#2 lead recipes

[happycowboy]

Howdy folks. I have about 60 or 70 pounds of pure lead that was given to me. I want to pour up some bullets for my .44 but am not sure what ratio's to use for pure lead vs. tin and so on. Any help, advice or recipes would be greatly appreciated.

[Adam Helmer]

happycowboy,

The 49th Edition of the "Lyman Reloading Handbook" on page 81 discusses Lead Alloys. It says, "Pure lead has a Brinell hardness of 5. An ideal alloy contains 5% antimony, 5% tin and 90% lead. This alloy has a Brinell Hardness Number of 15."

Hope this helps.

Adam

[happycowboy]

Thank you I appreciate the advice. I will check out the lyman manual.

[skeet]

from lead suppliers. Antimony is kinda hard to find and Tin is truly expensive. But if you want to cast and can find partial bags of lead shot at yard sales etc like I do ..here is the easy way. If you can find a partial bag of magnum lead shot..it usually has 5-8% antimony and a trace amount of tin..so get some tin(pewter from yard sales is a great way) ad about 5-6% to the shot and melt her down stir it up and cast with it.. Luckily I bought a few chunks of tin(87 lbs at one) at farm auctions and I made a whole lot of 10-1 15-1 and 20-1 lead ingots with it. I don't know why they had all that tin around farms. But over the years I have bought at least 200 lbs. Luckily I had a fellow give me 1800 lbs of magnum lead shot in sizes BB through 5s and I made some linotype with it too. I even tried monotype but if I remember it is truly hard Antimony is somewhat poisonous and hard to get alloyed so that is why I suggested magnum lead shot with it already mixed. Odd about that antimony thing but women in ancient Egypt used it in cosmetics etc. But poisonous mainly in vapor form I think

[happycowboy]

Thanks skeet, I appreciate the tip and the advice. I was hoping to just melt down about 6 or 7 pounds of pure lead and add 2 or 3 sticks of bar solder and hope the bullets wouldn't be too soft. I usually use 9 pounds of wheel weights and a 1 pound stick of bar solder. I suppose that I could get some more wheel weights and experiment mixing the wheel weights and the pure lead and tin to see what I can come with.

[Rapier]

I was going to use my program, but it only has about 6 metals in it so went looking. Can you do Excel sheets on you box? Here is an alloy calculator in a zip file from Cast Boolits that might help, depending on what you can find to mix in your alloy. It is a pretty slick program. Just copy and paste it into your address bar then unzip it. On my box it comes up immediately.
Ed

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/atta...4&d=1341560870

[happycowboy]

Thanks I will check it out and see what I can come up with.

[skeet]

The bad thing about wheel weights is that anymore you never know what yo are really getting. Some are an alloy of zinc. If ya get zinc mixed in a lead mix..stick a fork in it. Although harder to do I prefer to mix mine from scratch.... Tin is a bit hard to get now. Ya know I bought a Ruger 22 Colorado centennial not long ago and I got a couple boxes of ammo. The box of 22 LRs had bullets made of ...tin. Wow. Spensive bullets the box of mags was just normal stuff.