Bullet hardness?

[DDRanch]

What hardness do you cast at? I have been doing a lot of pistol at 12 - 15 brinell. Is that hard enough for black out?

[Overton-AR]

I am using 13 for my sub sonic loads. I have not "tested" it but
the spreadsheet calculators give me an out of 13.3 when I put in
my "lead mix." I just started and have only done a few hundred,
but I am having good luck so far.

[dead-bird]

15~16 is fine for Blackout.

Sometimes a little harder for other stuff.

Too hard and they can get hard to size.

[Overton-AR]

15~16 is fine for Blackout.

Sometimes a little harder for other stuff.

Too hard and they can get hard to size.

Are you talking super's or sub's ??? I guess either could
be fine if your powder coating, but I think the 15-16 would
be a little hard for sub sonic loads. If you run a 16 you
would need about 23K-24K psi chamber pressure to get
proper bullet obturation and most 300BLK subs only run
about 21K.

For supers....those would be fine but for sub's I would
go a little softer.

[dead-bird]

15~16 is fine for Blackout.

Sometimes a little harder for other stuff.

Too hard and they can get hard to size.

Are you talking super's or sub's ??? I guess either could
be fine if your powder coating, but I think the 15-16 would
be a little hard for sub sonic loads. If you run a 16 you
would need about 23K-24K psi chamber pressure to get
proper bullet obturation and most 300BLK subs only run
about 21K.

For supers....those would be fine but for sub's I would
go a little softer.

I find proper sizing to be of much greater concern than hardness.

I'm currently shooting subs cast from almost pure Linotype in a .500 Whisper, no gas checks.
And I doubt, any obturation.

[Dolomite_Supafly]

I too find sizing more important than the bullet hardness. I have never had my stuff checked for hardness. I have always ran wheel weight lead. I do a few things to try to ensure lot to lot consistency but I am not concerned with how hard or soft it is.

With powder coating the hardness or softness doesn't matter either. I have loaded and shot pure lead bullets with and without powder coating. Without they would sort of smear down the bore. With powder coating they ran fine without a single trace of lead.

[boost]

I cast by weight . Usually at mold profile up to +5grs.. When I started casting , a hardness tester was on my list of "must haves". Years of casting later and still never found the need for it.

I'm planning on chasing sub MOA with a bolt gun eventually in 300BLK. Maybe then I'd get a harness tester.

[oldpapps]

Oh no, I'm in one of those moods. Get ready for some ramblings.

Bullet hardness?
The problem, well one anyway, is for lead to expand on/in the target animal, it has to be moving fast and has to be soft. Cast bullets don't do both well. To get going fast enough to expand, the lead hast to be hard or it will skin off in the barrel. No one like to de-lead a barrel by any means.
Soft lead, soft enough to expand well, can't be pushed fast. So this leads us to, for expansion, soft lead must be jacketed. For raw lead bullets, make em hard so they resist leading. Now they are too hard to expand and just drill on through. The answer is to make the bullet fat so it will rip a bigger hole. With this view, I don't care much for pistols if the size doesn't start with the number 4.

How to make bullets hard? First way is the alloy. Put a lot of tin in the mix and the bullets will be harder, smaller and lighter. That works, just find the right mix. Another way is to temper the lead. Also called heat treatment. This goes from just an added step (that scares me) in the casting process to a very slow and tedious heating process with very hot lead being quenched in water (I always tried to use ice water). No matter, this heat treating goes away with time. I have NEVER quenched any bullets right out of the mold. One drop of water splashing into my lead pot would make for lots of very hot tensile every place including on me. (I was casting one time at the quarry and a spring storm cloud came over and a 3 or 4 inch rain fell, that's 1 drop every 3 or 4 inches. I abandoned everything where it sat and went into the weight office until the rain stopped. The area was nice and shinny with lacy lead splatters.)

Back to bullet hardness and how to get it. I'm a scrounge and always have been. I've used lead from all sort of sources. The best stuff I found was lead that I had to smelt from ore (one of the benefits of living close to old lead mines and having a friend living the a town called Galena). It was a pain to get out, I built a very large charcoal fire and set a shallow iron pot in the middle of it and pumped air to the hot coals. Shinny silver trickles seeped from those old rocks. It was neet to watch.

Advances are upon us. I have been studying up on powder coating. Full explanations are located on this forum. As I presently see it. There are two problems (for me). The first is I want different molds for my perceived needs, custom molds, dollars! The second is both no problem and a big problem. Lead heat treating can be totally removed by heating the bullets metal to 200 to 230 degrees. The coating process is at temp well over this, so any hardining by heat treating is lost. Leading is taken care of and for target/plinking use who cares how hard the lead is. But, for hunting use... I can see an extreme of me shooting a big ugly boar with a 300 Black only for him to get really irritated with me and determine that I need his tusks in my hide. No penetration, the dead soft lead splats of his tough hide. (Think 220 Swift loaded to max with a 40 grain thin jacked bullets at point blank range of a bear).
I will have to work on re-heat treating powder coated lead some how...... Or just work the alloy for the desired hardness. Oh, the things I have to worry with

I'll stop now. The youngest grand daughter is up, 11 months.

Load with care,

OSOK

[boost]

oldpapps, maybe I should have mentioned that I only shoot paper, steel, and clays.

I've seen somewhere in castboolits that a bunch of guys successfully cast the nose of the boolits softer than the rear. Do you know of this?

[oldpapps]

"successfully cast the nose of the boolits softer than the rear"

I have not see any listing of this. Sound interesting.

Several years ago there were, still may be, molds made to cast the bullet in two sections, the idea being to case hard back ends and soft front ends, then glue them together. I don't know what ever became of this. The idea sounds sound, don't know about the practical applications.

As for your use, case as hard or soft and you want, paper doesn't care. I've never worried with a hardness tester, maybe I should, My way is to whack a punch into my metal and compare. Is it going to give a number value, no. It does give me an strong idea how hard the metal is.
I don't know your source for lead. I have never bought raw lead to shoot. I have utilized junk yards for scrape lead and tin plates and made up some stiff mix. I've never worried about adding antimony or arsenic, I wouldn't know where to get it anyway. What I get is what I get and it has, eventually, worked for me.

And for my current needs, I have 70ish pound of mix that I made up for hunting in the 80s and have never used. I'm going to start working with junk lead to get my loads on track and then try some bullets made with this alloy only hard metal and powder coating. It's not like I will be harvesting hundreds of wild pigs that soon.

Oh, you 'shoot paper, steel, and clays'. I mostly shoot paper and two liter bottles full of water (my point of aim is the bottle cap at 100 yards, makes it interesting).

Enjoy life, there is only one way out.

OSOK