Zinc bullets

I was tempted to try it until I heard about the guy who had the bottom fall out of his Lee pot, and then learned that Lee specifically advises against using their pots with zinc. Apparently iron has a significant corrosion rate when exposed to liquid zinc.
 
And your zinc bullet needs to be about 38% bigger to get the same weight as a lead bullet.

By the way if you want to experiment with a lead zinc mix I have half a bucket of ww ingots that are contaminated with zinc
because the first time I used the PID temperature gauge I did not realize it was programmed in Celcius instead of Farenheit when processing some wheel weights :(
(...that's why I had to turn the heat up to get those buggers to melt... LOL)
 
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>corrosion

Iron dissolves well in liquid zinc, but barely at all in liquid lead.

I learned this when I had a pot of molten zinc dissolve its way through the SS pot I was melting it in. One of those "think fast!" events. The streamers, after they solidified, snapped easily (like dry pine branches).

Nobody got hurt, but it ruined the whole batch of metal, the pot, and spalled the nice smooth concrete floor too.

I am told this chemical compatibility also causes adhesion problems in the bore, but I have no first-hand information on that.
 
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bertn said:
By the way if you want to experiment with a lead zinc mix I have half a bucket of ww ingots that are contaminated with zinc
Click to expand...
You may still be able to use them. According to yomomma who has quite a bit of experience with casting if you can keep the zinc percentage low (I think around 4% or less) it will have no real negative effect on the cast bullets. Assuming your ingots are a pound each, if your melting pot holds 20 pounds you should be able to throw in 1 or 2 contaminated ingots per batch (even if they were 50% zinc) and the cast bullets should suffer no ill effects. I have accidentally melted the odd zinc wheelweight into my ingot material and never experienced any decrease in the quality of the cast bullets.

Or you can just give me the zinc contaminated wheelweights ;)
 
Canada ammo is also selling bulk 90gr zinc 9mm. I have tried to find a little information on this as well. Not a whole lot out there other I've come across other than people talking about how good for the environment it is.
 
ted_dent said:
You may still be able to use them. According to yomomma who has quite a bit of experience with casting if you can keep the zinc percentage low (I think around 4% or less) it will have no real negative effect on the cast bullets. Assuming your ingots are a pound each, if your melting pot holds 20 pounds you should be able to throw in 1 or 2 contaminated ingots per batch (even if they were 50% zinc) and the cast bullets should suffer no ill effects. I have accidentally melted the odd zinc wheelweight into my ingot material and never experienced any decrease in the quality of the cast bullets.

Or you can just give me the zinc contaminated wheelweights ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, that's good news.

It was from a bucket full of semi sorted ww. I picked out some obvious zinc and steel ones and pretty fast I got
tired of sorting and figured I could skim them off. So I'm guessing max 30%

I was planning on selling them to a scrap metal business but perhaps I should just hang on to them
and use them diluted with lead.
It's about 60 pounds so that will take a while before I get rid of them that way lol.
 
bertn said:
Thanks for the suggestion, that's good news.

It was from a bucket full of semi sorted ww. I picked out some obvious zinc and steel ones and pretty fast I got
tired of sorting and figured I could skim them off. So I'm guessing max 30%

I was planning on selling them to a scrap metal business but perhaps I should just hang on to them
and use them diluted with lead.
It's about 60 pounds so that will take a while before I get rid of them that way lol.
Click to expand...

I would keep them if I were you. I don't see bullet alloy metal getting any cheaper in the future and they're never going to go bad.
 
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