ADDING SOLDER TO LEAD FOR ROUND BALL CASTING

[James Kopp]

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to adding solder to your lead for casting...I am currently using lead the is about 99.9% (very soft) and have some 50/50 and 95/5 solder lying around.....Can I add it to the melt for a more "solid" ball? I tried looking at older posts, but saw nothing directly related to this topic....Would love to hear everyones thoughts here.

 

[2 shots]

have you seen the price of solder?? sell it and buy lead, also likely wouldnt want to add acid or rosin core to it. any chemist out there?

 

[Ohio Rusty]

Solder is mostly tin. You normally add it to unmentionable smokeless bullets to help with the filling out of the lube grooves in the mould. There is no benefit adding it to muzzleloading roundball and it will probably make the lead alot harder and would reduce expansion of the roundball.

 

[rchas]

Adding tin bearing solder to lead will raise the hardness of the metal. For unmentionable suppository guns a hard lead bullet is desirable as the bullet will deform less in the barrel and hold the rifling better. For muzzleloaders, there is no benefit, and a definite disadvantage as the balls will be harder to load.

 

[SDSmlf]

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to adding solder to your lead for casting...I am currently using lead the is about 99.9% (very soft) and have some 50/50 and 95/5 solder lying around.....Can I add it to the melt for a more "solid" ball? I tried looking at older posts, but saw nothing directly related to this topic....Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts here.

It will bump the diameter of your roundball up a few the thousands, and the harder roundball will be more difficult to load in cap and ball revolver, causing additional stress on loading lever components and frame. In a long gun or single shot pistol, no worries as long as you size the patch correctly. Just remember that if you try to pull a load for whatever reason, it will be a little more difficult for your ball puller to thread into the ball.

 

[tenngun]

If you load a round ball in patch in a rifle then pull it out a look close at the ball you can see faint impressions of the cloth in the ball itself.
You want soft as possible to hold the ball and rifeling together.
Hard ball often won’t shoot as well and on cooling can be a tad bigger, so you go with a thinner patch. And then loose some accuracy as you add range
Or not
Some do real well with hard ball, and in a smoothie a little hard or oversize doesn’t hurt
The big thing about ml as there is no perfect load. Jim’s 50 five x can be an entirely different load then Bobs 50 five x
Run you fifty ball and see how you like it.

 

[Poguetx]

You want 100% pure lead for round ball, especially for revolvers. A friend of mine tried 10% antimony, and the balls were too hard to seat.

 

[Whitworth]

As little as 1% tin will make the lead flow better and fill out the mould without affecting hardness that you would notice. I've added a foot or so of 50-50 roll solder to 10 pounds of lead in the pot to get better casting with some molds, both ball and conicals. Antimony is used to harden bullets and bullet cores in jacketed bullets because of cost compared to tin. YMMV

 

[oldwood]

Stay away from adding solder or any other hardening alloys to muzzleloader balls. Dead soft lead is best. If the cloth patch fabric weave is slightly imprinted into the lead ball where the lands touch the patched round ball , that's about perfect.

 

[The Crisco Kid]

You can use the 50/50 solder in amounts that will result in a 30 or 40 tin to lead ratio with no noticeable effect on your round balls other than they will cast a little smoother and look a little shinier. Adding some 95/5 solder can make them a little harder. I haven't tried it so I can't speak from experience on the 95/5. I reserve it for casting nose caps on half stocks. Some folks are of the opinion that the harder balls will give full penetration on an animal and make for easier tracking etc,etc, which is a whole nuther discussion. Whitworth pretty well nailed it while I was typing this response. I buy all the 50/50 solder I find at yard sales since one of my few vices is shooting old cartridge rifles with cast bullets.

 

[bud in pa]

If i remember right the Bevel Brothers shot rifled muzzleloaders with soft balls and balls cast from wheel weights with no notable difference in accuracy. I hunt with a 20 ga. smoothie, so I am not worried about expansion.

 

[deerstalkert]

You want 100% pure lead for round ball, especially for revolvers. A friend of mine tried 10% antimony, and the balls were too hard to seat.

10%?????? holy smokes! bnh30!

 

[45man]

No tin is needed at all. tin has little hardening affect but you do not need any, Just pure lead.

 

[maillemaker]

As usual when this topic comes up, people are coming at it from at least 3 different directions, so you are getting different/conflicting answers.

"Round balls" can be used in at least 3 different kinds of guns: Rifles, as patched round ball, revolvers, or smoothbores.

Generally speaking, for PRB and revolvers you want pure lead. However, as was said above, people will sometimes put a pea-sized piece of tin in their pot, and this will not appreciably change hardness but can considerably improve mold fillout. I find you can avoid the tin and get good fill by just running a bit hotter, usually. But I have never had a problem with mold fillout in a round ball mold regardless.

For smoothbores, they don't really care about hardness. I shoot "wheelweight" lead for my roundballs in my smoothbore musket. However, the ball diameter will change using alloy vs. pure lead.

But to answer your question directly, adding tin will increase hardness, depending on how much you add, and generally improve mold fillout.

 

[ZUG]

I think this adding other metals to pure lead has come about from the loss of easy procurement of 100% pure lead. When the source of pure lead was drying up some years back people were substituting all kinds of range lead for their use in muzzle loading guns. I guess it does not matter in a smooth bore gun but it will make a difference in a rifled bore or revolver. Some say it don't matter but I would bet 100% you will not find any of the top shooters using anything but 100% pure lead projectiles.

 

[maillemaker]

I think this adding other metals to pure lead has come about from the loss of easy procurement of 100% pure lead. When the source of pure lead was drying up some years back people were substituting all kinds of range lead for their use in muzzle loading guns. I guess it does not matter in a smooth bore gun but it will make a difference in a rifled bore or revolver. Some say it don't matter but I would bet 100% you will not find any of the top shooters using anything but 100% pure lead projectiles.

It absolutely matters when shooting military-style bullets that are designed to load with no interference but expand or compress to take up the rifling on firing. Expanding Balls or compression bullets like the Wilkinson require dead-soft lead or they will not take up the rifling, resulting in horrible accuracy and even tumbling of the bullet end-for-end in flight.