Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Nickel babbitt

I was given a 5 pound chunk of nickel babbitt and am wondering what the heck I can do with it. Anybody here ever messed with the stuff in bullet alloys? Google tells me it's 88-90% tin, 7-8% antimony, 3-4% copper, 0.3-0.5% nickel. I get a bhn reading of 30. Strikes me that a savvy caster could mix a significant quantity of bullet alloy with this chunk of nasty hard material.

Yeah, significant.

The only thing I would question is the nickel, but that's only like 175 grains of the total mass if it's at half a percent (I think). Nickel is pretty dang high on the hardness scale. Barrel wear, maybe, maybe not?

I would treat this as tin+. Use it like tin knowing your bullets will be a little harder. With a 10:1 ratio of tin to antimony you would be wasting a lot of tin if this is your primary hardening alloy. Find some letterpress type for antimony and use 2% of this babbit in every batch you cast.

Yeah, I'm thinking that by mixing this 5 pound chunk with 50 pounds of pure lead will yield something pretty close to 1:10 alloy, 100 pounds for the 1:20 alloy I find myself using more and more.

No one uses 1:10 alloy anymore since it is a waste of tin and while 1:20 is better it has ~5% tin which is still more than you need. But with any luck, 1:20 with your babbit might get to BHN=11 which would be good for most pistols. If you want to cast harder bullets (> BHN=10) you will need antimony since it is much cheaper and hardens 3X better than tin if using an equal amount. Since wheel weights are getting harder to find the best source for antimony is linotype or monotype used for printing.

I don't care if an alloy is a waste of tin or not, as long as it works. The panoply of soft lead bullets fits 90% of my needs anymore and simple binary tin:lead alloys fill the bill, and most importantly are easily re-created time after time. I'm now quite happy buying certified pure tin&lead, expensive as it is, simply to avoid the alchemy I engaged in for a half-century - plus it works.

That said, I'm not one to turn down free stuff. I'll probably do a small test batch with some of this babbitt metal and then file the rest away with the linotype, monotype, foundry type, other mystery metals, and COWW ingots that are accumulating a shocking amount of dust.

It sounded like you just had the babbit and pure lead but if you have these other alloys you are golden. Play with one of the alloy BHN calculators and you can make anything you want.