Anybody done this?

[gunfan2]

I have been powder coating my bullets and as soon as they come out of the oven I drop them in cold water. Can not see any negative results so far. Just wondered if anyone else has done this and if they had any bad result from doing so?

[DoubleJ]

I'd ask here

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthr ... ng/page371

Boolit experts

[twcrowe12]

I do that for rifle bullets, hoping it helps harden them up a little bit.

[DoubleJ]

If there's no arsenic in the lead (there used to be in wheel weights, but that was a super long time ago) then water quenching doesn't do anything.

[excess650]

A hardness tester will prove whether or not quenching increases hardness or not. Air cooled lead/tin/antimony bullets with a trace of arsenic will precipitate harden, but take longer to reach peak hardness, and don't achieve the same hardness as those quenched.

Almost all of the "lead" that I've ever scrounged and smelted was other than "pure". Cable sheathing that was reputed to be pure with the exception of the soldered joints has proven to be much harder than anticipated.

My question would be how well would the powder coating react to being quenched? The powder I'm familiar with needs about 400* for 15 -20 minutes to cure, but "heat treating" of cast bullets is generally done at a higher temperature (just shy of slumping) and for 45 minutes to an hour for proper "heat soak", so how would the powder coat hold up to that?

[80hp]

My question would be how well would the powder coating react to being quenched? The powder I'm familiar with needs about 400* for 15 -20 minutes to cure, but "heat treating" of cast bullets is generally done at a higher temperature (just shy of slumping) and for 45 minutes to an hour for proper "heat soak", so how would the powder coat hold up to that?

The powder most likely would be damaged. You can throw defective pc bullets back in your pot and the coating will burn off.
M.

[ih8unot]

I water quench mine after any heat source. No issues to date.

[Dolomite_Supafly]

I came into an amazing source of pure lead. A friend is into hot rods and a few of his friends is into circle track. Well the circle track guy had a bunch of lead ingots they used for ballast and every so often I guess they replace the ballasts because I got about 300 pounds of pure lead from one of the race cars. So if you are in an area where circle track racing is popular you might ask some of the race car shops if they have any old ballast they want to get rid of. Make sure you have a BIG smelting operation as some of my ballast bricks are huge and will not fit in a standard pot.

About the only way you can shoot pure lead without worry is by coating it. I have shot a lot of pure lead with lube and they work well enough but regardless of how hard I tried I would eventually get leading. Since I started using coated bullets the bore is cleaner than shooting jacketed bullets.

I have never water dropped coated bullets. I do question why you want to harden pure lead though. The powder coating is all you need to get the bullet out of the bore without leaving anything behind. And hardening the bullet only impedes the bullets ability to expand. I have shot thousands of pure lead bullets that were coated and I have never thought I needed to harden the bullets. And if you must run a hardened bullet you need an alloy that is not pure lead.

[dh2]

as close as I come to doing this is I have dropped some right out of the mold in to a pan of cold water, to get a case hardening effect it does work well

[excess650]

Full throttle supers demand harder than pure lead if you want good accuracy.