questions on lead for PRB

[Msplcdyankee]

Being new to black powder shooting I have a few questions I hope you all can answer:
I am shooting a TC Hawken 54 cal, TC Cherokee 36 cal and a Lyman GPR 54 cal. I have experimented with TOW Mink oil, Moose Milk and Mr Flintlocks Lube.
Patching has been 015 and 018 pillow ticking.
Lead for cast ball. Must it be pure soft lead or can range pick ups be melted, fluxed and cast into satisfactory ball for paper punching. Friends say I need as soft a lead as I can find. I am currently shooting Hornady and Missouri Bullet purchased balls.
Groups have been good at 50 yards and working on 100 yards.

 

[Black Hand]

Lead for cast ball. Must it be pure soft lead or can range pick ups be melted, fluxed and cast into satisfactory ball for paper punching?

For a smoothbore - some have had success.
For a rifle - pure, soft lead is best.

 

[Scipio]

Must it be pure soft lead or can range pick ups be melted, fluxed and cast into satisfactory ball for paper punching. Friends say I need as soft a lead as I can find.

MPLY:

Am in the same boat as you. You can go to a reclamation center and see if they have any lead sheets as used to line X Ray rooms. Those are very close to pure lead. Or you can get lead from berms or indoor ranges providing they will sell to you.

I picked up several hundred pounds of indoor range lead over the years because I used to extrude wire and swage jacketed bullets. PITA to melt and flux because it is filthy beyond belief but it was cheap. Am sure it was anything from .22 LR to cast to swaged and cores for jacketed pistol bullets.

I cast some RB with some of this range lead and using my SAECO lead hardness tester it comes out slightly harder than pure lead and less hard than 1/20 tin to lead mix. A whole bunch softer than lineotype.

I do not think there is enough of a difference to mean anything with either a smooth bore or rifled barrel.

Scipio

 

[Zonie]

I agree that pure lead is best for rifled guns but, for informal target practice the harder alloys of lead will work.

A lot of the lead found at shooting ranges will be quite hard and IMO, it should not be used for hunting the larger animals.

Because these lead alloys are often harder, they will deform less than pure lead when they are being loaded. (Even though a pure lead ball is wrapped with a cloth or leather patch, it does deform and ends up with visible grooves on it.)

Because there is only so much room inside the barrel, if the ball doesn't deform easily, something has to give so changing to a thinner patch will usually restore the ease of loading the harder ball.

The thinner patch might not shoot as accurately as the soft lead ball and thicker patch but, that's usually the name of the game when harder balls are shot.

Using harder lead for slugs usually is a poor idea with muzzleloaders.

With cartridge guns, the hard lead slug starts out larger or equal in size to the rifling in the barrel and it gets squeezed down when the gun fires.

With muzzleloaders, in order to load them, the slug must be slightly undersize.

Because the slug is (usually) undersize, it relies on the acceleration from the powder blast to "bump up" its diameter, allowing it to get a grip on the rifling. This is sometimes called obturating or plugging up the bore.

Harder lead does not bump up as easily as pure lead so hard lead slugs usually shoot poorly.

 

[Many Klatch]

Zonies reply pretty much says it all. However, if backstop lead is all you have then you need to learn to use it. Soft lead shrinks a bit more when cooling in the mold than harder lead because of the different metals used to harden the lead.

If you have a large amount of harder lead then you need to develop a load for it. Probably want to stick with a thicker .015 to .018 patching. Once you get your load figured out then you should be able to shoot accurately. The problem comes if you get a load of soft lead. All of a sudden your ball will be a couple of thousandths smaller. That could mess up your accuracy over time.

 

[hanshi]

Soft lead is what I prefer in any rifle and I use it in the smoothbore quite a bit as well. But Harder alloys work simply great in the smoothbore. The smaller the caliber the less difference between a lead ball and an alloy ball. In my .62 smoothbore soft lead ball is .600"; cast from alloy (WW) it's still only .606". My smoothbore barrel is tight and the alloy ball is difficult to patch; but it does well in "bare-ball" loads. I worked a little with hard lead ball in my .40 and could tell no difference even when patched the same as soft lead ball.

 

[mooman76]

Pretty much what the others have said. Soft is better but harder will work. I used hard lead in the past because that's what I had and it worked fine. Sometimes an adjustment in your load is needed when using harder vas softer. Like mentioned soft lead shrinks more so a thinner patch may or may not be needed. Range lead isn't always real hard, just depends on the range.

 

[M. De Land]

I have always followed the conventional wisdom of only using pure lead for patched round balls but experience has taught that alloys a good deal harder can be used successfully as well.
It really depends on rifling depth,type and patch material used.
If your patching is sealing the bore and not tearing or blowing through, then there is no reason it won't shoot the harder alloy just as well.
This is one of the advantages to using heavy and tough patch material .015 - .022 and then finding a ball diameter to fit the bore with the heavy patch.
Test some harder alloy and see what your rifle and patch material say.
I think using the above method you can shoot up to a 10 BHN hardness patched ball effectively with little or no loss of accuracy over pure lead.
On the hunting end of things remember that penetration is enhanced the less the ball deforms so expansion is not the only or even most important criterion.
A .45 or .50 caliber hole all the way through lets a lot of blood out as well as air into a wound channel.
I will take penetration every time over expansion given a choice.

 

[necchi]

or can range pick ups be melted, fluxed and cast into satisfactory ball for paper punching.

You already know don't ya?
Range pick-up(?),, nope.
Apocalypse, yes,, not a problem.
Paper punching is actually supposed to be the kind of shooting that requires the most accuracy.
But at the same time "accuracy" is kind of what's needed for hunting too,, right?

So yeah, sure, you can shoot any kind of reasonably soft lead out of an ML ya want.
But if you want accuracy then it's dead soft for round ball.
Not random, unknown kind of lead-like,, other bullet type alloys,, salvaged as found in the gun club berm.

 

[Stumpkiller]

Back in the 1990's I was having trouble finding lead and managed to toss wheel-weight lead I had recovered from roadsides in a Bess repro. Worked fine.

Since then I use recycled plumbing lead that may have solder and it is harder than pure lead - but still works in my rifles. If you can get it in the bore it will come back out. But I try to stock to as soft a lead as possible.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Range pick-up(?),, nope.

Pure lead is always best....But, you can use range scrap....
The key is having good casting knowledge and a hardness tester helps too.
Much of the range scrap can be easily sorted so that you can make ingots of different hardness...
A good caster can adjust his alloy to an acceptable hardness....

Another idea is to make yourself a portable bullet trap....Since I built my bullet trap I haven't had to dip into my lead stash yet....I just keep shooting, melting and casting the same balls over and over.....Hunting slowly dwindles my supply but at this rate it will be another 10 years before that happens.

 

[SgtMaj65]

I would shy away from using Linotype lead in any muzzleloader. If memory serves (I'm an old-time, hot-type letterpress printer and Linotype operator) and Linotype lead was only about 84-85% lead, the rest was tin and antimony to make it much stiffer to handle the battering of a press. I'm thinking like it was 4% tin and 12% antimony, if memory serves. I want the softest lead I can find for my ML.

 

[Scipio]

SMAJ:

I use pure lead or range lead. As I said earlier, I have a SAECO lead hardness tester and the range lead I am using comes out slightly harder than pure lead but not as hard as 1/20 tin to lead. Pure lead is softer but I believe it shrinks a bit where the range lead I use casts exactly the size advertised on the mold.

No need to worry about linotype I doubt anyone here has been able to find Linotype for about thirty years.

Too bad because it was fantastic stuff for modern smokeless cartridges, magnum pistol bullets, and to alloy pure lead for BP Cartridge rifles.

Many guys bought linotype by the hundreds of pounds when it was available and still have some. When they run out, there is no more. I wish I had about a hundred pounds of it.

And the wheel weights we used to use for alloying are no longer made of lead and tin from what I understand.

Scipio

 

[coloradoclyde]

Many guys bought linotype by the hundreds of pounds when it was available and still have some. When they run out, there is no more. I wish I had about a hundred pounds of it.

Rotometals has linotype for sale....
https://www.rotometals.com/bullet-casting-alloys/

Actual type set is also still out there too...but very pricey.

 

[mooman76]

I picked up a little more than 20 # of linotype or maybe it's monotype. I heard monotype is harder and this stuff is very hard. I can't scratch it with a finger nail and it feels like a soft steel or pot metal. It does melt though. I got it quite a few years ago when I was casting bullets for pistols and thought I needed harder lead. I found out later it wasn't needed when done right.

 

[Scipio]

CC:

And at $4.00 a pound, not a bad price at all.

Type metal wasn't much cheaper twenty years ago.

Thanks for the info!

Scipio

 

[hanshi]

Soft lead is indeed the holy BP grail. Way back when I cast revolver/rifle bullets I found plain WW - of that era - worked best in revolvers and linotype hardened WW
was better in rifles. I never used pure linotype for casting; although I was gifted with hundreds of .45 swc cast from linotype. Back then WW metal was the best all around lead for shooting; and it still does very well not only in the smoothbore but even in the rifles.

 

[M. De Land]

Well fear not as any ratio of alloy you want can still be made as I do it all the time.
You can still get pure lead and tin bars to mix it your self.
I have about 3500 pounds of mostly pure lead from a crane counter weight several of us casters invested in about a decade ago.
I mix it to yield a BHN of 9-10 for Black powder cartridge bullets.
I also have a good supply of pure lead and most of the time I try to use this for patched balls but believe the bullet alloy will work as well or nearly so with heavy patch use. I need to run some definitive tests to prove it though as it is still mostly theory from shooting some mixed alloy balls.

 

[Scipio]

MD:

Just got to ask.

How do you guys cut up that counterweight?

Never figured that part of it out when I was given large blocks of lead.

Scipio

 

[mooman76]

A guy on another board was experimenting with Brass RBs. He was in CA and was preparing for a lead free hunt. He was having very good success and claimed hunting accuracy was had.