deform them. The quenched bullets are harder than air cooled, but this is good as I use a tumbler to apply the PC and harder bullets deform less, if at all, during tumbling. Not sure if I would want a bullet softer than 10 bhn for hunting purposes as I will take penetration over expansion any day.
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Post by tullymars on Aug 31, 2015 21:05:07 GMT -5
Thanks fellas. I know next to nothing about casting and was just letting my mind wander a bit today.Plinking type bullets was what I was thinking about when the idea scrolled across my frontal lobe.
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Post by sixshot on Aug 31, 2015 23:17:49 GMT -5
As mentioned its hard to make a decent cast slug with straight lead, you'll almost always get some wrinkles even when you cast really fast with high temps. Better off to alloy it with something to bring the BHN up a bit, sure makes life easier. If you get to 10 BHN you're on safe ground with PC slugs unless you really lean on them, if you think you need a harder slug than that then just water quench when you take the PC slugs out of the oven, that will give you some gain in hardness. Like Tank said, you really want penetration with your cast slugs, just put it in the right spot & get an exit & you'll eat back straps for supper, cast bullets will do that for you.
Also, don't get too caught up in the hardness thing at first, its just like velocity, some people really get worried about hardness & velocity right off the bat. Of course you have to start some where but find a nice accurate load & then check the hardness & the speed but accuracy has to come first. If accuracy is good but you need more speed try bumping it up a bit, most likely the accuracy will stay pretty close, might even get better. Penetration with a cast slug will almost always be there if the load is shooting accurate.
Dick
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jsh
.327 Meteor
Posts: 884
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Post by jsh on Sept 1, 2015 6:29:33 GMT -5
A few years back I fooled with dead soft lead on some 357 and 45 stuff. I had to force feed the molds from the pot and keep them full in order to get them to fill out nice. Crank the heat up too.
I wasn't powder coating then nor had ever heard of it at that point.
I had water quenched for a long time on everything I cast. I have since air cooled all my wheel gun bullets. I also use WW alloy sweetened with a bit of tin. I had checked hardness but forget what both are.
I never recovered a 357, but it wrecked havoc on the deer. To soft IMHO.
The 330 goulds hp 45 bullet, in a 45-70 trap door made meat at about 100 yards. Front shoulder had a bullet sized hole in it and took out three ribs on the off side.
That's all the dead soft I have fooled with.
The air cooled seem to shoot better than my water quenched? This across the board in 4-5 calibers. My SWAG, is it slugs up or grabs the rifleing a bit better.
Jeff
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Post by AxeHandle on Sept 1, 2015 7:01:12 GMT -5
A little tale about water quenching... To speed my casting process from a bottom pour pot I water dropped my 50/50 Linotype/lead 440 grain 512 bullets. They took to long to be hard enough to drop from the mold if I did not. Little beasties didn't shoot for beans. Checked the hardness with a LBT hardness tester and got almost 30! They broke my Star Sizer too! Checked an air cooled bullet and got about 15. Helped me to fully grasp the need to use more than one set of molds when I cast from the pot. I now generally plan to use three molds when I cast from the pot. Yes, I have a Magma Master caster. When I cast from it there is no problem. It has forced air cooling.
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Post by hoover on Sept 1, 2015 9:21:53 GMT -5
Stan, if you woulda PC those slugs, the baking would anneal those slugs back to their original hardness.
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Post by AxeHandle on Sept 1, 2015 10:07:21 GMT -5
Easier for me just to throw them back into the lead pot...
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Post by dougader on Sept 1, 2015 11:50:36 GMT -5
I've seen threads about pc with a plastic cool whip container, black or white airsoft bb's, etc...and then the use of a tumbler instead of the cool whip container.
Tank, do you use a vibratory case tumbler or one of those rock polisher tumblers that just turn on rollers? And is that with as bb's or without?
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Post by sixshot on Sept 1, 2015 12:09:30 GMT -5
We are using a case tumbler with nothing but bullets, powder coat paint & turn on the switch. I leave my on for 15 minutes, then dump them into a collander & shake hard to remove any excess paint. Then onto the non stick foil & into the toaster oven for 10 minutes, don't bother to stand them up, just dump them onto the tray without double stacking any of them. Allow them to cool & then size them.
Dick
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Post by dougader on Sept 1, 2015 13:13:33 GMT -5
Thanks, Dick. Are you still using mostly the Harbor Freight red, or do other colors work well too?
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wdr2
.30 Stingray
Posts: 147
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Post by wdr2 on Sept 1, 2015 13:30:22 GMT -5
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Post by hoover on Sept 1, 2015 13:56:06 GMT -5
Doug, as far as HF PC goes, any color but black works well. I use mostly white with a .22 rf shell worth of black to make a grey color that resembles cast bullet color and just keep adding white when tumbling more bullets. I save any powder shaken off during the wire basket/collander phase and add it back to the tumbler by catching it with a piece of newspaper.
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