Cold water quenching or heating treating bulllets

[antiqueguy]

50/50 SOWW/COWW water dropped (or heat treated if you prefer and have time to do it) is a good alloy recipe. Actually, lot's of guys use just that for their hunting loads. Plenty hard to resist the ride down the bore and plenty soft to upset a bit in flesh.

If you have a muzzle loader, or intend to get one, I'd hold onto that soft lead for the time being though. It's perfect for these applications and lead will not become easier to come by as time goes on.

Hope that help

what I use for my hunting cast bullets is a cast soft point pure lead nose and a WW base fused together I think mixing the alloy to get a expandable bullet because whole thing will expand and it will lose lead big time

 

[PuppetZ]

I didn,t say expand, I said upset. The pure lead in the alloy give you a bit more toughness so when it hit something hard, it doesn't break up. It will still not change shape a lot and give you straight penetration. I use that alloy on deer with a 245gn wide meplat boolit out of a 30-06 and it's a real thumper.

 

[c.t.smith]

id throw it all in a pot and stir. watch out for zink though it could ruin you.

 

[jethunter]

Why would you leave the stick-on's out ? I wanted to try and use all of weights, unless it will cause problems.


Heat Treating lead

http://www.lasc.us/brennan_4-5_heattreat.htm
I wonder how those guy's are doing with California's lead ban ?

I suggested leaving the stickons out because they will make your alloy softer. Pure ww is good for 1200 fps but you don't want it any softer. Adding stickons will make it softer. Effective heat treat is dependant on having enough antimony and tin in the alloy. The stickons are usually almost pure lead and if you dilute the ww too much the heat treating won't work.

I've heat treated about 12,000 bullets since June. I do a hardness test on every batch before treating and after, and I've learned a few things about it. It's not rocket science but it's easy to get it wrong. If you're going to try heat treat, here are a couple hints -

1. the temperature on the dial of your stove can easily be off by 50F. Get an oven thermometer that will be accurate within 10F or better. Otherwise you have no idea what temp you are at.

2. Convection ovens give more even heat and more consistent results.

3. I'd recommend you don't use your family oven for heat treating, for obvious reasons.