casting bullets

[whyohe]

i'm starting to cast my own bullets for my BP guns but i feel the info is applicable to any bullet.

1) what type of flux and or brand do you use or recomend and why? and how much per pound do you use?

2) what do you "coat" the mould with to keep bullet from sticking? or even proceses to keep bullet from sticking in mould.

3) do you cool you bullets in any thing special? water mixed with any thing?

[boarhog]

Whyohe,
I used to cast my own 370 gr maxi-balls for .50 cal, and 575 roundballs and 505 gr Minnie balls for .58 cal. Since I was using near pure lead, the only flux I used was a #1 buckshot sized dob of beeswax stirred into the cauldron now and then to bring slag and impurities to the top so they could be skimmed off. The castings were dropped into a box lined with an old towel covered by a piece of leather to keep the hot bullets from igniting the towel.

Casting with wheel weights, or some other hard alloy used for cartridge loading, can be hardened by dropping into water, or by heating to the proper temp in an oven. It has been too long ago for me to quote chapter and verse on the details, but the Lyman Cast Bullet manual should be a wealth of knowledge on the subject. There are probably other sources of good info as well.

[mshm99]

Fluxes: oil and saw dust mixed, dab of parafin wax as previously stated bee wax. Fluxing pure lead functions more to clean up the impurities. With really dirty lead ,you may have to melt ,flux several times ,cast into a muffin tin ,or some other type tapered mold , allow to cool , extract from the mold and clean the under side of the ingot with a wire brush. There is crud in the melt heavier than lead .Pure lead is a must for BP shooting. Wheel weights are too hard to engrave on the rifling while loading. If you see any crystaline structure on your cast bullets , it won't work very well for a muzzleloader. You flux wheel weights to keep the antimony ,arsenic and trace amounts of tin suspended. Midway sells a product called drop free, which nothing more than a moly spray. Smoking the mold with zippo lighter , wooden matches or a candle are the time honored ways to help them drop free of the mold.

Dropping pure lead bullets into a 5 gallon bucket water or a several layers of cloth makes no difference.

Dropping wheel weight bullets into water will harden them up a bit after they sit for 24 hours. They can be heat treated to harden them up a lot.

mshm

[whyohe]

I've been finding out info in the internet and see what ya think.

As to fluxes people use bees wax and saw dust. What i found interesting is a flux use on lino type machines guys are using called Vitaflux. and they say it is the best they have used and they use wooden paint stirs to scrape sides of the pot and that the stir helps too.

As to keep the bullets from sticking most are saying a warm mold helps, a bullet sticks in a cold mold. I remember my dad pre heating his molds. he melted his lead on a Colman stove and preheated his mold on that too.

i really haven't found much on cooling them. what I've seen on videos is they drop them on a moist cloth of some sort.

all i have available to me right now is wheel weight lead, cause its free to me right now. i do have some pure lead( i think) from when they re-done my roof. it was used around the drain vents to seal them. so i was going to mix some of that in after i "clean" the wheel weight lead. hope fully that will soften it up some.

[rossman40]

Here is a real good article that I found,

www.lasc.us/CastBulletNotes.htm

As far as pure lead look for a plumbing supply store. They will have 5 or 10 pound ingots of pretty much pure lead. Look at the ingots, if the are gray or maybe even with a bluish tint it will be pure, if it is real shiny like silver then it may have tin in it. You can play with your ratio of wheel weights and pure lead to get the hardness you want. with BP speeds and pressure you do not need real hard lead.

[whyohe]

thanks rossman, lots of good info there.

[savedbyjc7]

midway sells a product called drop out. spray it on the inside of the mold. i cast for all my milspec rifles, mainly mosin's/finn rifles and round ball in the .50 hawken. as for flux i use candle wax. just dip a candle in the melted lead for a couple seconds.

[10ga]

Just google etc cast boolits best cast boolit site in the world.

[forester]

Aug 10, 2009 15:57:31 GMT -5 10ga said:

Just google etc cast boolits best cast boolit site in the world.

10ga is right, the cast boolits form has all of the information a man could ever want, and if they don't have the answer some one there will set to work figuring it out just because it bothers them not to know!

I have cast something in the neighborhood of 50,000 boolits in the last several years and tried a number of different things.

1. when I am cleaning up my WW or other alloy I use spent case tumbler media for flux, it works well, I don't mind using a bunch of it, and it would just be thrown out otherwise. In my casting pot I use Midway's brand of flux or some bullet lube.

2. Midways's drop out works well on moulds that like it, on moulds that don't its beating your head against a wall. "Smoking" the cavities with a butane lighter works great in almost any mould, but does not last as long as the spray on stuff. Whatever you do, make sure the mould is spotless, perfect, clean and degreased or nothing will work.

3. It depends...WW alloy will harden several points if you drop them in a bucket of water, the bigger the temp difference (colder water) the more hardening you will get. I air cool boolits for low velocity pistols, and water drop them when I want to go fast in a rifle. Pure lead (for your BP guns) will not harden in water because there in no antimony present to make the process work. You still might want to cool them this way though because it "sets" them much cooling like a sweat joint in copper pipe.

The correct hardness for a hunting boolit is a long, long discussion, for .45 caliber and up rifles I always figured that a hole that size all the way through was good enough to kill darn near anything and just went with whatever hardness the gun likes best.

No need to mix the water with anything...other than I have put ice in it before when trying to reach maximum hardness.