Casting Questions

N

napp

New member
I'm thinking about casting my own lead balls for the rifle and pistols. I have access to wheel weights; but none of the other needed equipment. I will probably buy the correct size Lee molds (.490 & .454). Here are my initial questions:

1. Will a cast iron melting pot and a single eye burner do the job; or should I go ahead and spring for a melting furnace?

2. If using a melting pot, which is the preferred heat source for the burner...electric or gas?

3. If I decide to buy a furnace, does the bottom pour spout type have a significant advantage over one which requires dipping with a ladle?

4. Do the lead balls require lubing after casting as cast bullets do?
 
Hey Napp

From bottom to top.

I like to roll the round balls around in lube. It makes them easier to seat. I put about a hundred balls in a little tub that sweet and sour sauce from the Chinese joint up the street comes in. I put a little lube in there with the balls and just roll them around until they are all coated. In my last batch I used a little too much lube. It does not take much. Half a teaspoon full is about right.

I have a Lee Production Pot but I never use the spout. Always dip the lead out with a ladle. The problem with the spout is that it is easy to get stuff lodged in the valve, holding the valve open slightly. The production pot is designed with a number four screw driver slot on the top. Tte purpose is to give the user a place and a means to turn the valve slightly to get it to seal. Only time I use the spout is to cast ingots.

As you can tell, I like the Production Pot which of course is electric. Temperature control is great and it absolutely will not go above 800 degrees which means you are under less risk from harmful stuff coming out of the pot. Lead vaporizes at about 3100 degrees but I am told that 1700 degrees is a threshold for danger. At the low temperatures produced by the pot the most you have to worry about is keeping your hands clean, keeping the space well ventilated, and maybe using a particulate mask. These are OSHA recommendations for persons who work with molten lead.

There are plenty of folks here who cast with a stove and an iron pot. MOst of them are single or they got divorced after casting balls on the kitchen stove. (I can tell you, my thankfully ex wife sure was hard on my shooting.)

I think the Lee Production Pot can be bought new for about 75 bucks so it is not that much of an investment. Mine is about 35 years old, looks like it has gone through the war but it still works well enough for a devoted tightwad.

I like your choice of molds. It is my personal opinion that aluminum molds can be relied upon to cast more consistently sized bullets. In retrospect, though I imagine there is not much difference in mold performance if you can get used to them. With steel molds you will make more scrap while the mold is coming up to temperature. With aluminum molds your rythm is very important because the molds lose heat more quickly.

Go to a pharmacist and get some talc to use as a release agent, or you can smoke the molds with a candle.

I personally think that another good investment is some measuring tools such as a cheap digital caliber and a cheap scale.

I think I could replace virtually everything I use to mold bullets, including the molds for under 200 dollars.

You are going to have some great fun casting bullets.
 
Great question, and thanks for the reply, Doc:)

I'm going to start casting my own .454's in the near future. I've got about 5lbs of lead and more on the way (my dad is friends with a guy that runs a wheel and tire shop) and my wife hooked me up with an aluminum lee mold for Christmas.

I've been curious about the stove too. Question: Does a propane stove get hot enough? I fully plan on getting a pot, but I have a little camp stove that hooks up to those small propane containers. If that got hot enough, I could do this in the back yard for the meantime.
 
My 2 cents..

Lee production Pot is a must in my book... 10lb'er is nice..but the 20lb is way better.... I like the spout and almost never laddle pour anymore. They are known as the "Lee Drip-O-Matic" in the casting communitee:D cause it will drip...But I have no problems. I keep a little wire near by in case I need to jam it in the hole in the bottom to keep things clear.

For RB's and lots of other boolits, the Lee moulds ar Great!(cause they are so cheap)... There is a BIG difference in mould preformance with the high end steels or alluminums. I found a long time ago that a VERY clean mold (cleaned with ascetone) will release with out a release agent.. (all you are doing when you smoke a mold is reducing the dia. of the projectile so it will fall out... not needed if your mould is Very Clean. Get yourself a little jug of 2-stroke injection oil to use as a mould lube on the pins and plate ( A TINY bit is all that is needed), if any oil gets in the cavity it will not produce a good ball.

No you don't have to lube RB's... but it will make loading easier.

You will probly break your loading ram if you try to load balls made from "Clip-On" wheel weights... the stick-ons should work fine.

Be warned... casting can be Very expensive since it can cause a huge increase in your shooting volume and it is quite addictive once you start... I probly can't replace my outfit with $2500:D
 
You will want pure lead, wheel weights are too hard for this use. In revolvers there are both loading and shooting problems, plus a safety factor. Get pure lead.
Lubing is not necessary.
I have a bottom pour Lee pot but don't like the pour feature as it doesn't work right all the time and usually leaks. I have tried the adjustments with no luck. So, I dip. Don't mind, once you get into a rythm it is still fast.
Gas is far and away preferable to electric for a pot. I use either a Coleman stove or a Brinkman fryer burner.
I always work outside for ventilation. Wait for a nice day, you don't need rain falling into your molten lead.
 
I no longer cast for revolvers but do cast RB's and Conicals for M/L rifle and my single shot pistols. I will only relate to what I do and my equipment and understand that it's in our nature to stop at what gives us performance.

Smelting;I use a propane turkey type burner outside, in warmer weather. Actually, my burner is a fish fryer which stand a bit higher than the turkey cooker. I use pure lead but if you are going to use in sabots, you can use wheel weights or alloy. Most of the time, I give the wheel weights away and get my pistol lead from what we mine, at the range. The propane burner will give you plenty of heat and in your cast iron pot, will melt rather quickly. I use a commercial flux and cast into muffin pans. I also make decoy weights at this time. My cast iron pot, is actually a two quart cooking pot that has a lid. With the lid on, the lead melts even faster. ..... ;)

Casting;Again, outside and in my Lee electric furnace with drop valve. The drop valve makes the process easier and faster. I feed my furnace using my muffin ingots that are fairly pure. Make sure you heat and square the mold as molten lead really burns if you slatter. I wear woven cotten gloves. I have a small wooden box with a folded towel in the bottom and tap out my projectiles into it. I roll checkk my RB's, visually inpect all and weigh them. All my regets and I get a bunch, go into my smelting pot, for later use.

4. Do the lead balls require lubing after casting as cast bullets do?
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Optional but not really needed as you won't have them around long enough and if you do, the oxidation won't hurt.

Be Safe !!!
 
You guys are wrong about wheel weights. I have been shooting wheel weight round balls for years. Yes they are harder. No they will not break your loading lever. After years of shooting them out of an ASM 1860 Colt, the arbor loosened up a bit and I repaired it with the help of the folks on here, but my loading levers never failed. No they don't lead the barrel. The velocity of a C&B revolver is too slow for leading a hard alloy. Because of the arbor problem, I have been loading the cylinders off the guns. Another thing I do is chamfer the mouths of all my cylinders. It not only makes the balls easier to load, there is no messy ring of lead as the ball is swaged into the chamber and it is thought to prevent front end chain fires.
 
Rifleman nailed it,

For BP rifles and pistols, you will need pure lead. Wheel weight is too hard for the pistols loading lever some can handle the extra umf needed to shove the ball in others wont. With the rifle, I use a cotton patch and lube. But, it never hurt to try different methods.

I use the lee bottom pour electric pot for all my casting, just have to make sure to keep the valve rod and valve clean, what lead leaks from mine is minimal.

I use the Colman propane 1 burner stove to melt the lead down for cleaning and to prepare it for ingots. It will melt 30lb of lead in a small cast iron pot in a short time. I was able to melt 150lb of wheel weight using 3 of the 16.4 oz propane stand up tanks.
 
I cast .451 balls with wheel weights and have no problems with loading in a revolver. The .454s seemed to require more of a push.

I smelt with a Lyman Mini Mag and cast with a Lee Pro 4-20. The Lee pot doesn't leak because I don't use dirty lead in it. All the wheel weights go into the Mini Mag, then I flux and skim all the dross off and pour ingots.

I never tried the propane burner method, but I imagine that it's probably quite a big faster to melt the wheel weights than the old Lyman pot.
 
Clip on weights are harder and don't shrink as much when they cool. You can use them but I only use .454 balls and they are harder to load. Stick on weights are 99.5% pure laed and pose no problems.
 
I'm new here - I've only been reloading and casting since Christmas.

Most people say to use pure lead for muzzle loaders. Some people here are saying it's ok to use wheel weights.

But for sure you can melt over propane or white gas. I melt down my wheel weights using an old dutch oven and a propane burner or a Coleman stove. You might do it on a hot plate if it gets you up to 700 degrees or so.

I have a Lee 4-20 production pot. It does leak, and I have not figured out how to stop it from leaking, but I put a metal cookie tin under the pot and it catches the splashes and I also dump my sprues in there, and periodically just dump them back in the pot.

Bottom pour is nice because you get pure lead off the bottom of the pot - most of the gunk floats on top. Of course you flux and pull off the dross, but little bits remain on the surface and so a bottom pour eliminates that problem.
 
Sounds like you are on the right track. If you are shooting muzzleloaders, try both wheel weights and pure lead and see what works best for you. For me, I use wheel weight alloy because I have a lot of it and pure lead is so much more expensive. You are spot on about bottom pour pots. I started with the Lee production pot and graduated to a better Lyman bottom pour pot years ago.
 
Don't you just LOVE these people who make blanket statements and just repeat the mantra that they heard?
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First off, there is no set mixture in WW alloy. Some will come out on the soft side, others will not. I've had WW smelts that came out so hard just in air-cooled ingot form that they were brittle. They were fantastic for high-pressure rifle loads at 2000+fps. But for RB? I would really suggest not going there. Do I use WW alloy in BP? Sure do. But don't start telling someone new to all this that something is just fine to do without explaining a few things they really should be aware of--even the simple things. Such as... Have you ever tried to use a reamer to unload a WW alloy RB from a muzzle loader? Guess what--if the alloy is as hard as some that I've blended, that little screw attachment isn't even going to scratch it. You're either going to fire it, or leave it loaded. This isn't the type of thing someone new wants to find out the hard way. ;)
 
...and that is your opinion. I have mine. said:
...and that is your opinion. I have mine.
Click to expand...

That's the beauty of this hobby, there's more than one way to be right.

I use two set-ups for my casting. I have a smelting rig consisting of a propane fish fryer and a big iron pot that I use for smelting. For turning raw material into usable ingots. I've got three ingot molds that I picked up at garage sales so that when I'm smelting I can keep my pure lead separate from my wheelweights, separate from my linotype.

I do my bullet casting from a Lee Production Pot. Yeah, the spout drips sometimes, but a little experience will teach you to minimize it. I use my pure lead for bullets under 1000 fps, my wheelweights for midrange loads and I blend a little linotype into bullets that will be pushing 2000 fps.

That's what works for me.
 
Thanks for the comments, guys. I think I am definitely leaning toward the Lee pot for casting; and a separate burner w/cast iron pot for smelting and ingot production. I am strongly leaning toward the Coleman burners that use Coleman fuel or white gas (only because one of them could double as backup for emergency use should I loose power in my all electric house). Now, a couple of other questions.

1. For the guys who use the single burner Colemans...Are there any problems with stability of the rig? ie: the grid surface where the pot sits, the weight of the pot when filled with lead, the small footprint of the single burner. It appears that the old standard two burner Coleman would be more sturdy and stable. However, if there isn't a problem with the single burner, it's hard to justify the additional cost of the two burner stove.

2. For the guys who recommend using pure lead rather than wheel weights. What/where are the best sources for lead?
 
napp,

I originally started casting about 30 years ago on a Coleman 2 burner gas stove and a plumbers pot. Eventually the weight of the lead filled pot and the constant applied heat caused the grate to buckle. I had to modify the stove with angle iron. That's when I switched to a Lee bottom pour pot and never looked back.
 
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