lead hardness tester... was gifted one... when should it matter ???

[Magnum Wheel Man]

buddy picked up a bunch of old reloading stuff a while back, 2 items included a pair of like new lead hardness testers... the pair turned out to be Saeco testers... he asked if I could find instructions on the www. which I did... he told me to print 2 copies, & when I took it over there, he gave me one of the testers for a set of instructions...

so what calibers or situations, would I really need to know or care about the hardness of the lead, over the standard wheel weight or there abouts ???

driving at high velocities ??? dangerous game bullets that you don't want the bullet to be too brittle ??? too soft a lead, causing leading to the bore ???

I must admit, I shoot a lot of cast handgun, but not a lot of rifle ( but could / would like to, in the future, for a few cartridges )

My FIL had about 3/4 of a ton of ingots, poured from wheel weights, & reclaimed bullet lead, that we got after he died... I've never had issues with whatever hardness that lead is...

do I need a hardness tester, or is it just a cool gadget ???

I guess I better re-read that Lyman cast bullet book

[g.willikers]

No one else wants to talk to you?
Guess you're stuck with me, then.
That was a nice gift, about $150 worth.
http://www.midwayusa.com/Product/193...ardness-tester
Whether you need it would probably depend on how satisfactory the results are with your present lead alloy.
Since you say it's just fine, then you still have a neat tool and it might come in handy one day if your reloading needs change.
Enjoy.

[Mike / Tx]

I'll throw in for what it's worth.

Since you have a pretty decent idea of what you already have in regards to your alloy well your probably set for the handgun portion. However when you start to work on rifles you might want to know what the hardness of your bullets are if you start water dropping them, or adding in lino or mono type, and such.

For me I had a bunch of unknown alloy from which could have been anything from wheel weights to dead soft. It was already in ingots form so I needed to have something to sort it with or by.

I also have worked very hard developing different alloys for my hollow points. I wasn't simply satisfied with what I got from the wide flat nosed and since a couple of the molds I had purchased came with the Cramer type pin sets I figured I might as well get full use from them. Having cast hollow points function as a hollow point should or as you would want it to isn't quite as easy as it is made to sound. Yes there are several alloys such as 20-1 25-1 and such that DO work, but only in a specific velocity range. That also inplies that you have the tin and pure lead to work with to use those. I don't but have worked around it. IT took a while but I now have a couple of alloys blended form the same base alloy that I can run in different velocity ranges and pressures, from my 38 Spl and 45 ACP up into the 41 and 44mag load range which will hold together and expand reliably.

My tester is the Cabine Tree and while it may or may not be as accurate as say what you have, it does give reliable and repeatable readings on what I test.

As for an actual need, I can say that yes it will come in handy once in a while, but once you have your alloy blend down and it is repeatable well it will probably sit until you need it again.

[F. Guffey]

Standards, it helps to have standards, I have 50/50 tin-lead bars, I have pure lead bars etc..

I have ingots, like everyone else, when I want soft lead and or hard lead I go through the stacks of ingots and drop them, lead has a dead sound, hard lead has a ring.

I would suggest a reloader read R. Lee's book on modern reloading, R. Lee writes about a friend that used a ball peen hammer, R. Lee said he had a calibrated swing, it is said he could tell the hardness of the lead by the hammer dent.

F. Guffey

R. Lee made an attempt at furnishing plans for a hardness tester, weight, area and time.

[Magnum Wheel Man]

MIKE... I also have several hollow point molds, but admit, I've not really tested them for expansion...

BTW... cooling speed effects the hardness right ??? Like water quenching... & if lead gets too hard, it gets brittle ???

can leads bullets be surface hardened ( like case hardening steel ) where it has both the surface hardness, & a more malleable core to provide toughness like a case hardened steel part ???

thinking this hardness tester will give me just one more thing to fool around with my reloads ( which I'm not sure I need something else ) see my other thread

[Mike / Tx]

MIKE... I also have several hollow point molds, but admit, I've not really tested them for expansion...

BTW... cooling speed effects the hardness right ??? Like water quenching... & if lead gets too hard, it gets brittle ???

Yes, but quenching isn't the only thing that determines this, so does the composition of the alloy. Having arsenic, antimony, and a couple of other trace metals alloyed in your blend can also effect this as well. Take a nice HP mold, and pour up your bullets using straight clip on wheel weight alloy, and you will usually get fractured noses and very little true expansion. Take the same alloy and balance the antimony out with tin, or add in enough pure lead to water the content down some, and you will start to get better and better true expansion. The question then is does this new alloy work for the original intended purpose. If your original alloy was working fine in say a .357 at around 1250fps or so, this new blend is going to probably lead up your barrel pretty good. However you can reduce that simply by reducing the velocity down until you are back within the threshold of the alloy. It's a balancing act.

can leads bullets be surface hardened ( like case hardening steel ) where it has both the surface hardness, & a more malleable core to provide toughness like a case hardened steel part ???

Yes, well sort of. When you quench or even oven heat treat your bullets after pouring them, you DO in effect get more or less a surface hardening. Yes your internal metal will also gain hardness, but the outside will be harder depending on the technique. Even so, you can still somewhat control this by the time you heat them or the temp at which they are quenched. The biggest issue with this however is that this particular hardening seems to only last a short while before the alloy itself starts to soften up again on it's own. So if you had quenched an alloy that air cooled is only around a 12 but quenched is around an 18, in say 4 months or so it will start to head back towards a 12.

Take another alloy which starts off as an 18, and simply air cool it, 12 years form now it will still be an 18, as the structure of the metal wasn't changed.

I take a different approach to my HP alloys. I start off with a base that is a 1/3/96, (tin, antimony, lead). From there I add in pure lead to water down the antimony, and add in tin to more or less equal what I bring the antimony down to. I end up with something like a 2/2/96 or softer instead. By balancing or equaling the antimony with the tin, I end up with an alloy that is still strong enough for shooting a plain based bullet, but now instead of being brittle, it is pliable and/or malleable and will flow instead of fracturing.

Got to run for now, be back later this evening.

[Magnum Wheel Man]

thanks for the info, & discussion...

... & just when I thought I was understanding hardening of steel, I find that the lead turns back soft, & is only temporarily hard...

not refuting the statement, but don't understand on a metal as stable as lead, how the grain structure imparted by heat treatment, or quenching, can change on it's own ( or "relax" ) over time...

as I get more into casting, I guess I'll get a better grasp... I inherited all my FIL's equipment, so I have much more of the good stuff, than experience, though I've always had a scientific interest in exploring

[Mike / Tx]

Well give this a good once over and I'll get back here shortly.

Chapter 3 Alloy Selection Metallurgy

[Mike / Tx]

Ok so while I might have been barking up the right tree, I was probably not on looking at the right limb.

Bear in mind I read and reread a ton of this stuff from week to week and sometimes it gets a bit mixed up. That said here is another write up on how heat treating effects your alloy and what you should strive for when doing it,

Heat Treating

With the above info you can see where I got started heading down the equalizing of the tin and antimony trail. I want my HP's to open up and roll back in a repeatable manner somewhat like these,


In all actuality I ended up adjusting the alloy just a touch in order to slow them down a bit from what you see above. I simply felt that having a little more of the base remaining and a little less of a spread on the nose was better all the way around. When the Speer Gold Dot first hit the market, for the most part, I stopped buying any other HP bullets for my handguns. The only other one I have that I shoot nowadays are the Remington SJHP's in a couple of calibers simply due to their past performance on game for me. That said the GD is about as good as it gets for all around expansion and penetration over a wide spread of velocities.

So when I started working on mine, those were the ones I tried to duplicate. I still have some tweaking to do to get them just where I want them, but I am close enough now that I feel good about it, even if I leave well enough alone. It is far easier to simply drop the load a grain or so than to adjust a 40-60# batch of alloy.

So in the end yes the hardness tester will come in handy. One thing I use mine for regularly is when I blend up a batch of alloy, I will pour up a dozen or so RFN's like the Lee 452-255 and toss them in a baggie and store them with the ingots. This lets me pull one out every now and again simply to check how things MIGHT change over a period of time. Since most of what I pour up I usually store in a box until needed this has also helped me to decide if I needed to try and quench or not. In most cases I have found no need to as the 10 - 12 or 14'ish BHN I use has been plenty hard for anything I have needed.

Of course I haven't started in on rifle bullets yet either, so that will be another bridge to cross once I get there.

[Magnum Wheel Man]

again... thanks for the wealth of info ( I feel like I'm getting a big jump start at your expense ) I printed off the 1st link to put with my casting stuff... will check out your 2nd link as well...

BTW... what caliber / weight are the bullets pictured ??? & how fast are you driving those...

BTW #2 I'm a huge Gold Dot fan myself, & getting your cast hollowpoints to open like that, is quite an accomplishment...

[Magnum Wheel Man]

read the 2nd link, & it was also very informative... thanks

[Mike / Tx]

BTW... what caliber / weight are the bullets pictured ??? & how fast are you driving those...

Those were from one of my first pretty successful test using some of the alloy I blended up specifically for my HP's. The writeup can be found at this link,
Latest-HP-Alloy-Blend-might-be-a-winner

While your in a reading mood here are a couple of other ones that you might find interesting as well,
THe-Blending-of-an-Alloy

One more for good measure, just so we can say we covered the bases,
Tin-in-HP-alloys

As you can see I went about it from several directions at first. When someone told me that I "needed to do this" well I stayed the course with my purpose. That purpose was to utilize a basic known alloy, the cores, 1/3/96 or the ingots, 2/2/96, and only add in as little as I had to of other more or less pure metals, ie. tin and lead, to get where I wanted to be, and to be able to repeat that alloy with a reasonable amount of consistency.

I simply found it at the time much cheaper to purchase the cores in a quantity that I could afford over or verses picking up certified metal from Rotometal's or similar places. Once I hit pay dirt with that first blend I knew I was on the right track and I went for it. While I fully admit that depending on just what I am blending up and in what quantity, it does take a bit more pure lead than I had figured on. I didn't have much back then, but once I figured out where I was heading I stocked up on it.

So I now have more or less only a couple of piles of alloy. Pure, Tin, and cores. I do however have some mono and lino stashed away, but for the life of me I cannot see where or when I might be needing it. I tried some rifle bullets out of the straight core, and it was everything I could do to even get them sized. By it's self it is very hard even air cooled, by comparrison to what I pour for my HP's. I have some WW both in the raw and in ingots that I use to pour up solids with like WFN's and wadcutters. But for the most part I use what I have been working with, the iso core blends that are so easy to get to do, what I want and need from.

Bottom line is there are usually always several ways to get to any one point, but of those ways, you have to pick which one suits you, and your goals, and that is the best route to be taken.