Round balls for a revolver

1

1hogfan83

New member
I procured about 20lb of range scrap and 70lb of wheel weights. I was going to use the WW for a practice run for my first attempt at smelting. I sifted out all of the iron and zinc ww. Can the lead ww brought down soft enough to use in a cap and ball revolver?
 
Do you have a hardness tester? About 5 BHN is what "pure" lead registers and one can typically get away with slightly harder depending on the mechanics with a few being quite fragile.
 
The stick on weights will be soft enough to use but the clip on weights are too hard. You wont be able to soften them up.
 
I've shot several hundred ball cast from wheel weights in a couple of cap & ball revolvers. They require more force to seat the ball, but the stuff is still lead and it shoots fine.

I do prefer swaged ball.
 
WW lead in my opinion is way hard to load on the gun, just too much pressure put on the lever , If you have a loading press it can be done off the gun with not too much effort,
so no press = pure PB ,,
press = WW ( with a little more effort).

YMMV of course.....;)
 
No I don't have a hardness tester. I was afraid of that, I guess I can sell it to buy pure lead. Do I have to lubricate the balls before I eventually shoot them?
 
If you can load it into the chambers and still shave a ring of lead, I think you will be fine. Load workup characteristics may be different using hard lead over soft lead.

Yes, I would expect it to be harder to seat the balls. I agree an off-gun loading stand might make it easier.

Steve
 
Recommended to use some form of lube to keep fouling down.
Either lube in front, or wads behind.
Denis
 
The amount of lube needed to reduce fouling depends on the type of powder, too.
With 777 a dry wad under the ball seems to work well enough.
 
I see your up in Fayetteville if you have an inkling to get a loading press you could run down I-40 to Powder inc in Russelville and pic one up ( and some Goex too ,,, no HazMat :D ).
You could shoot up all the lead you have then .
Just a thought.
 
Got to think that soft lead would just shoot better in chambers and barrels designed for it.
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I don't see where the barrel itself would make any difference. Most of the Italian guns have chambers smaller than the bore so soft lead may bump up enough to make a difference over hard lead. Hard lead doesn't shrink as much when it cools so not only are they harder than soft lead you shave more off of them when you load them putting even more stress on loading lever assemblies.
 
If you mixed something with a near 100% purity and maybe 90% at maybe 50/50 would you get 95%? Don't laugh, I took college algebra twice. But in my defense I aced all of my agricultural classes!
 
Hogfan, you don't have to lube the balls themselves, but over ball lube or wonder wads do the trick. You can punch the wads yourselves, see the sticky post titled- So you want a cap and ball revolver?

And with the lead, just buy yourself some soft lead, ebay, castboolits selling section and as well as others have decent prices on it.

Just for everyone's info, a powder inc loading press doesn't make loading hard balls easy, I've tried it. Maybe if you seated the ball with a brass rod while hitting it with a mallet you can load a hard ball easier.

Do you have any stick on wheel weights from your lot of wheel weights? Those will work for you
 
Out of that whole lot I got maybe a handful but they were very soft. I used my side cutters to test hardness when I wasn't sure and I almost cut through the stick on weights. I avoided them when I got the weights, I thought they were the trashy ones.
 
"Just for everyone's info, a powder inc loading press doesn't make loading hard balls easy, I've tried it. Maybe if you seated the ball with a brass rod while hitting it with a mallet you can load a hard ball easier ".

BPB , I use the ToP press and you are right it's not easy loading the WW balls but it is a option .
If that's all you have it's a ton better than putting excess strain on the guns lever and pivot pin .
But all in all ,,,I agree wit cha.
 
If you mixed something with a near 100% purity and maybe 90% at maybe 50/50 would you get 95%? Don't laugh, I took college algebra twice. But in my defense I aced all of my agricultural classes!
Click to expand...

Pure lead has a BHN of 5. Stick on weights have a BHN of 6. Clip on weights run from 12-16. I'm not sure how many tons of pure you'd have to mix in to get it down to an acceptable level.:D
 
I shot a match with hard cast roundballs (advertized as soft but someone screwed up) and by the end of the match felt I had put about 2 years of wear on my Colt 44s. They were much harder to ram and recoiled more than soft lead. I would expect that eventually the rammer would bend or the wedge would crush. If I had been using brass framed Colts the hard lead would have likely ruined them.
 
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