HAWKEN

I know that you are supposed to cast round balls out of pure lead, but, has anyone tried something harder like wheel weif\ghts ? The grooves are engraved in, or on the patch, so it seems like it might work......Robin

normiewill

If the ball is too hard the ball will just cut through the patch rather than deforming into the cloth of the patch. The patch is what engages the rifling to put spin to the ball.
Norm

Smithy

Being income challenged from the start of my shooting I would use just about any alloy for my round balls, because the only way to get "Pure lead" was to purchase expensive virgin lead (quite costly). I usually used range lead picked out of the hillside of our local shooting area. Worked like a champ. I even used that lead in my mini's and from the look of retrieved slugs, I had full rifled engagement. For a short period I had access to all the linotype I could carry and used that. The only problem I ever encountered was in loading a BP revolver. It took some excessive elbow grease to seat the balls. Smithy.

Old Scribe

I've used all kinds of lead from various sources and by fluxing the molten lead I got it "pure" enough for use. In fact I can't tell the difference from one source to another.
For a time I used bees' wax to flux lead alloyed with what ever and it worked ok. Lotta smoke and a waste of good bees' wax tho'. After buying a jar of Marvelux (from Midway USA I think) and finding how well it worked, I would get any kind of lead I could get my hands on.
I now have about 300 pounds of 1 pound lead ingots and another 300 pounds of lead needing fluxing and casting into ingots.

dagger dog

Hawken,

If you can find the stick-on weights they are darn near pure lead, I traded for some and after smelting tested with the Lee tester and they came out to 7-8 BHN pure lead being 6.

Clip ons come in at 12-13 BHN.

I had good luck with clip ons with my 45 cal Kentucky rifle, the patch material is the key you can shoot a harder ball if you use a patch that can stand the pressure.

I was loading about 90 grs FFG and they were exiting the muzzle of the 38"barrel with a super sonic crack, and were very acurrate.

firescout

I have a huge bucket of old stick-on wheelweights that I cast .457 round balls from for my ROA revolver. They work quite well.

Tx gunrunner

Go to a scrape yard and see if they have lead from high power wire covering or lead from X-ray shields . Both of them is pure lead . You can get it for $.50 a lbs . Using anything but pure lead in Black powder muzzle loader is a very dangerous and a bad practice , plus I don't like holding on to a pipe bomb . Muzzle loaders don't like smokeless powder either .

Smithy

I did the same thing except the hardness of my massive collection of lead came from free linotype that I couldn't pass up. I did find that a .454 round ball was easier to load and I still got the requisite "ring of lead" after loading. Smithy.