Casting

[doc623]

A week or two ago I cast some round nose and round balls.
Everything went as exppected.
I was using lead; plumbers lead; and a small percentage of wheel weights.
The round nose had grease grooves - two - in the bullet.
Once the bullets were cool enough to handle I put them in a plastic container.
I made/melted a mixture of 85% bees wax;10% bore butter; and 5% paraffin and poured the mixture over the castings.
I waited a couple days for this to harden and when I had time to get back to finishing.
The mixture had solidified and I had to pry the castings out of the container.
Here is the glitch. The lube/coating is sticky/greasy to the touch and when handling, however, the material did not stick to the castings and came off when the castings were handled.
Wrong mixture?
Or what?

 

[paulvallandigham]

YOu need to make a caliber sized cake cutter. put the bullet standing upright in a shallow pan or dish, and then pour the lube in around it. You use the " Cake Cutter" to free the bullets from the lube after the lube hardens. The cutter fits over the bullet, just barely and cuts the lube away from the bullet leaving grease in the grooves. The cutter is basically a long tube that has an inside diameter the dimension of the bullet. In Cartridge reloading, an empty, old cartridge casing is bored out to remove the rim, or the rim is cut away, leaving a hollow tube to cut away the lube.

If you are sizing them in a lubrisizer, then the lubrisizer will both size the bullets exactly, and lube the grooves.

Check the suppliers listed here in Member Resources, under " links", to see who is making and selling common sized cake cutters. Lee Precision use to have them.

 

[jtmattison]

Sounds like your mixture is way too hard.

I just made a stiff batch of lube that consists of about 60% beeswax and 40% olive oil. I did the same as you but when my batch cooled I was able to just push the bullets out of the hardened lube with my finger. The grooves were filled perfectly.

HD

 

[BrownBear]

Sounds like your mixture is way too hard.

I just made a stiff batch of lube that consists of about 60% beeswax and 40% olive oil. I did the same as you but when my batch cooled I was able to just push the bullets out of the hardened lube with my finger. The grooves were filled perfectly.

HD

Yeah, stand the bullets on their bases in a pan and carefully pour the hot lube into the pan till it rises above the level of the top grease grove. Let it harden and pull the whole cake out of the pan, then push the bullets out as described. I did this myself for a lot of years with cast CF bullets before getting a lubrisizer.

That all brings up your next problem- bullet storage. You don't want them rolling around loose in a can or oversized box, or they'll start pulling the lube out. I fought this for a long time trying to find a lube that was hard enough to prevent the pulling, yet soft enough to stick to the bullets. Never found a real good answer.

Recently someone here on the board handed me the perfect solution. It was under my nose (literally) or in the trash all this time: Plastic cigar tubes. They come in lots of diameters and have caps. If you don't know a cigar smoker you can do the same thing with the right size rigid tubing and whatever you can manage for a cap on each end.

That solution was just too simple for my complicated mind to come up with. :surrender:

 

[jtmattison]

That solution was just too simple for my complicated mind to come up with. :surrender:

:haha:

I know how you feel.

The tube idea is a good one. I use small boxes that I have leftover from my Hornady pistol bullets. I just stand the lubed bullets in the box and don't let them tumble around. I think I'll put some of the test tubes I have to use storing bullets.

HD

 

[doc623]

Tried that and the bullets just broke from the mixture that was dry and virtually none stayed on the bullets or in the groves.

 

[jtmattison]

Tried that and the bullets just broke from the mixture that was dry and virtually none stayed on the bullets or in the groves.

Are you talking about your original mixture? If so, try melting it down and adding about 40% volume of olive oil to it. You should end up with a lube that will work as we described.

HD

 

[Tumblernotch]

Tried that and the bullets just broke from the mixture that was dry and virtually none stayed on the bullets or in the groves.

Mix 6 parts of beeswax and 4 parts of Crisco. Place Minies base down on a flat plate of some kind with handles. Dip plate with bullets into the melted mixture as far as the top groove. Lift out and set aside to dry. Pop the bullets loose and push through a sizer base first. If the lube is too soft in hot weather, change the ratio to 8 parts beeswax to 2 parts Crisco (or tallow). The 8 to 2 ratio of beeswax and tallow is the original Minie lube. And dipping in this manner is the way that they did it in the ammunition factories. It works very well and the solid plate keeps the lube out of the base. The lube that sticks to the plate should be scraped off and returned to the pot after a couple of dips.
:thumbsup: