I purchased some lead bullets recently and my cousin will be teaching me to reload. Since I am new to reloading can you tell me if the bullets I bought are considered hard or soft lead?
I'd call your alloy a hard lead, in fact, it's an excellent blend. Antimony is added to improve hardness, and this it does quite nicely up to about 23% by weight. Common bullet alloys rarely go above 15%, and since Antimony is expensive, 6 - 8% is probably a good balance of hardness and cost. The most expensive element in bullet lead is Tin, and happily any blend with 2% Tin content is reported to flow nicely when casting, producing clean sharp edges where needed.
Thanks for the information. With hardcast bullets, is there less of an issue with bore fouling? What is the best way to clean a revolver that has lead fouling?
HB did a nice series on bullets. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall he uses Lasercast and really likes how clean they shoot and also spoke of their hardness. If you search for that series or if some one has the link to that vid, it might just offer some added info.
Pure lead has a Brinell hardness # of about 4. Most hard cast bullets will have a Brinell hardness # of 11 to 30 and as such are several times harder than lead. Elmer Keith, the father of the Magnum hand gun shot a bullet that he designed, the Keith wad cutter, that had a Brinelley hardness of 12.
"Generally speaking, a properly designed, sized and lubed hard cast bullet will not leave lead alloy deposits in a rifled barrel, but pure lead bullets will almost always foul a barrel to the point of a total loss of accuracy (with very few rounds fired) and perhaps to the point that the barrel will split or worse. ( see my essay on 'Dangerous Pure Lead Cowboy Ammunition' ) I am employing many abstractions here, as there are a number of ways to make a hard cast bullet foul your barrel and make a pure lead bullet not foul, but on the whole, what I have written in this paragraph is accurate." https://www.buffalobore.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=54
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