Wheel weights AGAIN!!!!

[kayja]

I just bought some Lead ingots off EBay advertized as useful for making bullets or fishing weights. nothing shady about the deal, except after reading on this forum that wheel weights may not be the best thing for black powder balls. the seller advertized that they are useful in making bullits, could have meant 30-06 ect.
Could I get away using the lead that i have purchased if i purchased another 30 lbs of soft lead and melted it with the wheel wt lead for muzzel loading rifles making the mix 3-1 ??thanks

 

[Slamfire]

They make pretty good bullets for suppository firarms. And I just made up a bunch of balls for my smoothbore, that I haven't had enough dry weather to try.

 

[Samuel]

From my experience , I have not had good success in making wheelweight lead soft enough to work well as round balls, I have found them to be hard to load down the barrel, - wheelwheight lead has -Antimony - in it, and it is suitable for making hand gun bullets and low velocity rifle cartrige bullets .
I supose if you mix enough? soft lead with it it would work, mabe someone will chime in with a good recipe for deluteing wheelweight lead enough to be suitable
I would use the softest lead you can find, to make your round balls

 

[Headhunter]

Most of my wheel weight bullet knowledge comes from the Black Powder Cartridge Rifle side. Like the 45-70 thru 45-110 Sharps Rifles. In this field, the Wheel weights make acceptable bullets for informal shooting. Being unable to properly tell what lead-antimony-tin ratio the wheel weight is, it pretty much negates their use as hunting or precision target bullets.

Normal hunting and Target bullet ratios or MIXES are from 20-1 or 20 parts lead to 1 part tin, all the way to 40-1 and then PURE LEAD.

Another thing with Casting bullets or balls or whatever is, pure lead or mixes such as 40-1 will make larger "In diameter", heavier bullets than lets say Wheel Weights or a 20-1 Mix.

For me and my hunting and Target bullets in BPCR, I shoot 1-30 as my "Hard" bullet for hunting and targets , and 40-1 for my Paper Patch Bullets for hunting only.

For PRB, I use Pure lead. The Patch protects the ball from the rifleing and vice versa.

For making Maxi Bullets or conicals or what have you, I would say the 30-1 Mix would be perfect. It would allow mushrooming of the bullet, the barrel would not lead up, and the bullet would swell well upon firing. Pure lead would lead up the barrel horribly. Wheel weights would be a smaller in diameter bullet, and would be too hard to mushroom well.

A Patched round ball from wheel weights would be fine for anything except hunting in my opinion.

I sure hope this makes sence.

Headhunter

 

[bwhoffman]

been there, done that. ww will work but is hard to start. you will need a short start with some "meat" to it. I also found that a well lubed patch a few .001s thinner was a help. I went from .017 to .014 and everything worked ok.
I much perfer pure lead for consistancy in target work.

 

[paulvallandigham]

If your wheel weights are thirty-five percent tin and antimony, and you want to reduce that percentage to, say, 5%, you would have to mix the weights with 7 times the weight in pure lead. 4% would require a mix of 9:1; 3% would require a mix of 12:1. etc. By the time you are using that much pure lead, what would be the point of using the Wheelweights in the mix at all? Use them for pistol and modern rifle bullets, or trade that stuff to someone for pure lead. When I was a teenager, my father wanted to cast some hard, .357 173 grain, Keith Semi-wadcutters to use in his revolver. I did the casting for him. It was difficult to get the mould hot enough and the lead hot enough to cast good bullets. But, when I got them, he found out they were so hard he wore out his arm and shoulder working the arm on his lubrisizer. The bullets would spatter on steel plates, but if they hit anything else, there was very little deformation. When we used the same mix to cast bullets for his .45-70 rifle, the accuracy was lousy, because the bullet was too hard to expand and fill the rifling. Years later, we found that a 1 part tin, and 20 parts lead alloy was the right mix for those .45-70 rifle bullets. NO ANTIMONY!

Sorry if this was not the answer you were hoping to hear. If you are just going to do a lot of plinking with your ML rifle, then go ahead and cast the balls out of wheel weights. You will find that the diameter of these hard balls will be smaller, and you might have to use a thicker patch, but for informal shooting, they will be adequately accurate.

Good luck.

 

[Runner]

Much depends on you and how you cast them, load them, and what you are shooting at. I use a couple of ounces in a ten pound melt for conicals and roundball. If you get it real hot, the balls will cast smoother with no wrinkles and contrary to what has been posted so far, they will be just a hair larger. Conicals will cast better and some are more accurate when cast out of that mixture. The Lee Target minnie being one of them. I suspect that is because the driving bands don't strip as easily. Loading using a couple of ounces to 10 pounds doesn't change so you would notice.
My brother-in-law shoots pure wheelweight roundball and REAL's out of his TC. He gets very good results, but he doesn't hunt deer with it. The 490 balls cast out of it are a bugger to start and load. I would not put up with it myself. The only reason for balls that hard would be if I was hunting a very large critter with a ball that might need help penetrating. If I was to hunt moose or bears with my fifty, then I might consider it.
As has been said, a large supply is going to be around for a long time using a couple of ounces per 10 pound melt! Likely you are better off to trade with someone casting modern pistol bullets and stick with mainly pure lead.

 

[Blizzard of '93]

might be best to sell 'em to a shooter that casts slugs for a centerfire of some sort and get pure lead, I cast some slugs for my C&B revolvers that had some wheelweights in the melt and they were hard to ram down, I now use as pure lead as I can find.

 

[RedFeather]

Did the seller tell you they are from wheel weights? If not, how hard are the ingots? If you can score them with your thumbnail, maybe they are mostly lead.

 

[DanChamberlain]

Antimony melts at a higher temperature than lead. If you cook your lead for a long time, ocasionally dropping a little wax in the melt, the tin and antimony will gather at the edges of your melting pot where it is cooler and can be skimmed away. Also, the dross can be skimmed off as well. Do this repeatedly and you will begin to arrive at a softer, purer lead product, suitable for ball.

Dan

 

[NORD]

If you are just going to do a lot of plinking with your ML rifle, then go ahead and cast the balls out of wheel weights. You will find that the diameter of these hard balls will be smaller, and you might have to use a thicker patch, but for informal shooting, they will be adequately accurate.

This is what I do and it works great! Wheel weight rounds ball work great for plinking! :hatsoff:

Nord

 

[Tinker2]

What Dan said is what I do.
I do it out side. Keep skimming it. The only difference that
I do, is I don’t use any flux or wax when I do.
Works well if you are willing to take the time.


Tinker2

 

[bob308]

if you have a .357 or .45 they will do fine but i don't think you can mix enough pure lead in to use it up. when i started out i had one pot and was switching back and forth from pure lead to ww. and i had some poor results. so i got another pot and use one for pure lead and the other for mixing lead.

 

[bmues]

I had these same questions about molding my own bullets when I got interested in ML shooting last fall. After researching lead and it's alloy characteristics for casting RB's I came across this article by Jim Colburn.
[url] members.aol.com/illinewek/faqs/casting.htm[/url]

Jim indicates that at one time he had his own bullet casting business and access to a metallurgical lab. It seems well written and is understandable. Mainly what I got out of it was don't bother trying to refine the antimony out of the lead as the effort isn't worth the end result but use the WW if you choose to. Hope this helps.

'SnappinCaps'
'.45 Cal. Kentucky Percussion'
"Let's go pop some more caps!"

 

[TANSTAAFL]

Getting lead based metal too hot can result in vaporizing and lead fumes, not a good thing to breath, so proper precautions should be taken.

 

[TANSTAAFL]

Sorry if this was not the answer you were hoping to hear. If you are just going to do a lot of plinking with your ML rifle, then go ahead and cast the balls out of wheel weights. You will find that the diameter of these hard balls will be smaller, and you might have to use a thicker patch, but for informal shooting, they will be adequately accurate.

Paul, I respectively disagree with most all you have stated, but the above is entirely wrong. Wheel weights being a harder alloy than pure lead, will shrink less and will result in larger cast bullets or balls, not smaller than lead ones cast from same mold.

I have been casting and loading for CF rifles & pistols for decades, utilizing water dropped chilled quenched and oven tempered WW with no problems and great results. Just the other day I cast up some WW dropped chilled 500 grainers, lubed and sized to .459 for my neighbors original Marlin Ballard Pacific in .45-70, at 100 yards it was a tack driver.

And achieving velocities over 2,000 fps and good accuracy in several other cartridges with hard cast and gas checked bullets poses no problems.

I hang out at this site, if one wants to know about WW and cast bullets, this is the place.
[url] http://castboolits.gunloads.com/[/url]

Now of course some WW don't work worth a hoot. :rotf:

Pic below from:[url] http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=4645[/url]

 

[Jaymo]

Modern wheelweights are pretty friggin' soft. I cast a bunch of .50 RB, REAL, Minie, .32 SWC, and .44 pointed today. Can't get the Minie skirt to come out right on any kind of regular basis.

 

[Jaymo]

I cannot believe it censored that. How lame. I didn't use any foul language. The word rhymed with rigging.

 

[TANSTAAFL]

I am still working on the several hundred pounds of WW I got back in the 70's & 80's.

But IMHO, WW metal, modern or not, is a poor choice for skirted minies.