Soft Pure Lead??

[Whitworth]

i have screwed into linotype Balls. i think linotype is a fair bit harder than dead soft. or wheelweight .

Quite a bit harder. This a Whitworth linotype slug that went thru 18 inches of Poplar tree parallel with the grain then thru 2 feet or so of sawdust and hit the Red Elm log leaving this dent. It could be fired again. That's a hard bullet.

 

[deerstalkert]

yeah! I have one shelf with just lino for some big unmentionables i used to shoot. might have the bride fill my coffin with it and deep six me with it. am never going to cast it up in what is left of this lifetime!
some i quenched and tested at 22-25 bhn.
drove one lengthwise through a moose.

 

[Idaho Ron]

yeah! I have one shelf with just lino for some big unmentionables i used to shoot. might have the bride fill my coffin with it and deep six me with it. am never going to cast it up in what is left of this lifetime!
some i quenched and tested at 22-25 bhn.
drove one lengthwise through a moose.

All the really hard lead I have will be cast into sturgeon fishing weights and sold when I'm retired.

 

[deerstalkert]

i am thinking about finding a job so i can retire again and do all the stuff i was going to do when i retired the first 3 times!
last time i retired was 15 years ago and i still haven't done them. i have lead on shelves from 1970 for petes sake! need to shoot more.

 

[SciAggie]

In my time shooting BP cartridge silhouettes we regularly cast 20:1 or 30:1 lead:tin bullets. Some guns like one ratio, some another. I have harvested deer with 30:1 bullets that expanded nicely.
I haven’t heard anyone mention round balls of this nature. I plan to experiment with this at some point. I’m curious if some muzzleloaders prefer balls with a small amount of tin. They sure cast easier.

 

[deerstalkert]

i just remembered i have a bunch of .54 Hard cast linotype balls i use in my ball mill. guess in the interest of science i will try shooting them tomorrow.

 

[Griz44Mag]

This post is not aimed at anyone.
There is a misconception that there is only two kinds of lead.
Pure soft, and hard. That way of thinking is just wrong. With my tester I can tell the difference of hardness in pure lead.
Guys that think that "hard lead" can't obturate, or can't at muzzleloader velocity are simply wrong. In the picture I'm adding, this lead is 18bhn. That is beyond harder than wheel weight. It was paper patched and shot out of my 45. It didn't strip the paper. It didn't strip the rifling.
There is a lot of info on here about alloy that is simply not factual.
The biggest myth is there is pure and hard. No levels in between.
Alloyed lead bullets are no harder to tune a load than pure. In fact a guy with a hardness tester mixing his own alloy can be more precise than the guy that buys thumbnail scratched "pure ". I can scratch 18bhn lead.

LOL - absolutely true in every detail. When I try to convince the "scratchers" of those facts I get all kinds of indignant replies from those who think a pencil is somehow "calibrated" or that their fingernails are macho-man hard enough to etch glass with. I just shrug it off and go on my merry way of real data....
In my hunt for the perfect K31 round I managed to create a 24BH solid that did not shatter at 2300fps. Alloys are fascinating and so varied with only minor changes to composition.
Silver seems to be a secret ingredient to help prevent fracturing at high pressures and velocities.

 

[Griz44Mag]

In my time shooting BP cartridge silhouettes we regularly cast 20:1 or 30:1 lead:tin bullets. Some guns like one ratio, some another. I have harvested deer with 30:1 bullets that expanded nicely.
I haven’t heard anyone mention round balls of this nature. I plan to experiment with this at some point. I’m curious if some muzzleloaders prefer balls with a small amount of tin. They sure cast easier.

I add 1oz tin to every 10# batch I cast to promote super shiny and slick balls. It doesn't take much.
1% tin to pure lead only increases hardness by .1%

 

[Billy Boy]

Ive never gotten a good answer about this but why must we use pure soft lead for round ball? It's said over and over that the patch engages the rifling not the ball, so what does it matter if the lead is pure lead or wheel weights or whatever, other than maybe weight consistency or expansion on game. A slightly lighter ball would give a bit higher velocity therefore flatter trajectory, albeit not that much. Seems like a rookie question but there are many other myths and wives tales about BP shooting. I'm just wondering if this is one.

Beyond any consideration of loading and accuracy, soft lead performs as you would want and expect on game. Harder lead would have to be driven faster to achieve the same effect and would be less accurate and more difficult to load. Our ancestors probably had a pretty fair idea of what they were doing.

 

[Idaho Ron]

Beyond any consideration of loading and accuracy, soft lead performs as you would want and expect on game. Harder lead would have to be driven faster to achieve the same effect and would be less accurate and more difficult to load. Our ancestors probably had a pretty fair idea of what they were doing.

There are different levels of "hard" lead. There is not two kinds of lead, soft and hard.
It's well known that hardening lead can make bullets more accurate at muzzleloader velocity. And adding alloy can improve terminal performance on game at muzzleloader velocity.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Beyond any consideration of loading and accuracy, soft lead performs as you would want and expect on game. Harder lead would have to be driven faster to achieve the same effect and would be less accurate and more difficult to load. Our ancestors probably had a pretty fair idea of what they were doing.

Well that assumes that they had a choice and actually tried different variations. ☺ I don't think they looked into any lead alloy variations because they didn't see a need. BANG! flop, what's not to like, why use an alloy? As cartridge rifles and pistols began to develop and lead in the bore started to be a problem, then the lead I think became an alloy, and at that point, since a lot more shooters were also hand-casters, then they noticed the problem when they cast alloy instead of the all lead. I don't think this was a terminal ballistics problem at first if it is at all, but was a casting and reloading problem. Probably starting in the last two decades of the 19th century as bullet speeds really increased due to modern powder.

LD

 

[Grenadier1758]

So several observations. Patched round ball in a rifled barrel. Thought the idea of rifling was to eliminate the need to patch a ball and use a projectile that took advantage of the rifling by spinning the projectile along its axis there by creating greater accuracy by preventing
tumbling . What’s the point in spinning a sphere. .
So seems the majority, at least here, still use round balls in rifled rifles for ?? Ease of loading, ??

...

Rifling was developed to induce stability in a projectile fired from a gun whether patched of not. It was well understood that a spinning projectile flew straighter than one that did not spin along the direction of flight. Look at the fletching on arrows that impart spinto the arrow in flight.

A non-spinning sphere will be unstable in flight much like a thrown knuckleball which has no spin but has deviations in the flight trajectory.

 

[Griz44Mag]

Well that assumes that they had a choice and actually tried different variations. ☺ I don't think they looked into any lead alloy variations because they didn't see a need. BANG! flop, what's not to like, why use an alloy? As cartridge rifles and pistols began to develop and lead in the bore started to be a problem, then the lead I think became an alloy, and at that point, since a lot more shooters were also hand-casters, then they noticed the problem when they cast alloy instead of the all lead. I don't think this was a terminal ballistics problem at first if it is at all, but was a casting and reloading problem. Probably starting in the last two decades of the 19th century as bullet speeds really increased due to modern powder.

LD

On one of my gold hunting trips to Colorado I did a good bit of panning in the San Juan mountains streams for gold - and wound up with a lot of lead.
That lead all tested to 5-5.5 in hardness. I feel pretty safe in saying that that source for lead was likely heavily used by the early explorers and settlers.
But of course - that was also very likely to have been black powder driven firerms!

ON A MORE MODERN NOTE - Richard Lee spent 30 years developing a lead hardness vs chamber pressure table. Many thousands of shots with over 100 guns and projectiles.
Projectile shape or weight have negligible influence over leading of the barrel OR velocity at the muzzle variances.
The results of that research is found in the table published in the Lee Reloading Manual 2nd Edition.
I have strictly adhered to that table for my projectiles for over 25 years. I get none or very miniscule leading in the bores of the guns I cast for. And that list is fairly long.
I cast hardness from 5.1 BH to over 24 BH and for firearms velocities from 500FPS to over 2500 FPS.
Hardness matters.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Projectile shape or weight have negligible influence over leading of the barrel OR velocity at the muzzle variances.
The results of that research is found in the table published in the Lee Reloading Manual 2nd Edition.

That's really interesting, but I wonder did he check round ball, bare, swaged onto rifling during firing? Just a technical point, but I've used round ball in a modern reload, and I use them of course in Cap-n-Ball revolvers, and I wonder if a .451 round ball, having so little surface area actually swaging onto the lands and grooves whether modern or cap -n-ball, would leave as much material as would a conical with more area swaged onto the lands and grooves when launched from a cap-and-ball revolver?

LD

 

[Griz44Mag]

That's really interesting, but I wonder did he check round ball, bare, swaged onto rifling during firing? Just a technical point, but I've used round ball in a modern reload, and I use them of course in Cap-n-Ball revolvers, and I wonder if a .451 round ball, having so little surface area actually swaging onto the lands and grooves whether modern or cap -n-ball, would leave as much material as would a conical with more area swaged onto the lands and grooves when launched from a cap-and-ball revolver?

LD

I have not read all of Richard's writings and I think likely that 95% plus of his body of work was in lead conicals for use in BPCR applications.
We lost Richard back in 2018 and along with that passing lost a huge amount of knowledge and experience.
RIP Mr. Lee.

 

[Rock Home Isle]

The increasing price of soft lead is getting nuts.

I remember buying 5 lb blocks of plumbers lead for $1.00, I’d buy 4 or 5 at a time. Then are 7 years ago, I noticed prices on the incline, so I bought 500 lbs at $0.075…and thought it was highway robbery.

Now I’m paying $2.00 a pound for lead…and hoping to buy more at that price before BidenFlation takes another toll…wow, what do you do?

 

[Grenadier1758]

I don't know if it's inflation of Trumpsteria feeding misinformation causing panic buying or Environmental Issues about lead.

 

[1BadDart]

I just bought 200# of soft lead for $.60 a pound.

 

[Leadnoakum]

In MN right now, scrap yards are paying about 50 cents a pound for lead. Ingots are selling for $2 a pound.

 

[nhmoose]

When I shot LB/Buffalo X-sticks competition I experimented with soft lead vs WW cast balls. Soft cast would cut X's WW would not. End of my experimenting. Later after my rifles bore would not hold X-ring I increased ball size by .05 back into the x-ring. After over 100,000 shots It would still hold X-ring with a .505 ball.

Had I continued competition I would have had the bore freshened as X's are what wins matches.