Don't know if it works but do know I don't want water anywhere near my casting set-up.
Chuck

I quench my bullets cast from wheel weights that I shoot in my 30-40 Krag Sporter and my 458 Magnum Ruger #1. They come out as hard as the ones I cast from Linotype. When I started quenching I tested them with my LBT lead hardness tester and they were within one point of the same. I usually shoot them within 6 months of casting and have seen no tendency for them to lead or loose accuracy. My quench water is a good 6 feet from my lead pot. Cast, turn 180 degrees and takes one step to reach the water. I have seen what a drop of water can do in molten lead so I am very careful.

I don't belive tin and lead alone will harden beyond its standard BHN from quenching.i think antimony (and or) arsenic need to be present.

Cbashooter wrote on Jun 1^st, 2022 at 2:51am:


Yep. tin/lead binary alloys aren't affected by quenching. You need to make it a tertiary alloy with the addition of antimony to achieve quench hardening. Don't ask me to describe the science involved, I'm no metallurgist. (Clip-on wheelweights contain antimony and the hardening thereof was what drove experimenters to discover this many decades ago now, about the time readily available stocks of linotype started drying up.)

It's gotta be done consistently to get consistent results, I do know that. I messed with doing this several decades ago after reading of the "wonderful" results achieved by luminaries in the bullet casting game. It works, but dropped the whole notion when A) I realized I was rarely venturing over the 2000fps threshold where super hard bullets shine, and B) I fell into a ridiculously large amount of linotype and monotype (most of which I still have), and C) my casting was directly in support of my hunting pursuits (I wasn't much of a target competitor) and hard bullets really really suck for hunting with .30 rifles.

This is not a new idea, of course, and the metallurgy there-of is well known.   A trace of arsenic, easily obtained by adding some lead shot, is necessary for uniform results.   Instead of dropping the bullets from the mould into water, it is far better to make a little wire-mesh basket and heat the bullets in an oven, then quench.

The late Charlie Dell and Hank Stromberg were advocates of this process, and I inherited a mould for square bullets (rectangular cross-section) from Hank.   This makes it easy to measure the resulting hardness of bullets if you put a square one or two in each quench.

In my experiments, it was easy to obtain hardnesses of up to 32 BHN.  Alas, I never found the really hard bullets to shoot any better!

CHRIS

One only needs to read Charlie Dells and Wayne's Schuetzen book.

Like Gumpy, I do it for convenience - the bullet is well cooled by the time it touches its friends resting on the felt pad at the bottom of the bucket. When the bucket bottom is evenly covered I add another felt pad. And, the water is lower and well separated from the pot. I changed "hardened" to "cooled" to avoid confusion with changing the BHN which I don't find necessary for my alloys.