Friends:
Today marked a watershed day in my casting of lead. My issues relate to casting lead for fishing, but I figure this is the best forum to raise my ...failures...and seek advice.
Until today, my experience casting has been to melt wheel weights which I then poured into pyramid sinker moulds impressed into wet sand held i place by tin cans. The eyelet was coathanger wire dangled over the top. Crude, but effective. Still use them.
Today, I fired up a lee pot for the first time, and loaded some good clean wheelweight lead ito it. Hi tech, right? I heated up the mold by running a couple rounds of lead through it (without the hooks installed). All learned on you tube. All good.
My mold was a Do-It Hot Lips "jig" mould, for which I planned to develop some killer snook lures.
The mold requires that a person set in jig hooks in before closing the mold and pouring in the lead. That actually took a little time in each case as the durn hooks would not lay straight. But I figured that out.
My two big problems are as follows:
1) Initially, the lead poured out of the electric Lee pot just fine, but after a few rounds it clammed up, would not pour the lead out the bottom spigot thing. Finally, I wound up having to pick up and pour out the unused molten lead (about 5 lbs worth) so I could store the Lee pot
away.
2) Had a failure rate of mebbe 80% on the jigs themselves. Lots of incompete fills, and all sorts of swirls in the lead where one would prefer a nice clean pour. Seems simple in concept, but....
Kinda dissapointing, really. I look at you gents with the wonderful hyper clean casts with your bullets and wonder what I'm screwing up.
My appplication is for fishing jigs ( have a couple sinker molds I want to try as well), not shooting, but seems to me the lessons learned would be similar.
Any tips gratefully appreciated.
