So with the shooting excursion called off, Cro decided to bust out the molds and turn some discarded wheel weights into something more useful. I figured it would make for a decent blog post, so I came over with the camera and ended up learning something.
The process is pretty straight forward, toss the weights into the pot, the lead melts, and the less dense steel clips float up to the top where you can scoop them out.
Plop in some bees' wax to keep things flowing and smelling a little better (it acts as a flux) and pretty soon you get some nice molten lead ready for molding.
Add enough bees' wax, and it'll flash over for a bit, which you can use to smoke the mold, depositing some carbon on it to help the bullets pop out. Plus it makes for my favorite picture of the day:
Seriously, those are the kind of pics that motivate me to lug the thing around.
Anyway, back to the bullets. So once you get the lead hot and melty, you can start heating the mold, basically running some lead through it till the bullets actually start looking good.
Cro uses the Lee two bullet molds
, they're a good size, and pretty simple to use with the built in sprue cutter, and they heat better than the 6 bullet molds. I wouldn't want to handle anything bigger under his little pot either. Once they're warmed up, you get some pretty nice looking bullets.
Then we just tossed them in a bucket of water with a towel stuffed in the bottom to keep them from bouncing and getting deformed.
We found that with two guys with the two bullet molds, you can get a pretty good rhythm going. Two hours of BSing, and we had a nice pile of .44 and 9mm bullets for the price of the electricity to heat the pot.
I think I need to pick up a .45acp mold and a beater GI barrel. Quite a few tire places will let you have buckets of used wheel weights, so for the cost of powder and primers, I could be shooting 1911 for nearly .22 prices...
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