Rocky Krag

I know wheel weights are harder than pure lead. Can I use them to make conical bullets that will penetrate further or perhaps round balls for practice?

cayugad

I personally never use wheel weights in a muzzleloader. I was under the impression that when used as conicals, they produce extensive leading of the bore because of theof the BIN. Whether they would make a good projectile for a sabot, where the would not actually come into contact with the bore, I could not say. I just always use as pure a lead as I can possibly find.

eldeguello

As Cayugad says, wheelweights might work satisfactorily in a sabot. However, in my personal experience with alloysharder than pure lead, there are serious drawbacks to trying to use such metalsinfull-size ML bullets. They are difficult to start, hard to get down onto the powder charge, and cut patches if you are using a PRB. This is with a CLEAN boire! if your bore is in the least fouled, you run the risk of not being able to get the ball down all the way. Then you have to unbreech the barrel and drive the ball out with a stout rod.

My advice is to use pure plead for ML projectiles.

liquidorange

before i knew better i would make maxi balls up with whatever lead i could find. it makes the bullets slightly oversized. if i cant get pure lead i just melt down a box of round balls to make sure.

cayugad

Plumbing Supply houses carry 99% pure lead ingots. Plumbers often times have old lead pipe they remove from job sites. You have to clean that but it is good lead.Also there is usually good lead at some of the iron works. These are stores that buy andsell all kinds of metal , cans and pipe. I lucked out and bought a 5 gallon bucket of pure lead down rigger sinkers at one of them ore six cents a pound. What a deal that was. You can usually get pure lead real reasonable there. Talk to roofers. See if they have any lead roof sheeting off the old roofs.Thiswas sheet lead they used to line roof valleys to keep them sealed. I also got a bunch from a telephone lineman. He was removing/replacing the old lead junctionboxes. The doors on the boxes was pure lead. If you can dig a thumb nail into it, it usually is a soft lead.

MLKeith

I agree that wheelweights are too hard for a conical. I have made bullets for my 38 spl. and they are real hard. I would suspect that in a conical they would not tend to upset slightly which soft lead do upon inpact of the powder which tends to make the conical fit the bore better thus increasing accuracy. I would expect hard lead conicals might not be as accurate and would likely not shoot as well. Real pure lead as stated is fairly easy to find depending on how close to a city you are.