That's how the serious casting cats spell it on the internet, and now your humble scribe has 168,000 grains of a lead-like boolit material cast into little Lyman ingots and shelved. Not allowing for waste, that's seven hundred and thirty -- 230 grainers for the 1911s with a few ounces left over for crappie jigs.
Before long I'll have a report on the casting, loading, and shooting qualities we can get from modern wheel weights fired as cast with either no lube or a light hand lube. I am not hot to get into the sizing and lubing game. If the as-cast stuff will hit the barn door and not lead the bores too badly, I won't.
The men of the family spent one of the Independence weekend afternoons at Cabela's in the Twin Cities, and I finally just tossed frugality to the winds and bought the Lyman kit with the little "Big Dipper" 10-pound pot. High quality it is not, but it should make all the boolits I care to shoot, swap, or give away.
(If you're out at my local DNR range some weekday afternoon and see a crazy dude raking lead from the berms, don't shoot. That's me.)
EDIT: Heading off an argument, perhaps: By "modern" wheel weights I mean the ones still based on lead. In the 80s when I was last casting, we considered wheel weights to be about 90-95 per cent lead with the balance more or less evenly split between tin and antimony. Serious, or just anal, casters added enough tin to bring it closer to Lyman's No. 2 formula of 90 - 5 - 5 (lead, tin,antimony). I have read that most WW makers have by now cut the tin content to nearly nothing.
Others made the good point that citing precise contents of any home-brew alloy was somewhat silly because we had no idea of what was actually in the lead, the tin, or the antimony we used. And who the heck had a Brinnel tester in his shop? We considered anything that cast smoothly and was hard enough to resist fingernail denting good enough to use.
3 comments:
I see that you like the big bores like I do. You may find a 10 pounder somewhat lacking, as it becomes apparent that out of the 10 pounds, maybe four of it can be reached by ladle without figuring out how to tip a 650-degree pot. And the lead sure runs out fast, even on a 20 pounder.
I don't regret my Lyman pot. I've already made my money back on it, compared to the cost of condom bullets. Even if it breaks--I mean, come on--how hard is it to fix? Other folks are happy with their expensive, temperamental bottom-pour rigs. Fine by me.
If you're also a cheapskate like me, you will be able to pan lube and use the Lee sizing dies. Not sizing only makes sense if you have a mold of exacting dimensions and an alloy of known composition. Otherwise precise sizing out of the mold is too much bother. (Most folks just sort the bullets if they want consistency.) It's also possible to crimp on gas checks with the Lee dies--just takes a little ingenuity and some other brand's die sizing parts for designs without a flat nose.
Happy casting!
Oh yeah. All important calibers start with a 4 followed by a 5. :)
I think you're right about the 10-pounder being a little small, but I can live with it at the current low production level.
In my earlier incarnation I did some pan lubing and will again if the big, slow slugs do much leading. As for the rest, I'm not asking much of these things, just something to practice with at across-the-room distances.
Also, I'm reading that some guys count on the factory crimp die to squeeze the bullet down to .451 or 452. I use one anyway, so we'll see what it does with the as-cast stuff.
I give a moderate taper crimp with 45 ACP, and I've never had problems with set-back. The mouth really digs into those soft lead bullets.
FWIW, the Lee TL designs (e.g. 452-230-2R or 452-230-TC) are known to be good, solid worker-bees with either Lee's "tumble" lube or conventional waxy types. I make my own lubes, and size, using the TC design or the more conventional 452-228-1R design. When using a soft-ish alloy, I've never had problems with leading. I like them on the wider side, so the alloys I use have enough antimony to spring back a little and give me .453", but very little tin, because I don't like the smell of burning money.
I have heard that the 228-1R does not feed well in the 1911, hence the TL452-230-2R. I have not been able to verify this.
I think the 452-230-TC makes good fodder for all flavors of 45. I did notice that the mold needs to be quite a bit hotter than the round-nose designs, or bad fill-out will result--730-750 IIRC. (I'm using a 2-holer; I have no use for 6-gang molds that make six differently-shaped boolits.)
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