Bullet Casters around Duncan Area

[RedHawk357Mag]

Hello just wondering if there are many casters around the Duncan area. I have been casting for a few years in the calibers of 357 and 44. I use mostly brass and alum molds. I have one steel mold that I haven't casted with yet. I use the NOE alums and brass molds from Accurate and Mihec. The steel mold I have is Hensley Gibbs #50. I use Lee electric pots/furnaces, I have a ten pounder bottom pour that I seldom use, then more often used Lee 20 pounder bottom pour with a PID. I use the Lee 20 pounder dipper furnace to preheat ingots. I have considered ladle casting but haven't gone that route just yet but have everything to venture into that when I get back to Duncan. Most of the time I use COWW or COWW/Pure 50/50. Also collect quite a bit of range scrap but haven't casted anything with it yet. Been assembling an assortment of reloading dies with the intent of experimenting with different resizing of brass diameters and expanding cases to find optimal reloading case prep. So far have RCBS, Redding and Hornady Duracromes in 357 and 44 for this adventure. Also experimenting with Redding Profile crimps and the Lee Factory Crimp dies. The Lees are not Carbide crimp dies. Lee Factory Carbide Crimp Dies are problematic with over sized cast bullets. Also use Lyman M dies for expanding and currently awaiting some custom expanders from Old Buffalo Arms/Molds to expand cases just a touch more than the Lymans are capable of. My guns have had cylinders reemed to .358 and .431. I use either Lee push throughs or Magma Star resizer to size to .359 and .431. Also planning to experiment with some newly acquired Pat Marlin Alum gas checks. Also wondering if anyone has committed to acquiring a Magma Master Caster pot. Would like to see what 575 dollars gets you in a 40 lb bottom casting pot. Thanks for reading and look forward to seeing what others are doing.

 

[Blitzfike]

I'm in the Tuttle/Bridgecreek area, and have been casting since 1972. Its getting harder to find lead, but I have a few hundred pounds put back so I will be casting for a while. I have a variety of molds, 2 cavity steel, 4 cavity steel, single cavity steel, a couple of the Hensley and Gibbs but they are 8 cavity. One in 38 wad cutter and the other in 45 acp. I have many Lee molds, single, double and 6 cavity molds. I really like the Lee 6 cavity molds best of them all. I've been playing with reduced cast bullet loads in rifle for several years and I can still shoot when there is nothing on the store shelves. I just built a Savage 111 in 458 Winchester mag and will be playing with the 45-70 bullets for reduced power lead loads in that. It is VERY painful to shoot the 500 grain solids out of it. I shoot 375 Winchester and 375 H&H Mag and load both of them with hard cast bullets as well. As far as the aluminum gas checks, as a welder, I know just how fast aluminum oxidizes and aluminum oxide is one of the harder abrasives used in working and polishing metal. I've been reluctant to use them because of that. I machined a die set to punch them out of cola cans, but don't want to subject my bores to the aluminum oxides. I'm playing with some copper stripped from some old Hard Line Coaxial cable left over from one of my previous jobs. The outer copper jacket is just the right thickness for making the gas checks, and the center conductor is 3/8" thin wall copper tubing. That's what I make my 375 caliber jacketed bullets from. Be sure to check your wheel weights and remove the zinc ones. Zinc does bad things to your molds, making it very difficult for the mold to fill out properly. With the steel or cast iron molds, you can give them a swab with muriatic acid to remove the zinc if you are unfortunate enough to contaminate them with it. Don't do that to the aluminum molds as they won't survive the contact. Be sure to neutralize the acid as soon as you have gotten the zinc out of the mold, heat and spray them with a good rust preventive. If you keep your pot temp low enough, the zinc wheel weights will float on top of the molten lead and you can pick them out with a scoop or pair of pliers. You are surely on the right track in matching the bullet diameter to your cylinder throats. I have a set of pin gauges that I check my revolvers with to match bullet diameters to them. I will usually ream the throats all to the same diameter in a cylinder and keep a record of what that particular gun likes. I use the Lee hardness tester to work up each batch of lead for casting ingots.

 

[RedHawk357Mag]

Blitzfike, thanks for weighing in and taking the time put forth your information. Sounds like you may be very experienced in casting. I have never casted with the Lee molds but it seems they have their following. And lots of folks are not so turned on by them. I believe Lee has made it possible for a lot of folks to put up casting. The Lee pots/furnaces especially.

458 Winchester, 375 H&H and 375 Winchester almost sounds like your a big game hunter. Those are some incredible calibers. I saw a 458 Winchester one time in a WalMart or something that thing is huge and imagine it is quite painful to shoot. Casting bullets for those calibers will run up out of alloy fairly quickly. I assume that you laddel those large bullets? Most I have read has lead me to believe that bottom pours are not very good for large bullets like that. Just looked at powder requirements for 458 Winchester, that's a fair amount of powder as well. What is a normal firing session for a caliber like that? I shot for the AMU for awhile when i was in GA and the International Service Rifle folks had a sub group that shot 300 Win Mags and after about 20 shots they would pack up and head home. That rifle seemed to have fairly impressive recoil.

Thanks for the info on zinc. I have been giving due diligence to sorting wheel weights. I hand sort with side cutter dikes or for the smaller wheelweights I use a automatic center punch and divot them. I also sort out the stickies as well. When rendering WWs I use digital thermometer and keep a sharp eye out on the temperature. So far I haven't had any issue with zinc. I just finished hand sorting 300 lbs of raw WWs today. I found a place that will sell me unsorted WWs at .60 a pound. Some would say that is high but I will say this is the first time I have been able to find them at all in a couple years. I bought some from a elderly man in Duncan about three years ago for 1.00 per pound fully rendered. He was selling a thousand pounds and foolishly I only bought 100 pounds. I also have several hundred pounds of range scrap I need to render when I get back to Duncan. Interesting info about the zinc and molds. I have never seen that discussed before. I will certainly file that away should i run into a problem.

Pin guages have been very enlighting. I was having some issues with leading with a mixture of 50/50 WW and pure that was perplexing me for awhile. I think I have located the cause with the pinguages, my Redding Profile Crimp dies were swaging the bullet bases slightly. I haven't conclusively ran this down yet but feel I am close. I had my throats reamed by the Cylinder Smith. Not sure if he is still doing cylinders or not, the last time i looked at his site I think he is or was only doing 45 Colts. He did a fine job on a couple S&Ws and both my Rugers. I have seen a couple videos of this on you tube but still don't feel comfortable trying that without seeing it done in person first.

Interesting points about the Alum checks. Might need to look into this further. I was going to use the checks on some hard cast bullets I bought years ago before I started casting. They are sized .358 and .430, a little small for me and didn't really want to melt them down as they are some pretty nice bullets. On the subject of abrasives, where are you on fire lapping a revolver barrel. My 44 Redhawk has a couple good restrictions in the bore. It will pass a .417-" pin completely but a .418-" will enter the muzzle and stops right around cylinder side of the rear sight or left edge of the Ruger "billboard" warning. Again thanks for the post. Good day.

 

[Blitzfike]

Not really a big game hunter, More of a gun bearer for family. I have family in Alaska and go there as often as I can and attend the hunts without a shoulder arm. I usually carry a 12 ga shotgun with slugs when in the field as bear protection. I belong to a sportsmans association with members from several states, we do 5 primitive camp/shoots a year for members only. There is always room for more bragging rights among the younger folks as to what they shoot. Some of us older guys like to lay out the big stuff and wait for one of the younger ones to come by and ask to shoot it. I most always lay out the factory ammo for them to shoot so I can get nice once fired brass to load down for my own enjoyment. The 375H&H is an Encore rifle barrel and was absolutely brutal to shoot. When I first mounted a scope on it, it was a nice Pentax Gameseeker Pro and the internals shattered on the 9th shot with factory ammo. I put a brake on it and now its about like shooting an '06 with 180 grain bullets. I like long range shooting, so I built a 300 win mag on a Stevens 200 action. I used a Shilen heavy barrel, a Rifle Basix trigger, a Millett long range scope and I glassed the bottom inside of the Tupperware stock to stiffen it. Oh, and I added a JP Tank style brake for it. This is one you can shoot from the bench all day, recoil is about like shooting a 243. On casting the large bullets, the secret is to get the mold hot enough and then the bottom pour pot works just fine. I will often start out with a propane torch to heat the larger molds, and when I get casting, I periodically have to slow down to let them cool off. I have never done any fire lapping, a good friend did that with several of his rifles, and seemed to think it hekped. I use the old fashioned method of using a lead slug cast around a cleaning jag, and I use diamond lapping paste of about 4 different grits. This paste is something used in the tool and die world to get precise fits in punch sets and dies. I have used fine grit valve grinding compound, but it is really way too coarse for that type lapping. Find a lapidary supply on line and order some of the various grit used in rock tumbling and polishing and mix it with heavy grease for use on your puck if doing it manually. Go very slowly, its easy to remove but you can't readily put it back on.
As to your restrictions, it almost seems as though the act of rolling the script on the barrel swaged it inward slightly. One thing I've learned over the years is that ignorance is bliss.. Many things I successfully do were done because I didn't know at the time that it couldn't be done. Lots of reloading and shooting lore has been passed down from experts on high for years and when someone actually challenges the methodology it is found to be false info. Don't be afraid to experiment, just do it wisely.. Jim

 

[RedHawk357Mag]

Funny you should mention the Encore. I bought one of those out of Gibsons in Lawton as a BP in 50 Caliber. That's the only gun I have never been able to shoot. I ran every type of bullet I could find at Murfs in Duncan, balls, every weight of sabot ML they had, don't remember exactly amount of powders i tried. If I recall correctly I used like a 30" by 30" target to try to capture shots from that gun at 100 yards. Round balls were the worst. I first tried open sights. Moved to optics. I put a Nikon something or other on it and that just showed me how bad I or the gun was shooting. I was at the SCRAP Range at Duncan trying some new powder to see if that might help. That gun was shooting so bad I was afraid someone was going to come out to the range and see me shooting that poorly. I took it home cleaned it as best as I could and took it to Lawton and sold the entire shooting match minus powder to Uncle Sams Pawnshop for I think 200.00 dollars. That was the craziest thing I have ever seen a gun do. I really think I would have stood better odds of shooting around a corner with it than putting a round in a ten ring at 100 yards. I have heard several people speak highly of them and they love the different gun barrel thing. And seems to be pretty popular on hunting shows a few years back to. I imagine that an Encore would be a fairly lite model for 375H&H. I remember mine was impressively light for shoulder fired rifle. Wow sitting here thinking that gun has got to be a bruiser!

I must say you have some interesting rifles from the sounds of it. I was going to build my first AR when I retired. I had decided to build a 6.5 Grendel but lost interest in it after having so much issue with getting good quality parts. I was looking to do a fairly nice build but parts were crazy to get ordered. Prices, availability of gun related items, must be quite a pain in the a$$ for somebody who is just getting into shooting sports. I know it turned me off of building one and I have been around shooting sports for awhile. It is nice to have the experience of how to tame those types of rifle rounds. I watched several videos of different brakes and their effects on rifles. Amazing technology.

There is probably a good amount of truth on the bliss statement...

If so inclined here's a link to a Alum Gas Check posting I got going over on Cast Boolits...
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?240863-Using-Alum-for-Gas-Checks-and-Alum-Oxide

 

[RedHawk357Mag]

Worded this wrong " My 44 Redhawk has a couple good restrictions in the bore. It will pass a .417-" pin completely but a .418-" will enter the muzzle and stops right around cylinder side of the rear sight or left edge of the Ruger "billboard" warning."

That should have said cylinder side of the FRONT sight and RIGHT edge of the Ruger "billboard" warning. Wow, I totally got wrong lol.