Tweet
Just thought I would show off my setup and stuff. Also the jig for PC that I built in the other thread in gunsmithing as it was kind of a welding fab question. Also let's talk about home cheap hardness testing. It is well known in the industry that you can test your hardness for "general" hardness using certain high quality pencil's of various hardness.
There is no hard chart for BH to Pencil Lead Hardness but you can ball park it and compare brand to brand and more importantly track batch hardness consistency.
The technique is very straight forward but demanding. You need to have the lead as a cylinder with no taper and then you need to sand a 90% flat meplat into it. Then hold the pencil at 45% to the meplat and try to gouge like you would with a knife into the the flat base of the bullet. If you get graphite dust your alloy is harder than that lead go up until you reach one that can shave off, not scratch, shave, a bit of lead.
I use stadletter artist sets to give me a range that is useful and I recommend the brand to others because that makes it easier to compare results. My current alloy has been a consistent "stadletter-BH" with water dropping which works out roughly Lymann #2 for comparative hardness. Interestingly enough this pure range scrap + some silver solder so to end up with a nicely bracketed Lymann #2 equiv is not half bad at all.
The most important use of this method is to make sure you have consistent hardness between batches, and that is a good thing.
Now lets throw some pictures. Today the goal is to Powdercoat the current lil pile of bullets, 9mm and 8x57 Mauser.
There is no hard chart for BH to Pencil Lead Hardness but you can ball park it and compare brand to brand and more importantly track batch hardness consistency.
The technique is very straight forward but demanding. You need to have the lead as a cylinder with no taper and then you need to sand a 90% flat meplat into it. Then hold the pencil at 45% to the meplat and try to gouge like you would with a knife into the the flat base of the bullet. If you get graphite dust your alloy is harder than that lead go up until you reach one that can shave off, not scratch, shave, a bit of lead.
I use stadletter artist sets to give me a range that is useful and I recommend the brand to others because that makes it easier to compare results. My current alloy has been a consistent "stadletter-BH" with water dropping which works out roughly Lymann #2 for comparative hardness. Interestingly enough this pure range scrap + some silver solder so to end up with a nicely bracketed Lymann #2 equiv is not half bad at all.
The most important use of this method is to make sure you have consistent hardness between batches, and that is a good thing.
Now lets throw some pictures. Today the goal is to Powdercoat the current lil pile of bullets, 9mm and 8x57 Mauser.
Comment