Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting LEAD

Who'd a-thunk it. I checked just now and Walmart does sell it, for $50 for one pound ingot. Checked Rotometals too and their price is exactly half that. I guess Walmart likes a profit!

Muffin, what's your go-to tin/lead alloy for your large-ish paper patched bullets? Do any out of straight lead?

Gnoahh. Last price I paid was$32, with free shopping. You sure that's not a 2# ingot.

Those in the picture were 450 and 500grain pure lead... the dimples on the bottom of the skirt caused by powder kernals..

1600fps is a bit stout out of a marlin.

The beauty of the PP, is the rifle doesn't much care what the alloy is.

WW work just fine too.

Link to Walmart Pb

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tin-Ingo...DZiMmb_m3wyE6i89EgyEwHXSSp4aAi-ZEALw_wcB

Ahhh. When I looked the description I read was misleading. The header said 2 pounds, the fine print said one pound. Oh well, guess I'll fetch from Walmart next time I buy any.

Rotometals is a ripoff. There's no reason why they're charging many times over market price or scrap yards are as well. It's a real scam. There's pallets of pure lead available from suppliers in China and India for proper priced but your purchasing a ton at a time.

I just checked with a friend who orders certified pure lead by the ton. He's paying $2.50 a pound. He just got 2 pallets delivered. One was from Korea and one was from France. Both are certified pure but they're far from being identical.

That's insane. 150% markup over going market price.

I wonder how much was delivery fees. Can anyone answer my earlier question about the ratio of tin I good casting alloys. If I read correctly a 1:20 alloy has 1 pound of tin with 20 pounds of lead. Seems like an expensive mix with $30/pound tin. I also hear a lot of old timers tell me to get some tin solder and add a few inches of solder to my 20 pound pot of alloy. That doesn't seem like much tin at all.

I've just been adding some tin rich monotype I have to my other alloys. Sometimes 1 pound mono to 10 pounds ww. I do other variations until I find what I like but all have too much antimony.

Bb

That's what I do. As for cost, what isn't expensive these days? It ain't 1980 anymore. Besides, an intrepid scrounger can find tin a lot cheaper than $25-30/pound, re: my earlier post.

I started buying more certified pure tin in recent years not because I'm rich or a glutton for punishment but because I've become more anal about wanting exactly repeatable alloys. A pound of tin makes 30 pounds of bullets for my .32-40 schuetzen rifles. 30 pounds of bullets is still a lot of bullets no matter who you are, and since the chief cost is the tin (c'mon, you don't think I actually buy soft lead?!), it's still way cheaper than buying them - if anybody even sold them that is - and I know bloody well that the bullets I cast tomorrow will be exactly the same as the one's I cast last year and next year.

When using 50/50 solder just use one pound of it to 9.5 pounds of lead for a 1:20 alloy. Calculate poundage up or down accordingly.

That answered my question on the ratio thing. As I thought, the guys who just add a few inches of fine gauge tin solder to the pot aren't doing much for their alloy. I'll keep my eye out for a cheaper source of tin. I saw some that looked like clippings from a heavy 2 or 4 gauge wire that looked easy to work with but it was still about $26/pound.

I need to find a source for good clean lead too. I have a much of mono/lino pigs and a decent supply of ww. I've also been buying scrap from a bullet co that's mostly lead and fairly soft at about 10bhn. It casts really well with a bit of ww and mono added.

Bb

With the contractors permission, I picked up 4 bars of old window counter weights from a office renovation site. They appear and feel like some lead alloy or perhaps even pure lead. Anybody have an idea what I’ve got??

There's a fair amount of leeway in the whole lead alloy thing. While I often espouse the need for knowing exactly how to repeat an alloy that's proven to work for specific applications, I do recognize that it's not completely necessary. For the casual caster who's not into the minutia, taking a small pot full of wheelweight material plus maybe some range scrap or other unknown alloys and adding a "pinch" of tin to encourage complete mold fill-out is certainly a viable approach. Resultant bullets will probably work A-ok in a pretty wide range of applications (as long as anally strict protocols concerning bullet fit are adhered to) - it's just that the exact alloy created will forever be a mystery and efforts to duplicate it in subsequent batches will be iffy. God knows I operated like that for a long time, and life was good. The occasional frustrations gnawed at me a little bit so I resolved to up my game, and life got better.

I guess I cast like I cook. I just add different things until it works. The unfortunate part is sometimes things come out great and then I don't remember how to duplicate it.

Right now I'm basically working with 3 different inputs. My lino which actually tested more like mono with around 74% lead 8+% tin and 17 or so antimony iirc. Then I have a bunch of clip on ww alloy I melted down 6 or so years ago in a Dutch oven on my turkey fryer burner and then made ingots, then I have some softer stuff I buy from a jacked bullet manufacturer that's about bhn 10 and is supposed to be just lead with a little antimony.

As I do different bullets and batches I've been writing down the different ratios of these 3 blends in hopes of being able to reproduce what works. I'd like a good amount of pyre lead and some pure Tin to also be able to mix with some of these other 3. I hope to do more expansion testing of some of my hp bullets with different alloys in the spring.

My neighbor tested some of my penta hp 210g .452s I made with what I thought was a bit harder alloy of mostly ww with a bit of mono and got pretty good expansion from a hotter load in a 45 acp. I'm guessing from the charge of power pistol he said he used it was close to 1000 fps but I was surprised to see the expansion with that alloy. I've got lots of testing I want to do but I have too many projects going right now.

I did get several thousand different bullets cast and powder coated this summer so hopefully next summer I'll get more tested. I'm looking forward to testing my .432 hammers with the penta hp and my 420ish grain m&p .462 with the cup and penta points. I also did some 147g 9mm with a deep narrow hp and some 180g .402 with a shallow hp.

M&P didn't send ny the penta pins that were supposed to come with my 402 190/180 mold and the one set of hp pins I got are almost like a cup point they're so shallow. I can't seem to get a response from them to find out if they can send the other pins with my next order. I've bought 6 of their molds this year and would like to buy more but I'm hoping for a bit of communication first.

I also tried one of their aluminum non hp 200g flat nose .402 molds and that thing really cranks out some nice bullets and casts easily. My 4 cavity brass hp molds work very well for the most part too but a couple have had a little learning curve to them and I'm not quite around the curve on them yet.

I've had a few that have a really sticky cavity and one or two where the front alignment pin seems really sticky. I lube them with 2 cycle synthetic oil and finally resorted to spraying one mold with Franklin release spray so I didn't have to beat the last bullet out of it that always stuck. I'm pretty sure there's user error involved but I've had to figure it out on my own.

The hps are cool but that aluminum flat point mold casts so easy I'm thinking about ordering a few more of those. They even make 8 cavity ones in some calibers.

Bb

If any of you need soft lead ( don't know about purity, but it tests about 6 to 8 Bhn) from a hospital Xray room, I've got a ton, maybe a ton and a half left. I think I paid 30 cents for it back when, so I'd hope to get 50 cents for it now, but will discount large purchases. My local postmistress is still pissed at me for shipping a few boxes of it USPS flat rate, so shipping is out. But if you are traveling near Mt Shasta Calif, I can load you up.

Paper patched, pure lead, 300 gr, 1600 fps +/-







They are tough on critters, close or far.

This is exactly how to do it !

I used to do much the same thing with a 10 inch SSK 44 Magnum Contender Barrel.
300 grain LBT Long Flat Nose PB,LBT blue lube, hand lubed,close to 1,500 speculated (no chrono)with close to 22 grains of 296.
Patched with a stick on computer label.

Amazing expansion because of the pure lead bullet and great penetration due to the Heavy Weight of the bullet and the ductility of the pure lead bullet which retains the weight

I'd like to hunt like that myself with my only "big bore" BPCR, but it's a .40-65 target gun that weighs 14 pounds all-in and I ain't gonna lug that beast around the woods all day! Why not with one of your .32-40's you might say? Again with the weight excuse I would reply! The thought has occurred to me to try paper patching soft lead 200 grainers in my .357 Maximum Martini, and if I did it would probably be with that one. Ditto paper patching for one of my myriad .30 calibers. Definitely not with the .22's (although I'd bet it's been done, probably by Digitally Dangerous Dan)!!

Many years ago I flirted with patching .30 bullets out of a Krag and a Winchester 54 .30-30, by wrapping the dead soft bullets with teflon tape. It was an imprecise PIA to execute and I gave up on it before mastering it. It did show intriguing possibilities for accuracy though and I kinda regret not pursuing it to the nth degree, and the prospect of 2000 fps with pure lead bullets for hunting was very intriguing too.

Liked a certain type of blue jean.
Locally all stores sold out of my size.
Got some from Wally online, decent price.
Months later, try again local, same problem.
Go to Wally online and they wanted DOUBLE what the normal price was, for that size.

Not sure why, but they seem to jack up prices due to availability. Maybe get from a diff source and mark up their standard amount?

Dunno but was stunned at the ridiculous pricing for an item thats normal, just out of stock on that size.

Wonder if that 50 bucks a pound lead price under same system.

Pops cast bullets, nice ones.
Had about a dozen buckets of wheelweights.
Had big chunks of pure lead from?
And about 400 one lb ingots already alloyed.

Everybody "wanted" lead but didn't want to pay a buck a lb for the nice clean ingots.
So I sold the wheelweights/chunks to a guy that was cool (had to clean out garage so worked in my favor)
and scrapped the ingots.

Of course after that some folks whined about me not having the lead.

They had their chance.

Let em pay Walmart price LOL