Ammunition & Hand Loading > Cartridge and Shotshell reloading
Powder Coating Lead Bullets
unfy:
Soooo spent a fair bit of the afternoon casting some buckshot.
Also have the supplies to test out the lacquer thinner (LT) tumble powder coating.
Went through about 25# of lead and decided to form the wire cloth basket and stuff for the bake part of things. After each ingot (and the next one was melting), I'd do some work on getting ready for the PC.
I decided to use a 1QT HDPE (2 recycle symbol) paint can as a my tumble container.
1 tbs of powder coat. maybe 3-4 tbs of LT. To 50 bullets.
Yeah that was way too much of both.
Added another 3/4 of a tbs of powder coat and another 30 bullets or so. Still not great. See the first pic. At least the PC was settling on the bullets and looking encouraging.
Decided to start cutting the buckshot off the sprue. After every handful of buckshot, I'd agitate the PC stuff. See the second pic.
Well... 2 or 3 hours later, I finished with the buckshot and... yeah, the PC was still wayyyyyy runny. Decided to hold the paint can at like 60 degrees and just slowly turn it constantly (tumble!). That helped speed up the process considerably.
I'm still tumbling. Will get more pics later.
Immediate lesson learned: buy the big paint measure / mixer thing from hardware store. Less waste of PC, lets you tumble easier possibly, and the big air cavity and mouth aids in evaporation.
unfy:
It thickened up as expected, and appeared to coat as expected.
Dumped them on the wire cloth, separated them out a bit with knife. Dunno if moving them at that point in time was correct or not.
There was a fair amount of waste as shown by the left over in the pan. The thing in the middle is some of the sprue from casting the buckshot.
Gave it a cook for 20-25min @ 400f.
The concern I've had about the liquid tumble + wire cloth is realized here. It pooled up around the wire cloth - which makes taking them off take a bit of effort - but more importantly, there is some nasty blemishes. On some of them, it's minor. On others, not so much.
I'm not too concerned about it. As a first test with ALOT of mistakes... I expected a pile of poopy.
But, it's encouraging. And so far less messy than using the gun.
I need to figure out timing of everything a bit better, and also a more proper PC to LT ratio. Also, I didn't have any tray beneath the wire cloth, so I imagine the bullets right above the elements took a pounding.
Would I do this with any kind of 'performance' ammo ? No. Pistol plinking... sure.
tstuart34:
I've been using a ceramic tile in my kydex oven. If you pre heat the tile as a heat sink it helps even things out a bit in your oven and keeps things from having hot spots from the elements
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unfy:
I just realized bkoenig already did the lacquer tumble!
Woo!
Way for me to read own threads :(
unfy:
I am about to start doing this en-masse. Or work up to doing this em-masse to burn through a huge stockpile of lead that I have.
My immediate intention is to give the lacquer thinner thing another attempt.
Has anyone else given this a try, and have suggestions before I start experimenting again ? I have every intention of powder coating hundred(s) of pounds of cast bullets ....
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