I had a friend who was building a house out of brick and cement, and so we'd get together and have informal gallery matches. We shot into a bunch of pallats and so I'd pick up the bullets, bring them home and throw them into my lead furnace. What I found was that the 22RF bullets had lots of antmony in them.

I'm not a metallurgist, but I usually cast with lead tin alloy, and a little antimony is OK, but it hardens the bullets and when the alloy in my furnace cools, I notice that it has a very crystallin structure. I like a little antimony, but not a lot. From what I'm told, 22 rimfire bullets are 1 to 2% antimony.

I’d always heard that .22 RF bullets were almost pure lead.  They’d have to be soft, because they are swaged to shape.  Antimony alloys would wear the dies and strain the presses, raising costs.

I used to screen and sort range scrap into three parts:  cast bullets, which I figured were some sort of Lino-wheelweight alloy; jacketed bullets, and .22 RF bullets.

The first would be for general purpose casting of smokeless rifle and pistol loadings.  The second would be melted out of the jackets and used for black powder cartridges, loaded with black or smokeless.  I figured that since these were swaged, they also had to be mostly pure lead.  The .22LR bullets were used for grease-groove bullets loaded in black powder cartridges with black powder.

I didn’t add any other metals to any of these categories when I melted them down, just used them.  They worked fine until I started messing around with paper-patched bullets in black powder loadings, which seem to have a hardness zone that the castings must be kept in.

Ah, for those days!  Ten minutes with a trowel, screens and a bucket, and I’d have a week’s worth of casting material for free.  Can’t mine the berms here, so I have to (*sob!*) buy the stuff now at the scrapyard.