New member ! Many questions !

[jsteed]

Yet to cast a boolit. Here's my story:
Bought from an estate Lyman equipment (old but seems to work) 10# furnace, 4-5 molds,sizer, some lubes,etc. Owned these for a few years and now have some time so I bought some wheel weights and the furnace works fine. Ended up with 300 ingots (don't know the hardness of the ingots). My ultimate goal is to kill my next deer with a wheel weight! I use Marlin levers in 30-30 and .35 rem. I've purchased the Lyman cast bullet book and read through it twice and still have a ton of questions.
I'm thinking of RCBS molds in the above calibers, flat nose design ( with GC ).
1. Do I need to add something to the ingots produced by the WW for hunting?
2. Will lyman handles work with RCBS molds?
3. Should I use the Lyman/Ideal sizer, or go with the Lee method?
4. How important is it to slug the barrels? I ask this because I've been reloading for years useing Sierra and Hornady jacketed bullets and have always been able to get very good groupings.
5. Is it a good idea to weigh the cast boolits, like on a digital scale?
6. Is an expander die needed for the case mouth when loading cast?

I'm looking forward to your feed back.....enough questions for my first post.....certain there will be many more to come. Thanks in advance.:)

[MtGun44]

Welcome. Thanks for spending the time reading. Much of this is well documented
in good sources. I also suggest getting a copy of Glenn Fryxell's superb online
book "From Ingot to Target" - I may slightly misquote the title, but that is either it
or very close. Cannot recommend it highly enough. Glenn is a great experimenter,
extremely knowledgeable and an excellent writer. He used to hang out here a bunch,
haven't seen his posting recently, sad to say. He has lots of great articles at the
LA Silhouette league or club's site. Search on "Fryxell" and "cast bullet" and you
will find links.

Good questions, some answers.

1. Probably OK as is, if you want expansion, you may need to soften with Pb. For hunting there
are at least four lines of thought. Hollowpoints that blow off the nose, hollowpoints that expand
and stay intact, softpoints that expand, and flatpoints with no expansion. With hard alloy HPs you
get the first, with softer alloy HP you get the second, with either dual alloy boolits or "softer" you
get the third and with hard alloys and no HP you can get the last. Each approach has it's adherents
and applications where the "best results" is claimed. A book can be written on each.
2. Without modification, no. Plus there are a number of different Lyman handles. I think you
might get the 4 cav Lyman to work, but they would be pretty unhandy, not recommended. Lee
6 cav handles can be easily modified to fit several different brands.
3. IMO, if you have a Lyman lubrisizer this is much more likely to work over a wide range
of conditions than the tumble lube process. Ranch Dog developed a variation with dipping and
his proprietary molds, but my very limited experience was negative. BUT there are many fans
of the RD designs, so my poor results with the .30-165 may be an anomoly. With limited time
to experiment, my initial negative results made me push it onto the back burner without an
extensive effort. But - I strongly recommend conventional designs for a more reliable path
to good results, especially in rifles. TL with low intensity pistol loads seems to be much higher
success rate. People absolutely DO succeed with TL and variants in rifles, it just seems to be
trickier to make it work well. IMO, the primary driver for TL is to avoid buying a lubrisizer. If you
have a lubrisizer - the cost issue is moot; carry on.
4. For certain cartridges the different makers are all over the map with barrel dimensions. With
others not so much. For the .30-30 you will probably succeed with .310 or .311 diam, probably
worth just trying them. Same for the .35 Rem. Probably succeed with .358 or .359. Generally
you want to use about .002 or .003 over groove diam for rifles. 9mm Luger - either shoot really
big or slug. Too big is never a problem unless you cannot chamber the loaded round. Too small
is always a disaster - not dangerous but leading, inaccuracy, tumbling, etc.
5. Weighing is mostly a technique for those chasing match accuracy. If you use consistent casting
technique and size the boolits in a lubrisizer to control diameter, you will probably not find much
gain from weighing, at least for plinking and hunting ammo. Can't hurt to keep the weights close,
but it is not really done much unless there seems to be a problem in casting technique causing
unusual wt variation.
6. Yes, conventional rifle dies do not provide any funnel effect and you will usually get shaving which
damages the boolits when seating. Some use a chamfer tool and get by, some twist needle nose
pliers in the neck, many recommend the Lyman M dies which are caliber specific, and I get good results
with the Lee Universal Expander Die, which works for all cartridges, just providing a flare.

Bill

[jsteed]

Thank you Bill, I will need to re-read all of that. The reason I asked about the handles being interchangable is that Lee handles are backordered to May.

[runfiverun]

the rcbs molds you want will work fine.
the 30-150-fngc for the 30-30.
the rcbs 35-200-rnfp.
they both take gas checks.
i'd add about 25% soft lead and 1% tin to the mix and waterdrop.

the marlins generally like a little larger diameter/longer boolit.
so i'd look more at the rcbs 30-180-fngc for the 30-30.

bill pretty much covered everything else.
oh the rcbs molds take rcbs handles unless you do a lot of grinding on the lymans to make them fit the larger rcbs blocks

[Bigslug]

MtGun44 pretty much nailed it across the board, so I'll stick to #1:

We've got an alloy calculator in the sticky section of the "leads and lead alloys" portion of the forum. According to that, stick-on wheel weights run a Brinell Hardness Number of about 6, which is just barely harder than pure lead's 5BHN. According to Fryxell's book, this is probably WAAAY too soft for much other than super light pistol loads, and may need some tin/antimony additives just to help it fill out the molds. Clip-on wheel weights are listed as an approximate 12 BHN (individual mileage may vary), which is good for pretty much all handguns except the uber-magnum stuff. In either case, you'll probably want to harden the mix up with by water quenching (probably won't gain you anything with stick-ons, but clip-ons might see some benefit), adding hardening items to the mix, or both.

I'm a relative newbie to the metallurgy game myself - others will undoubtedly have more specific alloy formulas for you - but I would suggest a higher tin percentage for a hunting boolit. Tin is better at getting hardness without creating brittleness (like antimony), so it will give you a tougher boolit that won't come apart on impact. It's more expensive than antimony-rich mixes, but still dirt cheap compared to a Barnes solid copper. I lean more to the school of punching a well-aimed hole in a straight line through the vitals with a meat-crushing flat nose - possibly with some minor mushrooming - than to the one of relying on the bullet having "special effects". At this stage of my/your casting development, this is probably easier to attain anyway.

[jsteed]

Many thanks to all !