Hardness of lead recovered from jacketed bullets???

tootall

tootall

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I obtained a bunch of lead from the backstop of an indoor range recently.
(A club work-bee. Tear down plywood, shovel out lead, shredded rubber mats, other debris, etc.)

I am wondering how hard the lead core is on a typical jacketed pistol bullet?
I suspect it does not need to be hard at all, as it doesnt touch the rifling.
Pure lead?

I will probably just blend it all together with about 130 lb of mystery mix lead I have already.
 
I find it to be somewhere between pure and clip on wheel weights. You can mark it with a thumbnail but not as deeply as pure lead.

I use it for most of my handgun shooting and have pushed it over 1000fps without issues. Going to start powder coating it from now on I think but that's mostly to eliminate the smoke from the lube.
 
Zinc bullets!
Its bad enough to have to sort WW, now I gotta sort range scrap too?
Good thing they float, and melt at slightly higher temp.

Thanks for the tip.
 
I will speak only about the lead I recover from my range.

It is just short of Wheel Weight for hardness.

Think about it, what are people shooting? The range recovery I get is all pistol lead. That is not pure.

Best bet is to melt it all down and then do a test.

I would be appreciative if you would post the results of your tests.
 
yomomma said:
Pistol range lead is usually treated as pure or next to pure.
Click to expand...

The cores are swaged into the jackets so they have to be pretty soft in order for them to flow under swaging pressure. Most lead alloys like WW, Lyman #2, etc. do not flow readily unless subjected to extremely high pressure. Pure lead does so much more easily and because the core is shielded from the bore by the copper jacket it can be quite soft so pure lead works the best.

However, in addition to soft bullet cores and 22s range scrap will also have bullets made from WW and other harder alloys mixed in so it will typically fall somewhere above pure lead but below WW. They should work without issue at target velocities and powder coating will negate any possible leading.
 
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