When I make fishing weights, I drop them out of the mold into a water bucket.

What is the propor technique for bullets?

I cant find any info on this

I drop them on a 1-inch pad made up of cotton rags and let them cool off slowly.

I stole a towel from the house and folded it up on my bench.

okay cool, thats what I will do then! thanks

Why do you drop fishing weights into a bucket of water? To see if they're gonna work?

haha... thats exactly why i do it!

I assumed they would burn fabric. Tried dropping some .454 round balls on an old cotton shirt last night and it worked great. thanks guys..

Use a section of one inch foam purchased from a fabric store with several layers of clean rags/cloth. This helps protect the boolits from denting. Then allow boolits to air cool.

All of my rifle bullets get dropped into a bucket of water with a towel on the bottom. All pistol bullets get dropped onto a folded up towel, cotton towel. Any cotton blends, the man made fiber will melt.
Burlap does well also.

Jim

i get a cardboard pop flat and set it at and angle so the bullets are dropped on the high end and roll down and cool on the way down...... i set the lead pot in another flat to help keep the spatter corraled..................

PRAY FOR OBAMA... PSALMS 109:8

By quenching hot lead in cold water would it not tend to harden the metal?

quote:

Originally posted by 45otto:
By quenching hot lead in cold water would it not tend to harden the metal?

It does.

quote:

Originally posted by craigster:

quote:

Originally posted by 45otto:
By quenching hot lead in cold water would it not tend to harden the metal?

It does.

And if tin is in mix, make it brittle.

quote:

Originally posted by 45otto:
By quenching hot lead in cold water would it not tend to harden the metal?

Yes if there is antimony present, but no if pure lead or lead /tin alloy.

I have one of those big plastic coffee cans 3/4 full of water. Just drop them in. I like the sizzle noise.

A lot of people shooting low pressure pistol cartridges claim they get better accuracy from softer bullets. They prefer lower antimony content, and prefer air cooling of bullets.

I'm of the "harder is better" school of thinking, and I almost always use 5 and 6 cavity molds. I generate so many bullets so quickly I get lots of dings on my bullets if I try to drop them on a towel. With everything but muzzleloader minie balls, I drop them from the 5 or 6 cavity mold into a 5-gallon bucket of water.

I use wheel weights and I also drop into a 5 gal bucket with about 2 gals of water. I keep the water level down a bit to help keep the risk of a splasah down and keep it away from the hot lead pot.

Can anyone with a BHN tester who uses wheel weights and a cold quench atest to the BHN they get with theirs? Ive not aquired a hardness tester yet.

Yes sinkers have to be tested by dropping into water. If you have air pockets they float and are worthless.

Brentp--bullet casting alloy cannot be tempered. Not controllable, but there is some change in hardness if water dropped and how deep the hardness goes and how long it takes to harden is all unscientific to the point that in my opinion it is nothing to worry about. I do water drop all mine as a matter of convienience.
The convienience being dropped into a 5 gallon bucket they wont get disfigured and I don't have hot bullets rolling around, and they are collected in one place.

I drop my rifle bullets into water and pistol onto a towel. I have also heard that time will harden some lead alloys.

all mine go into a bucket of water.

As a general rule I do not immerse any (sans .44) in water for an additional hardness factor.The .44 that I cast are the Keith 250 G. Ideal mould + for my own purposes use linotype. Word is that if one casts bullets +drop them into water then within 8 hours they will become so hard as to break your sizer.Sounds like shit to me as I have NEVER had a problem like this.Anyone wish to verify one way or the other?

folded towel. Then refill mould and pick the last up with tweezers and look at the sprue cut. If it isn't round, I stick them back. If they are, I stick them in wooden blocks with four rows of twenty-five bullet holes in each, in the order cast. Harry Pope did it that way, and it worked for him. I have done well enough at Schuetzen matches over the years to trust it.

Rich

The basic rule is that lead/tin alloys soften over time, while lead/antimony alloys harden over time. Generally wheel weight alloys are lead/antimony alloys. When lead bullets contain both tin and antimony, they seem to follow the rule for whichever is the predominate alloying metal.

The wheelweights I have been using get a hardness of about BHN 22 if dropped directly from the mould at circa 565 F degrees into a 5 gallon bucket 4/5 full of water coming out of my well at about 50 degrees. I suspect the water is considerably warmer than that after 40 or 50 bullets have been dropped into it in my 70 F degree basement.

I have never had either a WW or linotype bullet dented by dropping onto a towel, a piece of carpet, or into my water bucket, and I've made 10s of thousands, if not 100s of thousands of them over the years.

By heat treating lead/antimony wheelweight bullets, a BHN of approx 27 can be achieved.

Carpetman1,

NOT to be critical; but you need to get out more. Subscribe to the CBA* and order their booklet on casting.

They routinely heat treat cast bullets that measured 15-16 Brinell hardness two or three days after casting, to a hardness approaching 30 for competition. Ed Harris pioneered this process more than thirty years ago. Issues of the American Rifleman from the early to mid 1970's have articles on the process.



Rich

* Cast Bullet Association. They are shooting 30BR's and 200+gr bullets over 2100fps in the .3MOA range at 100/200 yards these days. They are also getting under .5MOA with Savage 12BVSS production rifles and the same weight bullets.

My air cooled WWs go from 9 to 10.5 BHN. Water dropped go 22.0 to 25.5 30 days after casting.

Idaho Sharpshooter--I've read it enough to believe changes in BHN do happen with heating, water dropping etc. BHN is measured at the surface and last I read, how deep was not known. As stated it's not like tempering where things are more exact and permanent. They read so much at 3 days, what about 4 days 12 days etc. And really so what? What differences are you really going to notice? I'm sure with a sensitive ohmeter you could read some changes in resistance too--but what difference would that make?