Bismuth or tin will cast large. Zinc will poison your lead pot and mold making it useless for lead. Zink will also ruin all the range scrap for casing purposes. For all of these you will need a very thin patch. OR, a new mold. ITX balls that are commercially sold are oversized and require a thin patch and are stupid hard to load. Any ML rifle bullet metal need to be as soft as pure lead to work right. Only pure lead is that soft. I suppose one could use sabots but not with your current rifle.
All this foolishness is over the idea that lead ML balls present a hazard. They don't. Really.... IF that were true the civil war battlefields would be a toxic nightmare, they are not. IF it were true swallowing a birdshot pellet would dose you with lead, it does not. It has nothing to do with provable scientific evidence. It is agenda driven. Some of the backers are simply stooges. Some know better, but are ideologs. Please understand these people have a much different vision for the future than we have. They are bullies and control freaks. It is obvious that the people proposing these rules hate hunting and hunters they want to stop all hunting. They are relentless.
While I don't disagree with anything you said, you are not taking into account the fact that the entire state of California has a ban on lead hunting ammo. The entire USA has a ban on lead for waterfowl. There are many, MANY, state or FED wildlife areas that one can legally hunt, but not with lead ammo. Must be non-tox.
It's easy to say that one should thumb their nose at such laws. Are you willing to have the DNR or USFW seize your gun, truck that you drove to the hunting spot, and fine you quite large sums of money for doing nothing other than using lead in a non-tox area?
The hunting world howled when the FED's banned lead for waterfowl. Hunters and the shooting industry figured out a solution in time. That involves steel shot (actually a soft iron, not steel), bismuth/tin alloy, and the various tungsten alloys. The same is happening with centerfire rifle cartridges for hunting. Copper alloys and gilding metal. We will figure out our own solution for muzzleloading.
I strongly disagree, vehemently disagree, with the push to ban lead shot/balls/bullets. It makes me very angry as I see it for what it really is. It is based on nonsense science and flawed research. It is being used to, like you said, ban hunting. Or at the very least make it inconvenient and too costly for most folks. I also believe that hunters and especially TRADITIONAL muzzleloader hunters are too small of a group to stop what is coming. We cannot stick our heads in the sand pretending it won't happen. Because when it does eventually happen everywhere for all shooting, we need to have a non-tox option readily available for use.
The BPI ITX balls you referenced are a tungsten alloy. Yes they are very hard. However they are the only non-tox roundball commercially made.
As I said earlier in a previous post, and you said it as well, bismuth and tin expand when they cool. It may in fact require a slightly smaller mold. If you were, for example, using a .495" lead ball in the past, you may need a .490" mold for bismuth/tin. But before we jump on the tin bandwagon, remember it is not approved by itself (100% tin projectiles) for non-tox ammo. Unless something has drastically changed in the last 6 months or so. Tin is used to create alloys with other non-tox materials/metals like bismuth. Typically the bismuth used in shooting is 95% bismuth and 5%tin give or take. That alloy IS approved EVERYWHERE in the USA as a non-tox projectile. Now I'm sure if someone submitted 100% tin projectiles for certification to the USFW it would likely be approved. But that costs money and tin is silly expensive.
While you are certainly free to disagree with me, I think we as traditional muzzleloaders really need to quietly work to find solutions to the impending lead ban. It's coming and we are too small of a group to stop it. We might slow it down some, but I really don't think we can stop it. And that in and of itself angers me to no end. But I refuse to go quietly into the night. I will find a non-tox alternative that works for me before I give up shooting and hunting.
