how to soften lead

[AZbpBurner]

Sometimes the old ways may seem strange, but actually work, despite our scepticism.

This ancient incantation,repeated 3 times over a deerskin pouch of lead balls will make them softer. You need only hold a gourd rattle in your left hand, and wave an ear of unshucked green corn over the bag for best effect:

"Softer, softer make my lead. Softer, softer, like my head."

left hand ... darn ... I wish I'd known that ... all these years shooting regular balls, 'cause I was holding the fool thing in my right hand ... aaaaaargh!!

:rotf: :rotf: :surrender: :rotf:

You obviously got your technique from an Australian

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Sometimes the old ways may seem strange, but actually work, despite our scepticism.

This ancient incantation,repeated 3 times over a deerskin pouch of lead balls will make them softer. You need only hold a gourd rattle in your left hand, and wave an ear of unshucked green corn over the bag for best effect:

"Softer, softer make my lead. Softer, softer, like my head."

You guys are brutal. :rotf:

LD

 

[Billnpatti]

Pure lead is as soft as you can get. Any lead alloy is not going to be softened in any way that is available to the average person. To soften it, you would have to remove the tin, antimony and any other metal from it. That's not a thing that can be done at home. Although, I have removed a bit of some kind of metal that probably was tin by heating the lead in a pot to a pretty high temperature and then skimming off the shiny metal that floated to the surface. It was a slightly different color than the lead but was definitely not slag. There was very little to be skimmed off and it probably didn't change the hardness by any means of measurement available to me.

So, there is nothing you can do about the hardness of any given lead. It is what it is and if it is too hard for your purposes, you will just have to find some softer lead.

 

[cynthialee]

Sometimes the old ways may seem strange, but actually work, despite our scepticism.

This ancient incantation,repeated 3 times over a deerskin pouch of lead balls will make them softer. You need only hold a gourd rattle in your left hand, and wave an ear of unshucked green corn over the bag for best effect:

"Softer, softer make my lead. Softer, softer, like my head."

Don't tell everyone!
But you forgot to put a pillow under the lead balls, and the pocket full of raw sugar.

 

[mooman76]

About all you can do is dilute it with pure lead. Not really practical most of the time unless you have a whole lot of pure lead and it will never make it completely soft, just softer to a degree. There are always people out there wanting harder lead for center fires and they sometimes get soft lead they don't want so swapping your hard lead for the soft is an option.

 

[19 16 6]

You obviously got your technique from an Australian

Yeah that's right, because of the coriolis effect.
I believe, so I am.
As we believe, we receive.
If we believe totally that we are a helicopter, one day we will go whop whop whop & fly away.
Just gotta get ya rotation correct for ya hemisphere.

For the bloke
who soaks
his balls in coke
It's real
It's no joke.
O.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

:rotf:

 

[Twisted_1in66]

No,no, you have it all wrong. It is not an ear of corn you should be holding but a burning smudge of sage. AND, the deerskin bag has to be braintan or it won't work!!! At least you have in incantation right.


Twisted_1in66

 

[Len Graves]

What about alloying your lead with marshmallow creme that should make the balls softer, maby just stickier. With incantations of course.

 

[crockett]

Rifleman: never say never. I'm sort of interested in mining, minerals, rockhounding. A lot of folks don't realize that many metals as we know them really don't exist as an element in nature, they are often a sulfate (or is it sulfide?)and they must have the molecule changed. Take iron- usually is rusted into iron oxide. I think in the smelting process the heat causes the "oxide" to separate and voila- you get iron.
I've often thought the same thing, can you take wheel weights or some other lead alloy and somehow add a distillate to leach out the wrong metals and end up with pure lead. I'm sure it can be done although the cost and effort might not make it practical.
So...maybe there is something in the coke that takes out a harder metal?

 

[M. De Land]

I don't know of any practical way to remove tin,antimony, copper or zinc from a lead alloy.
Once it is alloyed the molecular bonds are hard to break up.
I've looked at some micro-spectograph pictures of lead, tin and antimony and you can see the crystal formation of all three and the bond boundries between them
Antimony forms distinctive tree shaped crystals that greatly strengthens the alloy over pure lead against deformation.
Tin increases the fluidity of lead alloy making it mold better but does not increase the hardness nearly as much as antimony.

 

[nkbj]

There are means of de-coppering by controlling the temperature to get the copper to rise to the surface. Going off of memory that's at about seven hundred degrees but I'd have to look it up to be certain.
In much the same manner the other lighter elements will separate out and rise to the surface of the melt if they are not stirred back in.
However, getting all of the non-lead elements out of lead would take some rather extreme chemical processing rather than simply letting nature take it's course via gravity.

 

[nit wit]

That's the first thing I thought of!
Nit Wit

 

[Rifleman1776]

practical

That is the key. Practical.
Really, this whole thread is just for yuks. :youcrazy: :blah: :haha: :rotf:

 

[nkbj]

If you have a noticeably alloyed metal and wish to soften it then de-coppering and skimming after it's been sitting in the molten state is the way to go.
Remember, you don't have pure lead one way or the other and how soft you need it is all that matters.

 

[nkbj]

PS,
De-coppering is good when you have No.2 babbit to add tin to your muzzleloading bullets.

 

[Zonie]

Where are we getting all of this lead/copper stuff?

Looking thru my Materials Engineering book I only see copper and lead mixed together in the copper alloys section. The lead alloy section shows no copper mixed into lead alloys at all.

The most lead in the copper alloys section is in a alloy called C93700 and that alloy is composed of 80% copper, 10 percent tin and 10 percent lead.

It's used for high speed pump bearings and impellers.

C 93700 melts at 1403°-1705° F. which is in the glowing heat range so, even if the lead and copper do separate (which I doubt), that sounds like a hell of a lot of work to get the 10 percent lead out of it after skimming the 80% copper off.

 

[Stumpkiller]

Agreed. We can't achieve the kind of temperatures needed to refine and seperate lead from tin, antimony or copper with our Lee or Lyman furnaces. It takes 2.5 to 3X the heat of a bullet casting furnace.

And then you have to have a way to seperate the layers.