Is there a way to tell if lead is pure or near pure without using special tools to test the hardness!

If you fill your casting pot with lead and stir often, will the tin, antimony, etc float to the top where it can be skimmed off and discarded?

The reason I ask is I have wheelweight lead and I want to cast some 240 grain LSWC's for use with sabots in my Encore!

Pure lead that has been laying around for a while turns a dirty gray. The more tin the shinyer it gets. If you don't use hardnes or chem. testing I don't know another accurate approach.Checking the melting temperature, if you can, will get you close.
Once you have a tin lead alloy you really aren't going to separate it.
The stuff that floats is the oxides, sulfides and such.
When the mixture starts to coagulate as it sometime does we call that dross, but that still isn't a tin lead separation happening.

Chuck;As long as they are sized to fit the sabot I've never had any problem with straight wheel weights. I save the soft stuff for round balls and bore sized conicles. Gonna try some BD.45s with a sabot in my inline this weekend.
jim

Chuck

No way to separate components from soluble alloys, alloying is an irreversible process.
The less expensive and easiest way for softening an alloy is by adding pure lead.
I do that with range pick up lead, which has a Brinell Hardness Number of 17/18. I add 20% of pure scrap lead , it reduces hardness to 13/14 Brinell Hardness Number
Try by adding pure lead until you find wheelweight/pure lead proportion that works for you.
Please consider these alloys recuperate some of their initial hardness in 45/60 days, so, an additional quantity of lead is recomendable.

Hope this helps

BA Shooter

Thanks for the replies!
I guess what I was really looking for is whether or not wheel weight lead is maybe a little too hard for bullets at muzzle loader velocities!
I once shot a doe with a 44cal, 240gr cast SWC/sabot combo with 2 Pyrodex pellets in my Encore, the bullet was made from WW and I picked the bullet out of the off shoulder, but it didn't mushroom much!
Maybe I should just look for some plumbers lead to mix with the ww lead! That should fix it!
Thanks again!

Yea Chuck - What KenJuudo Says

If yer usin Sabots ya can use anything ya wants fer alloy - alot of folks even use jacketed bullets in them. The hardness doesn;t even matter except for bullet performance on the game.

You wants soft lead for round balls so the patch can grab the ball, Connicals so you can easily seat the bullet into the rifling not to mention the molds are designed to throw the proper diameter with pure lead. Harder leads make larger bullets and the result is a connical that is too big for the bore and very difficult to seat properly by hand.

Hey chuck just read yer last post

SWC bulllets are not designed to mushroom and you do not need a mushroom effect with a 44 caliber bullet. They kill just fine without mushrooming. A smaller caliber at high velocities is designed to mushroom up to a larger caliber to create a larger wound channel.

The higher velocities needed to mushroom a bullet are not neccessarily feasible with a muzzloader. Thats why guns from the black powder era use big bullets. A bullet with a nice big flat meplat on the front of the bullet that is heavy enough to give complete penetration (one hole in and one hole out) will be your best performing bullet. A 240 grain SWC bullet from a rifle will be plenty of bullet and perform nicely on deer size game out to about 150 yards as is evident from the dead deer you have in your freezer. That bullet performed just as it should have. If it had not entered the offside shoulder it would have exited the other side, two shoulders is alot of deer to go through especially if it hit some bone.

If you pick up a copy of Veral Smiths book "Jacketed performance with lead bullets" it will go a long way in helping you understand bullet performance on game and explain it much better than I can.

[ 11-21-2003, 18:27: Message edited by: West Creek Charlie ]