A couple of months ago I bought a box of 250 500g Meister hard cast bullets to try in the 45-70's. These bullets did not perform well in any of my rifles They keyholed and left a lot of silvery strips on the cleaning patches. I suspect the poor performance was a combination of factors including being slightly undersized for my rifles, the unusually large bevel on the base and insuficient lube due to the very hard waxy lube.
I loaned a couple of moulds to a friend who has been casting for over 30 years and gave him the remainder of the Meister bullets a week ago. They were of no use to me and paying retail shipping to send them back to Midway was not an opportunity. I Talked to him Saturday and he told me that it was the strangest bullet alloy that he has ever seen.
It melted at a very low temperature. When he went to dab the melted lube off the top of the melt the paper towel he used didn't even singe. This suggests a melting temperature under 400°F.
The alloy does not shrink when it solidifies. Removing the bullets from the mould was difficult. He told me it took five hours to cast 50 bullets because it took so long to knock each bullet loose from the mould. He made ingots from the rest of the melt. The sprues often broke off rather than shearing off. You can see the fracture on the base of the bullets where this happened.
The melted alloy looked like a pool of mercury and did not oxidize at all.
He tossed a sprue of lead into the melt. This melted and floated on top of the rest of the melt and would not combine.
Both the bullets and the ingots ring or clink slightly when dropped on a hard surface. Even hard lead alloys go thunk when struck.
Meister claims that their alloy consists of 2% Tin, 6% Antimony and 92% Lead. This is too common an alloy to have caused the problems described above. Such an alloy melts at a higher temperature, would oxidize, would amalgamate additional lead and would shrink when it solidifies.
Does anyone have any ideas what weird alloy has the properties described above?
