Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns SOFTNOSE CAST REVISITED

The oven method.If the purchase of cast bullet is made and they are inserted into an oven with 2/3s of the bullet covered by water how long do you heat the top 1/3 and at what temp?And how does this take the bullet from say 22bhn to a softer nose?I would think the heat would be like heat treating them which would be harder.Get a little info here please?

Cottonstalk, if you use the pan method with the bullets standing in water you don't place them in the oven, you just quickly heat the exposed nose with a torch, watching the color carefully, this draws the temper (hardness) out of the nose & makes it much softer than the submerged portion, then you tip them over in the water.
This method does work but can be a little tricky to get a handle on.
When using the oven method (without water) you can harden bullets & you can "draw" them back in hardness, say you have some bullets that are 22-30 hardness & want to use them for plinking loads, you put them in the oven at maybe 350 degrees & draw them back down in hardness, you really need to get a copy of Veral Smiths book on cast bullets, its worth every penny & explains everything in great detail. Beartooth Bullets also has a manual out but its just a copy of Veral's.
When you start heat treating in the oven it takes some experimenting but you can take certain alloys to about any hardness you desire, some alloy's won't heat treat. Wheelweights work great here, Linotype is already about 22 BHN but won't heat treat beyond that.
Hope this helps.

Dick

IIRC,

If you are making a softnose with WW alloy trying to draw, its not going to go below its original air cooled hardness.

WW metal for all but the fastest handgun speeds is going to be too hard to expand, and only alloys that respond to heat treating will draw to softer levels once they air cure.

A pure lead, lead/tin or lead/silver/tin make hollowpoints and softnoses work like we want them to: They wrap like ductile foil at even the mildest speeds.

I think that will re-harden them, won't it?

Outdoorman, you might be right, I don't do it this way (in the water) it would seem that the heat will transfer down the bullet somewhat if you don't tip them, but again I could be wrong on this method. Also the water has to get quite warm in a hurry from the torch which might also affect the hardness. I'll continue to do it my way as its proven to be reasonably fast & the bullets come out perfect.

Dick

I've done the annealing in the water with the torch, and even though the water does get quite warm the shank stays super hard. I've had mixed results by annealing in the water. I use a 50/50 alloy of ww/soft, and the bhn is still up there a ways on the nose (maybe 10-12) even after torching it. for rifle velocities it works fine, but for handgun the two-part method is better.