Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Need some paitient education.

First off, there is a lot of info out there to sift through and much of it is for advanced casting and procedures. Too much for me to sift through to make an educated decision.

My end goal is to make 38 spcl bullets for a S&W 5" barrel, slugs for 2 Colt Dragoons and round balls for a .32 Muzzle loader.

What I have- 1 6 gallon bucket of wheel weights, Lyman 20# electric lead pot, lead pot, 2 different 38 bullet molds and some other lead melting stuff. Flux, ladle, skimming spoon.

My questions-Lead quality/hardness for bullets for my purposes, gas checks, sizing, lubing etc.. Also desire to make snake shot using the blue capsules.

First plan is to melt and clean all the wheel weights and pour into ingots. From there I would like to pour my 38 slugs first. Any pointers or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sort out the wheelweights before you melt them - clip-on style for the .38, stick-on style for the round balls. The stick-on weights are near pure lead, usually, and the clip-on are a little harder alloy.

Make sure to sort out the zinc weights, they will contaminate your pot.

If you bought some sort of commercial flux, throw it away. Clean sawdust works much better and doesn't gunk up the sides of your pot.

That was money well spent. LOL Picked up three cap and ball pistols tonight for 300.00. Now 44 slug mold needs to happen.

I like to use dead soft lead for C&B conicals and ML rifle balls. Stick on WW's have a little hardness, not much though but maybe enough to make seating the C&B conicals a little difficult. Just load them as cast, no need to pre-size them unless they are grossly oversize.

For the .38 bullets, I would mix some stick-ons in with the clip-on WW's; enough to bring the hardness down to a fairly soft state. If the bullets are sized to fit the cylinder throats and are properly lubed you can get by with very soft bullets, with good accuracy and no leading. As an example, dig your thumbnail into a factory lead-bulleted cartridge- pretty soft. No gas checks are needed here, but accuracy considerations may demand them if the bullet design calls for them- one way to find out.

Let us know when you get to the bottom of this rabbit hole! I've been casting since 1968 and haven't gotten to the bottom of this hole yet!

Last weekend I melted down and poured all the lead into ingots. I have a wheel weight pile and a tape weight pile. Would a one to one ration of WW to Tape weight be satisfactory for 44 cal revolver balls?

Were it me, I would use just the stick-on lead. The harder mix you propose will work, and shoot ok, but the thing about using hard lead for balls/conicals in a C&B revolver is the added difficulty of swaging them as you seat them in the cylinder. That extra force applied to the loading lever can be detrimental to the overall tightness of the gun and can conceivably break a hinge pin in the linkage. At the very least it's harder on your hand! I always stick with soft plumber's lead, or lead pipe, or lead sheathing material for such projectiles- the softer the lead the better.

Another vote for going all stickon ww's for the balls.

If you have lots of stickons, mixing them 50/50 with clip ons is a good alloy for the 38 special. But I've shot 1000's of clip on ww's out of the 38 which works fine as well.

If you used your 20# pot to melt down all the ww's, then it's going to be filthy. When the pot is empty and COLD fill it up with water. Plug it in and when the water starts boiling use a ss scrub brush to remove all the crud from the pot. Unplug it and dump the water and crud out.

With clean ingots and a clean furnace you'll have to use very little flux when casting bullets. When you see a little bit of sludge floating on the top is a little bit of wax, I just heat up a spoon in the melt and let some wax melt on the spoon and mix it into the melt then skim the top. The wax will burst into flames and even though I know it's coming it always startles me.

Make sure your molds are good and hot before casting or your first 50-100 bullet will be wrinkled and you'll have to remelt them.

As far as sizing, it depends on the gun. Some 38's are tight an you need to size the bullets 0.357", some allow bullets sized .358" o4 .359". You'll have to slug your bore and measure the throats of the cylinder to see what you need to size to.

No need for gas checks in a 38. One of the beauties of the 38 since it runs mild pressures it's not picky about alloy hardness and a bit of most any decent lube will do the trick. You can powder coat, use lee liquid alox or 45/45/10 or most any stick lube. I like white labels BAC, his prices are so reasonable it's not worth making your own and it's good stuff! http://www.lsstuff.com/

Today my Lyman handles arrive from Cabelas. Had no idea Lyman molds come without. Will be pouring round balls from the tape weight for my 44 cal pistols. Finally gathered all the stuff to shoot them, pellets, patches, caps and wonder seals. Word must be spreading, found a large lead pipe and some other lead tape in the back of my truck. LOL

[quote=458 Lott


As far as sizing, it depends on the gun. Some 38's are tight an you need to size the bullets 0.357", some allow bullets sized .358" o4 .359". You'll have to slug your bore and measure the throats of the cylinder to see what you need to size to.

No need for gas checks in a 38. One of the beauties of the 38 since it runs mild pressures it's not picky about alloy hardness and a bit of most any decent lube will do the trick. You can powder coat, use lee liquid alox or 45/45/10 or most any stick lube. I like white labels BAC, his prices are so reasonable it's not worth making your own and it's good stuff! http://www.lsstuff.com/ [/quote]


All good advice, but I would counter by saying don't bother measuring the bore. Just size the bullets so they barely pass through the throats of the chambers and ignore the bore diameter. That's what drives accuracy in a revolver. If the resultant bullet is smaller than groove diameter, and is sufficiently soft, it'll bump up to fill the grooves from the pressure of the gasses pushing it. If larger than groove diameter, it'll swage down to fit. You'll likely get less leading (or no leading) by following this protocol, too. Again, it's counter-intuitive but soft alloys will lead less than hard alloys by following this protocol too, all else being equal.

Ouch. Those aren't cheap. I absolutely refuse to buy Lyman, Saeco, or RCBS mold handles at ~$40 a pop (yard sale finds are an exception). I have yet to find a mold that I can't make Lee handles fit (with quick and minor modifications). And at less than $15 a pair (often on sale for $11 or $12 a pair) I don't mind screwing with them a little.

--Saeco molds need to have the pin hole in each arm drilled out slightly.
--RCBS molds need to have the arm thickness sanded down slightly (few passes with a sanding pad on an angle grinder is all that's needed).
--I seem to remember Lyman molds accepting Lee handles with no modification (been a while since I have messed with a Lyman mold).
--NOE, no modification.
--Haven't messed with any other mold brands.

A little bit of use will start to see the arms slip out of the wooden handles. I usually just file a small notch in the end of the arm insert (that slides into the wooden handle), put a few drops of epoxy into the mold handle and slide the arms back into the handle. After that, none of them have moved in years.

And I personally like the longer arms on the Lee handles compared to the RCBS / Saeco / Lyman handles. Lets me open the mold up much wider when dumping bullets or to clear issues when I am working with a HP mold.

+ 1 for the Lee 6 cavity handles. I use them on everything.

This evening I was melting down a lead pipe and something wasn't right. It had almost a rainbow sheen to it and no matter how many times I fluxed it, I still kept getting this green slag off. I spent over an hour trying to scrape this green stuff off but it just kept coming and kept the rainbow sheen. Any ideas?

If you get lead too hot it will oxidize and produce the sheen you mention. So long as you are too hot, you'll keep oxidizing the top of the melt.

Were you using a thermometer to adjust your heat?

It may have been some of the alloys in the lead. I have got the lead so hot that the tin was oxidizing; but that was a gold sheen.

Yep. Way too hot.

You really need to use a thermometer for bullet casting.

Yep, that is a compound in the alloy causing the colorization. Have been casting for 30+ years and never used a thermometer. Pretty tough to get in trouble temperature-wise in casting, as problems show up almost immediately with the quality of the bullets dropping out of the mould.

Don

No thermometer but did just ordered one. Probably was too hot. Lesson learned.