i have about 60 or so pounds of lead in my garage, most of it free scrap, not sure on the purity or alloy of it. one 10pound ingot is pure, not sure about the rest. been told i can't use it for centerfire rifles, but was wondering if it would ball right for a BP revolver. plan on a Pietta 1851 London Navy .44 as my first pistol. also where can i find molds and how much do they cost?
casting my own pistol balls
- Thread starter kevin.303
- Start date
NB.nagantsniper
CGN frequent flyer
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- northern nb
BEST PERFORMANCE IS from soft /pure lead.
ive used wheel-weights in my b.p. /muzzlwloader rifle, its ok butpure lead is always much better.
ive used wheel-weights in my b.p. /muzzlwloader rifle, its ok butpure lead is always much better.
if you don't know the dimensions of your barrel, either slug it yourself or get someone to do it for you - the bores of black powder pistols vary widely, and you don't want to be stuck with an undersized mould or it'll never shoot properly-those little brass 1 shot thingees are alright to start with, but you'll soon find you need a multiple cavity- and for god sakes, get WOOD handles or put some on- screws and nuts and a good hardwood- otherwise you'll get a severe burn
Pure lead is best for muzzlestuffers. What is the scrap? Wheelweight?kevin.303 said:
Wheelweight heat treats admirably to use in just about any centerfire rifle cast bullet use you can imagine.
My main concern would be knowing what, exactly, the scrap came from. Very bad deal if it has any zinc in it. Or has cadmium or something similar in it...
Well, where did the lead come from?kevin.303 said:
If it came from old pipe, flashing, wheelweights, recovered range bullets, etc, then it is good to go. If it came from batteries, then I wouldn't touch it. Is it babbit? One kind of babbit is almost identical to linotype, but on the other hand most of them have significant amounts of zinc and copper. Zinc in particular badly contaminates your bullet alloy and makes casting good bullets about impossible.
I have no idea what a metal analysis costs; I've always known where my lead came from so never had this problem. Maybe they're cheap, and maybe there's a university nearby who do them as a teaching exercise, or maybe there's a local foundry, or whatever.
But 60 lbs isn't a lot of lead. If I wasn't reasonably certain of what it was, I'd just sell it to a scrap dealer for whatever I could get, see if he could trade me for any known scrap he had (like wheelweights). And then start again.
Wheelweights aren't that hard to find in most places, and then you know exactly what you've got. Hospitals with nuclear medicine departments will often give you the lead shipping containers for the isotopes if you ask nicely (tell them you cast civil war figurines or something harmless); they're pure lead, or always have been in my experience. Big as cannon balls...
Pure lead for the resolver...kevin.303 said:
I don't shoot BP resolver so I don't know what size ball they take. You will find moulds from Lee, Lyman, RCBS, Saeco, NEI, etc - take your pick. Price range varies widely; you'll find them all for sale online. Some people like casting with Lee moulds (not just the fact they're really inexpensive); I have found them to be a bit of a pain in the ass and prefer to spend the extra cash for something else.
I liked the NEI moulds while Walt was still alive; don't know anything one way or another about them since he's been gone.
You might try buying your pistol balls for the first while until you sort out what size ball works best in your resolver. They are pretty cheap, and not much point in buying the mould and then finding a ball slightly smaller or slightly larger is more accurate.
Actually, no you don't - there are quite a few alloys for wheel weights and they're all siginificantly harder than pure lead.
Pietta will recommend a .457 ball for the .44, but .451 will likely work fine too - it should shave a small amount going into the cylinder. This info comes from Pietta's own manual for the 1851 Navy.
I'm not sure its cost effective to cast balls (and they won't likely be as round) as commercial supply like Sierra or Hornady, unless you can get free or very cheap pure lead. I bought a 70 lb ingot last summer for a Minie ball project - with taxes, cost me $115. The foundry tells me that lead has gone through the roof in the last year or so because there are currently only three foundries in Canada smelting it- apparently several others have been shut down due to renovation/lead issues, and there is currently a premium on world lead markets for pure lead. Many of the alloys are somewhat cheaper than pure, but not best for BP.
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Yes, it is quite true - sometimes a foundry can't even duplicate the previous batch of alloy exactly.Skip said:
It is also true, however, that when tire shops are throwing old wheelweights in buckets, they don't sort them into various buckets according to manufacturer, style, weight, alloy etc. and as a result things pretty much average out by the time the bucket gets picked up, no matter what shop you're in. Having been melting down wheelweights in batches of a couple of hundred pounds at a time the last thirty years or so, I have made the startling discovery that the hardness of the resulting alloy is pretty much always the same, give or take 1 BN point. At least, that's what Veral Smith's hardness tester tells me.
It is also true that scrap wheelweights are hard enough as is for mild use in centerfire rifles and pistols.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is also true that while the proportions of Pb, Sn, and As in wheelweights can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, those differences do not affect the ability of wheelweight alloy to be heat treated to specific hardnesses using one standard heat/time chart.
One could of course pay for an assay each time a load of scrap WW gets turned into bullet alloy - but the resulting information would be pretty much pointless in that it wouldn't affect useage in the slightest or how the bullet caster heat treated their bullets.
Pure lead is the best in muzzleloaders and bp handguns. The harder the lead in the ball, the harder it is to load, especially if you are using real black powder. In a revolver, when you seat the bullet a small ring of lead should be shaved off--much easier with soft balls.
44Bore
44Bore
Rick said:
Agree 100%.
One must realize also that bore size makes NO DIFFERENCE on a black powder revolver. The lead pill will be swaged and the circumference shaved off when it is pressed into the cylinder. Most cylinders are about .451-.452 in diameter (Piettas too). Some guys use only .457 balls, I tend to use .454 as they seal as well and are easier on the ramrod lever.
Since the bullets will all be a uniform .451 once loaded into the gun, fussing about your bore size won't change how the gun shoots one iota. It will shoot well or it won't, depending how it was made. The ball diameter has nothing to do with that so long as you are over .452 when you load.
As for scrap wheel weight lead, if you want to use it in centerfire rifle and hunt with it, just air quench and use mild loads. The softer the bullet, the more expansion you'll get. for accurate range work, you want a harder bullet that you can spin faster. In these cases, I generally use a cold water quench - easily hardens it another 50% or so.
Sone huys get real fussy and water quench, followed by oven annealing and then age hardening over a couple of years of shelf storage so that they are always shooting the bullets from 2 years ago.
In my case, I use lead only for the big bore like the .45-70 and I use wheel weight exclusively. For BP revolver, I use pure scrap lead from old roof flashing melted down to ingots and fluxed to hell, then melted again and fluxed again before I cast. Getting the junk out is important for consistency.
Ahhh.... nope!Claven2 said:
The three most important things in centerfire cast bullet shooting are 1. bullet fit, 2. bullet fit, 3. bullet fit. If you don't get a good fit of bullet to ball seate, you almost certainly will have an uphill battle all the way. Fillers can help quite a bit, and wax wads, but a good fit pretty much negates going that way.
Hardness isn't about spinning bullets. It's about matching the strength of the alloy to the working pressure it will be facing. Too hard and you won't get proper obduration; too soft and the gas will just blow right by the bullet, resulting in very messy leading and lousy accuracy.
Bullets kept in the freezer pretty much eliminates Bn hardness changes over time, and not all alloys change with age as fast as others to begin with. And hard bullets will expand. Here's a little Bn versus minimum impact velocity for expansion chart:
12 1400 fps
14 1500 fps
18 1900 fps
20 2200 fps
30 2400 fps
You can load cast rifle bullets to 2200 - 2700 fps for hunting, but you will need a hardness of around 22 - 30 for the bullet to cope with that. As you can see, this works quite well for expansion if you aren't shooting hundreds of yards away..
It contaminates your lead alloy so it doesn't cast worth a damn - as I found out once, much to my annoyance. I think one of the Lyman cast bullet manuals has a little section where zinc contamination is mentioned.Claven2 said:
Zinc might make a good bullet alloy, but I'd use a separate pot and moulds to check it out. I think there was an article on casting high velocity pistol bullets out of zinc in Handloader magazine, about thirty years ago.
I'm not the guru who has been instrumental in investigating and developing the cause and effect of this Claven. I have watched it discussed at length by metallurgists and professional ballisticians/cast bullet experts. It's far too long to reproduce here, and I probably wouldn't do it completely.Claven2 said:
Suffice it to say that it comes down to how well the bullet is fit to the ball seate and matching the operating pressures of the load.
Whether you agree with that or not, that and many other fascinating technical discussions go on daily on the cast bullet list and within The Cast Bullet Association. I'd advise anyone who casts to join; it would be time well spent.
