Saturday's here, what to cast?

B

Beagle333

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Saturday's here and the sun is out and the forecast is for 80° with "comfy sun" as the weatherman put it. What to cast? Get out some molds and clean em up for casting. It's gonna be a great day!
 
I need to be casting some for the 327s with a RCBS RN 90 but have entirely too much yard work to do. Maybe tomorrow after church
 
Alrighty..... I got the two part bullet (Lyman 452626 A&B) out and cleaned the molds well and mounted handles. I didn't cast the hollow points in the background today, those were just on my desk and got in the picture).
Then I melted a roof vent (pure lead) and made a few tips for the thing. (the last two pics)

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Now I'm waiting for another pot of hard lead to get up to temp and the hollow body part of the mold is on the hot plate also getting ready. :)



.
 
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And here we have the other half. It would have been easier with a ladle, I think, but I already had the hard stuff in the bottom pour. But all-in-all it wasn't any more difficult than any other single cavity HP. It was kinda fun. And what a great day we had to do it in. So here's the bottom half.

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Now to join them when I get time. Gotta go start dinner now. :)
 
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Well ain't they just cute! haha. And they mic at .453 which is good. I thought I might have to PC them to get the size, being an old Lyman mold, but they are fine. I don't have them epoxied in yet, this is just for the pic, but the final product will look just like this. They come with a top punch that is pointy like the base of the pure lead insert, so they are meant to be sized and lubed before the soft part is glued in.
I like em, as an experiment. This is probably the only bullets I'll ever make with the set. lol :rolleyes::cool:
The final bullet weighs 270 grains. That's a nice weight for .45

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I had the urge today when I came home from work.

I decided to cast some 200 gr 45's for my 4506 45 super rig. Cast em pretty hard with wheel weights and rotometals superhard. The casting gods smiled on me tonight and they came out perfect. Dropped about a hundred.
 
I'd like the design far better if the crimp site were on the soft top portion of the projectile. Having to rely upon an adhesive to ensure the soft nose of the round didn't simply fall out wouldn't please me - especially over time. I can imagine some pretty ugly notions in a mag and while the round chambered in a semi-auto.
 
That’s very true. There are probably many reasons this mold isn’t still made. Fortunately I’m a wheelgun man, although I don’t think I’d be loading any 270grainers in my 1911s anyway. All of my experiments will be in a sixgun and very slowly between rounds.


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I can imagine making the molds so that the set came with a hand tool to sort of pop-rivet the soft nose into the butt of the hard cast base lead in a third step - skip any adhesive. No risk of separation. But all in all, I'd still design this for a case crimp to assist the hold in of the soft nose point.
 
Single cavity Lyman mould.... that was all I could afford for years .
When you got a pile cast with a one-holer you was proud of yourself !

Thanks for showing the two part bullets.... I was thinking about buying a set when they came out...but after thinking how long it would take to make 100 bullets ..cast the front , cast the back , epoxy, let dry.. I just got wore out thinking about the labor intensive process !

I didn't realize you sized the bottom then epoxied the nose in !

Just out of curiosity how long does it take to make them ...?

That bottom part makes a wicked looked hollow point !

Gary
 
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The time is mostly spent waiting for a second pot of alloy to come to temp and heating up a second mold. The casting isn't very slow. It's the same as any other HP single cav and the nose is as easy as round ball casting. I didn't do them exactly back to back, so I can't really say it takes 3 hours to make a hundred. I guess it would depend on how many of each you made once you had the molds up to temp. You could easily pour 300 noses one morning and then do 300 the next morning of the base if you wanted, to make it two easy sessions. The bottom does make a wicked looking HP, but it doesn't weigh very much alone. I think you'd do better using a HBWC backwards.
 
That looks like a fun experiment. Cast up maybe a couple hunnerd and be done with it. Occasionally shoot some into water jugs or the like to see how they perform.


BTW, cast up some 77 grain 32 acp bullets from my milled off 32 mag mold. That is a cantankerous little mold!
 
Got the luber filled with TAC-1 and lubed the bases. I just happened to end up with 85 of them. Now, just to epoxy the noses in and decide on some loads.

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Finally got a warm day with little to no wind, so out onto the porch and smelted 85 pounds of wheel weights into ingots. Probable got that much more to do, but that will have to wait for another day.

Don
 
That's quite a pile of wheel weights, Don. I still have a medium flat rate box of wheel weights to smelt. I guess it's probably 55 pounds or so. I usually get about 85% recovery.
 
Last year, on a visit to my local scrap yard, I spied a bunch of new, huge wheel weights. Since NY quit using the lead wheel weights years ago, I figured they must have set on a garages shelf for a long time and they finally decided to get rid of them. Because of the size of them (most are 4" to 5" long), I figure they must be for trucks. I grabbed about 200# worth at $0.40 a pound. Sometimes being at the right place at the right time is everything.

Don
 
Beagle333,

Have you considered applying powdercoat inside and outside those bases to glue the noses in heat? Might save you a step if you were planning to do the bases anyway.
 
I had thought about the powdercoating as adhesive. It really might be a faster way of doing it if one were going to make many of these, as I could have coated the base and glued the nose in one smooth move. It will glue something together fairly well.
I'm just going to use epoxy on this batch, since I've already lubed them anyway.
 
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