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I think I have most of what I need. I have:
20 lb Lee bottom pour pot
RCBS mould #45-255-SWC, 2 cavity mould for 0.454 with handles
20 lbs lead from RMR that list a hardness of 10
Safety equipment to include welding gloves, eye protection and a well ventilated area to work.

The revolver is a Ruger Blackhawk (1977) that has oversized throats. Normal 45 colt size bullets slide right through the cylinder. I did slug the barrel and it is the normal dimensions.

I have been loading and shooting lead bullets from Montana Bullets, and others, but want to give this casting a try.

The lead is in the form of rejected bullet cores and thin wire sections. I have been reading an online book by Glen Frywell and Robert Applegate, but that is almost information overload.

I am guess that I should start with casting ingots, and a mould for that is the one thing I don't have at the moment.

I am hoping someone here can point in the direction I should be going.

There is a lot of experience on this site. They will contribute immensely.

Veral Smith’s book gives good info on bullet fit and how alloy plays into the equation. Not required reading but something that might help and is interesting.

Are the throats in your cylinder uniform? That’s a bigger hurdle than them being oversized.

If you have a welder you can make a couple ingot molds by splitting a piece of 1 1/2” black iron pipe and welding caps of sheet steel on the ends. Or swipe a muffin tin from the Mrs. Ingots don’t necessarily need to be pretty, just manageable sizes.

Thanks, I have been watching his videos and learning.

As best as I can tell, the throats are 0.455. Thats measuring with a basic caliper.

I did a test run and realized that the Lee pot is not ideal for turing the scrap lead into ingots as there is not a lot of room below and the flow is slow to fill the ingots. I picked up a cast iron pan that I can use over a camp stove. I have an old corn-cob bread mould that I plan on using for the ingots.

I also ordered some hard lead that I can mix in to make this lead a bit harder.

I tested out the bullet mould to get a feel for bullet casting. Some of the bullets actually came out nice. This is the good and the bad.



I took a few of the good ones, lubed and loaded them over BE-86 for a 800-900 fps load. They shot accurate, but I noticed that the bore was leaded up pretty good for only 8 lead bullets. As a comparison, I was also shooting 105 and 158 grain lead Badman bullets in two 357 mags which had no leading in the bores.

That is a decent start. I found out (here) that getting and keeping your mold to good casting temperature, 315-350 degrees. helps the fill out of the alloy leaving you sharper and cleaner looking bullets. Adding a bit of tin to your alloy breaks the surface tension of the lead but tin is expensive. So pre-heating your mold is the cheapest way to get better bullets. So a temperature probe or a infrared gun ( https://www.yourbestdigs.com/reviews/the-best-infrared-thermometer/) really helps. The probe gets into your pot while the gun reads the surface.

Getting your molds TOO hot may warp them. Getting your alloy too hot will boil your tin out of the alloy. It is a game of watching and balancing your rate of casting to how hot your are making your alloy and mold. Once you find your sweet spot you will love your production.

As for substitute ingot molds I use stuff like this: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Deoxygen...ls-Kitchen-Dining-Bar-Supplies/427847421

I pour them to about a inch deep so they will fit into my pot.

What did you lube those bullets with?

It's important to completely degrease your mold before you begin casting. If there's any hint of oil or grease in them you'll get wrinkles and poor fill-out.

Keeping the melt well fluxed will help reduce the viscosity of the molten metal and help it flow better. This contributes to a well filled out bullet also. I use Marvellux, which many casters hate because it leaves ugly residue in the pot, but it reduces the alloy's viscosity to that of water, almost and that's the main reason I use it. Also, it won't ignite like paraffin and bullet lube often will. I find that once my mold is up to temperature, the bullets I drop are near perfectly filled out. I don't recall whether paraffin or bullet lube have as dramatic an effect on viscosity of the melt because I haven't used either for flux in decades...but I do think Marvellux is fairly unique as far as that property goes.

I like to run my melt at about 700 degrees, and sometimes a little higher. Once I get the mold up to temperature I watch for frosty looking bullets. Once you start seeing that just slow down the pace a little. A frosty surface does not, IMO, mean the bullet is bad...it just means you're running a little hot.

^^^^ What he said

Thanks all. Lots of good info.

I managed to get the rest of the scrap melted into ingots today.

For the few bullets I tested, I used a bees wax based lube that I use for black powder. Not ideal, but I will be mixing up a batch this week from a recipe I saw online that uses paraffin as a base.

may want to look at sizing your bullets a bit "larger" to fill the throat and that will reduce or eliminate the leading you are getting.

How is that done? I understand sizing, but sizing up?

The mould is a 0.454, and the bullets as cast, have to be pushed through the cylinder.

I had considered getting another cylinder in hopes that it would be undersized and could be honed, but have not pursued that route yet. 250 gr XTPs will not shoot to well out of that revolver. The Montana cast 250 grain round nose flat tips will shoot good if over a healthy charge of Longshot.

I am into this revolver on the cheap and want to see what it can do before putting more money into it.

There are a lot of guys here who know much more about cast bullets than I do, but I'll throw some stuff out there for you since responses aren't showing.

Hornady's 250-grain XTPs are .452" and that might be a part of the reason they aren't working well for you.

Bullets cast of harder alloys tend to drop from the mold with slightly increased diameter. That's one way to increase diameter and maybe, possibly get a tighter chamber mouth fit, but that's not an automatic way to get best results because harder alloys can pose other problems depending on the situation. The increases in diameter seen with harder alloys are pretty limited.

If you're having to push bullets through the chamber mouths of your revolver, then the diameter should be just about right. I would avoid reducing diameter when sizing and lubing if that's the case. Lube-and-size dies come in many diameters, so you should select one that won't spoil a good chamber mouth fit.

One thing that should be understood is base obturation. When the cartridge is fired the base of the bullet is subjected to a lot of pressure, and that pressure can and should cause the bullet's base to fill out the chamber mouth and seal it. If the seal is not good, then pressure can escape around the base of the bullet and essentially erode the bullet's surface and that leads to leading. Sometimes you may need to harden a bullet to inhibit leading due to higher velocities but there is definitely such a thing as too hard. Hardness needs to be balanced for the application and circumstances and obturation is a part of the equation.

In the same vein, powder selection can be an important contributor to success (or failure). Using a faster burning powder to achieve a desired velocity is sometimes the way to go because the base of the bullet receives a very rapid "kick in the butt," encouraging it to seal the bore. Using a light charge of a slower burning powder to achieve that same velocity might not provide the obturation needed---and you end up scrubbing lead out of the bore. Taken all together, it's a balancing act between pressures and burn rates and alloy hardness, as well as bullet diameter being optimal. I'm sure there are a lot of other things that should be said...but I've been yabbering long enough here...

Hope this helps.

Accurate measuring of the cylinder throats should be done with pin gauges. Powdercoating rather than wax lubing allows for increasing the diameter of cast bullets. It's also cleaner and allows for easier long term storage. Although I have been told I should size my bullets to .452", I size to .454" and life is good.

Thanks, Dinny

Agree about using pin gauges. Short of that, if the bullet passes through the throats with a bit of resistance you're probably good to go. As others have said, counter intuitively a softer bullet will often lead less, IF it fits properly and has good lube. I can't speak to powder coating as my sole experience is with some bullets that Dinny sent me to try (so far so good).

Well you got me firing up my pot again so thank you! Gnoahhh is one of the gurus we were mentioning so I hope the great advice starts to flow.

Have you been on Castboolits.com? It is a very busy site. If you have the time you can get into a lot of rabbit holes if information. If you feel that you are seriously getting into cast bullets, you can try the Cast Bullet Association.

How are you set for lead? If you are really short I have some roofing lead I can part with.

Don't over think the cast bullet thing. I cast & shot lead for 25 years with no guidance except an old Lyman Loading Manual which contained some casting instructions. It wasn't till the internet came along that I found I'd been wrong for all those years. Still the only problem I had was some leading to clean. Guns shot good & killed good & were plenty accurate. In your case order as mould of standard weight that cast large enough to size .454" & some Carnauba lube from https://lsstuff.com/.

Thanks all. I did a casting session today and it took me a while, but I finally found a sweet spot. I had started with the dial set at #7, but the bullets were frosty. Worked the temp down to #5 on the dial setting. Next purchase needs to be a temp guage. The bullets that looked like the middle one seemed to be the best. The shiny ones like the left did not have sharp edges on the driving bands. Maybe I was letting the mould cool down on those. I have a bunch of bullets to play around with now.



As for powder coating, I was watching some videos today and may give it a try. Does not look hard at all.

While waiting on the lube to melt, I completely dissembled the Ruger, cleaned, and reassembled it.

Good fill-out is key. Only you can determine what cadence and temperature to run at (and it'll vary with the alloy, so strive for consistency on that score once you've worked that out). Don't reject the frosty bullets, they'll work fine.

It appears that you've got a handle on the process - keep it going. The thing with external advice and reading books/articles is that at some point you gotta start doing it yourself and learn by doing. Empirical knowledge is often the best knowledge. Not all casting equipment is created equal, no two molds are perfectly identical, no two caster's temperaments are created equal, no two guns are equal, and oh-my-god no two homebrewed alloys are created perfectly equal. Lots of variables that we in our chairs a thousand miles away can't observe and comment on, so at some point you have to assimilate what you've learned and start making your own mistakes - and you'll progress via the more mistakes you make, if you learn from them.

Make notes as you go along. You'll soon be so far down the rabbit hole you won't remember every little thing you worked out. You sure don't want to repeatedly re-invent the wheel.

Join the Cast Bullet Association. Lots of good folks there with a couple millenias-worth of collective experience. The forum takes a more scholarly approach than others, and the newsletter/magazine is always full of well thought out articles. Plus, you get to sample some of the wisdom of C.E."Ed"Harris who is a bastion of the organization. I'm fortunate (or unfortunate depending on point of view!) to have been in on the CBA darn near from the beginning, and listening to some of the old guys there 40+ years ago set me on a true course that saved me a lot of grief. I sure do miss some of the CBA founding fathers and casting luminaries that have passed on, but those guys created a hive of knowledge that has endured (and been added to) so their legacy is firmly cemented in the organization.

If you do join the CBA, make sure to buy the CD containing all of Frank Marshall's articles from "The Fouling Shot" newsletter. That guy (who would be about 110 years old if he were still alive) had more practical knowledge about this stuff and conveyed it in a folksy/humorous manner.

Waiting for lube to melt? Are you pan lubing? I still do that for my .32-40 schuetzen bullets as I shoot my bullets as-cast, breech seated* at the range/matches, and I've yet to find a portable bullet lube pump that isn't a messy nightmare when sitting at the shooting bench.

* Breech seating: the act of shoving the soft lead rifle bullet up into the rifling as a separate step ahead of the charged case. Done via several methods of which all work, the only important thing is to get the bullet firmly and straightly started into the rifling. Key word there is straightly. No messing around with reloading dies and running the risk of creating a crooked cartridge which dooms accuracy. I go to the range with a box of naked lubed bullets and bullet seating tool, a pre-set powder measure, de-recapping tool, some primers, and one cartridge case. The cartridge case I used for three days at last weekend's match is the same case I'd been using for hundreds of shots previously, and it's still going strong.

Yup. Pan lubing at the moment. Until I find a better way.

Nothing wrong with doing that, especially if your bullets drop from the mold at desired diameter. In fact, a lot of serious cast bullet accuracy buffs buy custom molds (Accurate Molds is a good source) that drop their bullets at a diameter pre-ordained for the exact alloy being used. Tom at Accurate Molds is a master at creating that phenomenon. Doing that, and merely pan lubing guarantees a bullet that isn't conflicted by passing it through a sizing die.

One way to skin the pan lubing cat: set bullets in the tray, pour molten lube to desired depth (don't ever get the lube so hot that it smokes - that messes with its viability), let cool until solid. Then set the tray in the freezer for a half hour-45 minutes. Remove from freezer, turn upside down, and coax the whole shebang out of the tray - bullets, wax, and all. Then merely press the bullets out of the wax with your thumb. Done. Put the empty cake of lube back in the tray and insert the next batch of bullets into the empty holes, re-melt, repeat. The bullets end up with perfectly filled lube grooves.

Edit: don't set the bullets so close together that they impinge on their neighbors. It makes re-using the lube cake easier for the next go-around.

I ordered some tin and did another casting session today. Mixed up 10 lbs of lead and managed to cast about 250 bullets and got most of them lubed. The addition of the tin seemed to make a difference, as the shoulders were much sharper. These are two I plucked out of the batch.



Now, I have replaced the older Blackhawk with a newer 5 1/2" stainless Bisley. The older Blackhawk had really loose cylinder/throats. This newer revolver has much tighter chambers and the throats seem to be right at 0.451. I am considering sending it off to a gunsmith for an accuracy job, but want to shoot it a little more first. The mold is casting these bullets at about 0.454, but are not concentric. Will I need to size these for best accuracy?

"Seem to be right at .451?" Best make sure. Push a bullet through the throat(s) and mic it. If indeed it's .451 then yes, I would plan on sizing them down. .003" oversize is quite an unnecessary squeeze. Rule of thumb (literally) is the bullet should be able to be pushed through the throat with but slight resistance. A thousandth oversize is ok, but a thou undersize really isn't.

My friend gnoahhh gives good advice as always. But you can shoot them at .454" but like he says, that's a lot of squeeze. I had a 45 ACP cylinder with .448 throats. I also had an oddball Lyman mould for the 45ACP which dropped a bullet at .457" which I sized .454" & shot using that cylinder. While it did lead some it lacked nothing for accuracy. So, so figure.

Good thing is that last batch I made did not seem to lead up the barrel at all. I did run a bullet through one of the cylinders and it took some pressure to get it through. It measured right at 0.451.

What would be a good sizing setup to begin with? The lee kit that mounts on top of a press?

Just ordered a 6 cavity mold, 358-158-RP for the 38 spc/357 mag.

The Lee push through die is just fine, especially if you are pan lubing the bullets. (As it appears you are?) Were it me I would try sizing at .452 initially.

Of course we're assuming the barrel's groove diameter is the same as or smaller than the throats. If the opposite is true (not farfetched) then run your bullets as large as you can conveniently get them through your throats. Or better yet have the throats reamed to a bit larger diameter - not expensive and any good pistolsmith can do it.

Getting hooked, arentcha?!

Curious as to what ratio tin/lead you settled on.

I had some 70/30 and tin from Rotometal and lead from another source. Tried to get the 2% tin, 6% antimony, and the rest lead ratio. I would like to think I got in the neighborhood of that.

Definitely be shooting more, which I need. I admit I need lots of practice with revolvers.

The Lee 6 cavity 38/357 mold came in today. I cleaned, and smoked it and tried it out. With the RCBD iron mold, keeping the lead right around 700 seemed to work best. With the Lee aluminum mold, I had to keep the lead at 800+ deg to get good bullets. The first couple dozen went back in the pot until I git the temps worked out. I would get on a roll, then the bullets would come out extra frosty so I had to let the mold cool a bit.

Quite a few of the bullets would have a section of frostiness on one side only.

I ordered the Lee sizer kit for the 45 cal bullets. In the interim, I loaded up some of the bullets ahead of 8.5 grains of Shooters World Ultimate Pistol. It is a nice accurate easy shooting load, but I have to crank down the Lee FCD to get them to chamber completely and allow the cylinder to rotate. I am hoping the sizer kit will ease the loading issues. Didn't have the problem with the older Blackhawk with the looser chambers.

That frostiness won't hurt a thing. Shoot 'em! (At least you know you're getting optimal mold fill-out when that happens.)

The Lee sizing kit came in and it makes a big difference in loading.

The two on the left were unsized, I had to turn down the Lee Factory Crimp die quite a bit until the rounds would fit in the chamber. Crimp looks pretty mangled.

After sizing the bullets, four on the right, I was able to seat and crimp with a RCBS seating die with no issues. Hoping to test these out on Thursday.

Going to order the Lee sizing kit for 38/357 bullets and try powder coating.

Curious as to why your goal is to powder coat? No doubt it's good, and no doubt it's all the rage now, but not really necessary (especially at the velocities you're playing with). If you dislike your current setup and wish to upgrade for speed of production, perhaps a good old used lubrisizer may be for you. You can chunk out a lot of bullets with one and be loading/shooting them while the guy next to you is still flutzing around with powder coating. (Although for sure PC'ing isn't deathly slow to do, speed in the process doesn't come until you have all the bugs worked out and have an efficient system in place.)

Just dislike working with the wax, plus I am always on the lookout for another slippery slopes to slide down. The lube does seem to work well and there was no leading after the last range session, but would like to play around with different methods. The current batches are all lubed so I have a lot of shooting to do before starting with the powder coat stuff.

Main hobby used to be woodworking and making custom furniture as a side gig. This reloading stuff has taken center stage and the woodshop is only collecting dust at the moment.