Rain is gone... fire up the pot!

[Beagle333]

I am making some NOE 360160 WFN's today. 160 grains of fun. It is an RG4 mold (HP mold) but with the flat pins in it, it casts really easy.

But..... if I close the mold upside down, the flat pins don't settle all the way down and they make this really neat indented meplat that isn't really a HP, but kinda is. I cast some both ways, just for the fun of it.

 

[m&p45acp10+1]

Beagle looks like you have a huge pile of reject bullets that I will be kind enough to take off of your hands if you will cover the shipping that is.

Those are some great looking bullets there. Now lube them up, and go make a lot of holes in some stuff.

 

[LAH]

In all my days.

 

[Beagle333]

Now lube them up, and go make a lot of holes in some stuff.

'Sizing and lubing em up now

 

[Mike / Tx]

In all my days.

Bout spit coffee out when I read that.....

Ya gotta admit, he seems to get the most out of his molds no matter which one he is using....plus, he's havin a ball doin it too.

Beagle,,

looking at your cookie cutter in the other thread, got me wondering about the last batch I pan lubed. When I did them, I simply set the bullets into the holes which remained from my last batch. THen I set the pan on the hot plate on low until it had all melted in good around the bullets. What I used was a golf club handle that I measured and cut to just bigger than the bullets. It di an OK job, but it left plenty of lub around them that I had to keep cleaning off the sides of the sizer when I sized them.

So, I see you mentioned you sized first,( which I hadn't thought of), does that new cutter clean them off enough to be good for seating in the case? I mean when I size them in the Lee sizer, I know two things are going to come from it. One, some of the excess lube WILL get mashed into the grooves of the bullet, and two, what doesn't stay in the grooves will be cleaned off and the sides will be nice and clean when they pop out the top. Well pretty clean anyway.

I don't need to get the extra building up in the seating dies is what I am trying to avoid.

Oh and BTW, I am hopeful that I will be able to get up a pic of the MP 358-640's I loaded up for the 357 sometime today.

 

[Beagle333]

My operation isn't very fancy...

I just melt a hunk o' TAC#1 in a little condiment cup and dip mine just to the crimp groove with a pair of pliers and set em back on the wax paper and cut em out later.

My cutter was designed to have .002 clearance on each side of a boolit sized to .358, so it is .362 and does leave a small film on the side. To get em slicked up like in the picture above your post, I run em through the Lee sizer again to get that .002 off of em. Buildup isn't a problem in my Lee dies, but I do size em again before using my Hornady Dimension series, because it has a little sliding sleeve in there that holds the boolit in alignment with the case all the way through seating and it will get some buildup on it. I only use the Hornady's on the wife's 125gr .38 loads though. Apparently the Lee lines up the longer case of the .357 and the longer boolit well enough and I don't need that kind of precision for loading them.

So to answer your question.... after casting, I tumble em very very lightly in Alox (the sizer will sometimes put a "skirt" of lead on em if I don't lube em just a little before sizing), then size, dip, cut out, and then sometimes shove em through the sizer again to clean em up extra pretty or I can just load after cutting out.

 

[Beagle333]

Here's a shot of em as cut out, without going through the sizer again, just to show how much lube is left on the driving bands. It's almost invisible, but I'm sure that after a couple hundred boolits, you might see some on the seating die.
(Can you tell I have a cat? A lubed boolit will attract a cat hair from 60 feet away!!! )

 

[GP100man]

Good Going Beagle333!!!

I loobed up some of those 358429s sat & they shoot where I aim ,did`nt take time to put em thru the chrono or on paper.
They were 9bhn & 7gr. of IMR800X did`nt lead a bit with randy rat`s TAC#1.

Funny how the camera finds things !!

 

[Beagle333]

Always gotta do a bunch of the 358432 ....

(of course, the ones on the right haven't been punched out after being dipped)

 

[LAH]

Good looking stuff.