Saeco Lead hardness tester
Thinking about buying a lead hardness tester.Any info on the Saeco?
Jim
Jim
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hardness is not the only thing that you really need to know to get GOOD bullets and Bullets that you can drive at higher velocity. Antimony will make for HARD but TIN will make for bullets that fill the mold better . Lube the correct type SOFT not HARD "candle WAX" will keep bullets from leading the bore . Undersize Lead bullets will lead the bore even if Glass hard.. If your fingernail will not leave a mark it is most likely hard enough for 2000 FPS if #1 LUBE #2 SIZE #3 alloy is OK 0 -
Well, if you're a cheapskate like me, you can make your own hardness tester. You need some way to add a calibrated compression pressure to a sphere of known diameter and measure the indentation made by the sphere. Then apply the standard formula to find the Brinell Hardness Number. If you wish you can convert to the Saeco scale. All of this info can be found on the interweb.
The formula I use is as follows--
BHN= pi * D * (D minus the squareroot of D squared minus d squared) divided by 2P
where D= the test sphere diameter
d= the indentation diameter
P= the pressure applied
All data used is converted to metric values, D=millimeters, P=Kgrams
Put into Excel makes the process easy.
I use a shotgun wad compression gauge that I calibrated with a handheld fish scale that is checked against a commercial scale. I press a .218 inch ball bearing into my sample at 60 pounds pressure for 15 seconds and then measure the resulting indentation. I have checked the process with soft lead to correlate the readings and they work out well.
Or, go spend your reloading component dollars on a hardness tester.0 -
I like the LBT hardness tester, it reads directly in BHN.
http://lbtmoulds.com/hardtester.shtml0
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