Casting bullets...advice needed

[Bad Dog]

Im am gearing up for my first ever try at casting my own bullets.
Ive got about 40lbs of lead, a mix of soft lead from a dive belt and a little range pick up.
My question is do I need to harden this?
What do I use to harden it?
Where do I get the hardening materials?
I will be powder coating my bullets after casting them if that makes a difference.
Thanks in advance for all of your great advice

[ray1970]

I saw your post looking for wheel weights. I think that?s a good start.

While I?ve never tried my hand at casting bullets I think the wheel weights should be close enough of the right mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that you can just smelt them and cast them.

[longrange2]

You can cast straight wheel weights, and many people do. That’s an easy way to get started. You’ll need to learn to sort the zinc wheels weights from the lead ones. Most of the wheel weights in use now are not lead. I typically mix lead wheel weights 50/50 with soft lead and then add a little bit of tin. I like the bullets to be a little softer 8-10 BHN because I often cast hollow points. This helps them hold together instead of being brittle like harder bullets. In addition, when powder coating you can get away with a little softer bullet. You can buy one pound packages of tin bbs on Amazon or EBay among other places and it makes them easy to weigh out the amount you need, PM me your email I have an excel spreadsheet the helps figure out what types of lead, and how much to achieve specific levels of lead, tin and antimony.

[thedave1164]

As already stated you can get by with softer lead if you powder coat, pick up a Black Friday toaster oven and watch Elvis ammo on YouTube for the best info on PC bullets, I use the cheap red power coat from HF.

If you make it up north, I have a few lbs of WW I could share.

Cast Boolits forum is a good resource and can get WW ingots for about $1 lb

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/forum.php

[Little Dutch]

This is all solid advice. I don't have anything much to add.
I, too, use wheel weights and range pickup. Range pickup sometimes results in a harder bullet, resulting in bullets that weigh a little less than my wheel weight cast bullets.

I use a salvation army toaster oven and powder I purchase from Eastwood. I prefer the ford blues, finding them to adhere particularly well. I wish I had a better toaster oven though. I get hot spots with mine, but it works well enough and it was a $4 experiment that I've been using successfully for a few years.

[earplug]

Harbor freight powder coating and a used convection oven. Alloy not important on the 9MM, 38 spl and 45 ACP I was making. 9MM at .358 worked fine.