My 1st Go Round with 9mm casted

[Capnjack98]

First of all id like to say thank you all that read this ,cuzz i know this has been beatin to death. I just wanted to share my experiance and maybe get to know some folk.

First thing i think i did wrong was buy a mold,( 2-3 actually) before i had a bore to slug. Bought me a .356-124-2r TL RN Lee off CheeseBay and figured half the battle was over,wronk!

Armed with a 10pounder Lyman pot, dipper and some unknown lead from work i made what i thought was some pretty sweet lookin boolits. Ohh they looked pretty alright,but flyin was a diff. story ill get into ina min. By pencil testin my lead,far as i can figure its round 12bhn. I fluxed with sawdust and added some tin solder maybe 2in. to the melt. Most seemed to fill out fine. I pan lubed with LLA( 1 coat).

I just bought a Stoeger, and really was itchin to try out my lead. Running a couple mags of factory through first gave me a nice baseline i figured to compare the casters to. It did not take long at all to see everything go2hell when i switched. It was like night n day. The factory shot soo damn nice, my groups were tight as ever. The lead was all over town and some possible keyholes. After maybe 35 rounds lookin at the bore the smile dropped from my face.

You can prolly tell what happened next. I spent all the next day scrubbing. My lead did indeed drop .356 but unfortunatly my bore slugged at 356. I got in on a group buy for a 359 and thinkin bout sizing them down ofcourse.

The load .356-124-2r TL with 3.8gr RedDot @ 1.13 OaL Stoeger Cougar slugged @ .356

Thanx again for all the info from u guys, "Ajax" on chat has helped me quite abit as have you all. Great community here,and i will def. be sticking around. I enjoy a good challenge,and it seems ive got one as of right now :wink:

[runfiverun]

andy is pretty knowledgeable.
toss that mold and start over, 358 is gonna be more the size you want.
shooting copper then shooting soft lead on top of it will almost every time produce leading.
i see no mention of an actual lube, so i am going with you used the alox.

[MtGun44]

This may help.

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?121737-Setting-up-for-boolits-in-a-new-9mm

Bill

[repawn]

I have the same mold - with WW and a small piece of lino my boolits drop at .358 - .3585. I use recluse 45-45-10 lube and have had great results. My only advice is to clean all the copper and lead fouling from the barrel before sending any more rounds through it.

[Shiloh]

Many 9mm molds drop too small. In my opinion, 9mm molds need to drop larger boolits. .356 boolits pattern at 50 for me. Thos are the ones that hit the target.
Gotta have at least .357. .358 works better.

Shiloh

[mdi]

I have found that I get slightly larger (.001"-.0015") bullet if I use cooler alloy. With a good hot molds and melt a bit above liquid, the bullets drop at cavity diameter, not much shrinkage...