HP casting for the first time...Any tips?

[aharlow]

Just got my NOE 360447 150 grain SWC RG2 cavity PB Mold for my Colt Python .357 Mag. Will be my first time casting for a HP boolit and wondered if there are any good tips out there that i should know. I read "From ingot to target" and it was a great resource but wanted to get some feedback from the forum also on any RL experiences with HP casting. Here is my mold and i have to say it is one beautiful mold. Thanks NOE!!
125700

[JD74]

Nice looking mold, from what I have read and heard in the chat room you have to keep those pins good and hot so the boolit slide off easy. Got my first NOE this year also they are very nice and well worth the cost.

[Beagle333]

If you get it anywhere near hot enough, those small HP pins will be a joy to cast with. Just get it good and clean (I scrub mine down with Dawn and a toothbrush), check the edges of the cavities for any burrs (use Qtips, shows any burr easily), and cast as you would with any other mold. Keep it hot, cast fast, and it'll go smoothly. It's only the big fat HP pins that will stick enough to give trouble. Nice mold!!!

[tazman]

I have an NOE hollow point mold that is a copy of the Lyman 356121 except with their hollow point adaption. It casts great.
As was stated before, keep the mold and pins hot and cast quickly. you will be fine. Mine releases boolits with no problems. I tend to run it hotter than my other molds but not a lot. Maybe 50 degrees.

[GP100man]

I HAVE A 360-180 RNFP RG2 MOLD FROM NOE. Clean it , run it thru 3 heat cycles, clean it again.

Now , lube the mold as described & a touch of lube on the pins where they move in the plates.
a note on the Bull Plate lube , a little goes a LLllooong ways, use it very sparingly!

I preheat my mold to 350f & don`t start casting until my alloy is 810f & the boolits stop stikin to the pins in 3 castings. It takes hot temps to keep those big blocks hot !

Speaking of the pins , I polished mine with 1000 grit & oil until they glitered in the sunlight, but my pins are a bit longer than yours.

As posted earlier, find a temp & pace & it`ll make short work of a pot of alloy.

I have solid versions of all my HPed molds & the HPs will out shoot the solids every time with less load development.

GP

[aharlow]

Thanks for all the input guys! Just got my Lee 357 Mag Carbide dies and factory crimp die today in the mail. I also picked up some 2400 powder today and i have some 296 already at the reloading bench to try out. Only thing left is to get some Brass and to start up the 20 Lbs Lee pot and get to some casting.

[rintinglen]

I have an NOE hollow point mold that is a copy of the Lyman 356121 except with their hollow point adaption. It casts great.
As was stated before, keep the mold and pins hot and cast quickly. you will be fine. Mine releases boolits with no problems. I tend to run it hotter than my other molds but not a lot. Maybe 50 degrees.
These are the keys to getting good hollow points:
pre-heat mold;
run melt a bit hotter;
pour a large sprue;
cast fast.
The most common error casters make with a HP mold, especially at first, is to stop and look at the fruits of their labors as they cast. This allows the mold and pins time to chill enough to screw up the next one, then the new caster puzzles over why the next ones are bad, all the while letting his mold get colder. I ignore my boolits as they drop from my NOE and MP molds and cast as fast as the sprue will harden. If one boolit hangs up, I don't spend much time on it. I leave it in the cavity, close the mold, and fill the rest up. A large sprue helps fill out.

[prs]

I got it all right on my first try EXCEPT the noses of the boolits were inconsistently dimpled because the pins were not settled to their bottoms. I tossed them back into the pot and added a simple move to my mold handling, before closing the hot mold between casts I would hold it with the pins upward on about a 45 degree angle while giving it a shake to settled the pins all the way down. That gave consistently perfect hollowed metplats on my 45ACP 68 boolits. I use a soft alloy for these, pure lead with only 2% tin, no antimony.

prs

[41mag]

Not a lot I can add to what these fine folks have already input. I will throw this out though, temp control on your alloy will help you as much or more than anything. With the Lee pot your temp will vary quite a bit at time especially as the level drops. The Thermostat is not much more than a knob that gives a general idea of where your at. I HIGHLY suggest touching base with NOE and pick up one of their alloy thermometers. It will help you keep your alloy within the range that your mold likes the best. As mentioned do the heat and cycles on it as well. Aluminum will hold some of the cutting oil in the pours and you can clean it then pour up a nice batch, then the next session it throws ****. This is simply due to the pours opening up and aloowing the oils to come out. Whenever I start with a new mold, and as you will discover, each is a being unto its own, I will start with my alloy around 685 and work up in around 20 degree increments. However I also have a PID attached to my pot so that makes it a bit easier. (something you might look into building yourself if your halfway electrically inclined) I also use the hot5 plate to heat up my molds as w3ell. I have a couple of markes on it so that I know where to set it for brass or aluminum. Since most of my molds are either 4 or 6 cavity it works well. Once it has come up to temp and the alloy is up to the desired starting temp I will start pouring. I throw about 10 cycles and put the mold back on the plate and check what is going on. If I am getting mostly **** bullets, I adjust the temp up a little, and repeat. Once I am getting good fill out I will stick with that and I always jot down what temp the alloy is at when I hit that spot for that mold. This saves a lot of time and effort as you know that when you have your alloy at say 720'ish, and the mold it up to temp on the hot plate, your going to or should throw good bullets right from the start. another thing you should do is have a nice set of challen locks sitting there along side your hot plate, this will allow you to pre heat your additional ingots so that your pot temp doesn't drop so much when you add now alloy. Once you get into a rythem as mentioned go for it. You will find that while your pot is heating back up with added alloy you have time to move the drop pan of bullets out of the way and set another in it's place so your always more or less in motion. I use the 1 deep by 8 x 12" or so cornbread or cake pans from the dollar store to dump my bullets into. I simply lay a shop towel down into it lengh wise and srart dumping on the closest end. Once I get a dozen or so in I pick up the end of the towel and roll those to the other end. I repeat this until I run out of room and swap pans. ANyway good luck with your mold. I have several of them and enjoy shooting them all, course there are some who I think just pour them so pretty that they set them in a glass display case instead of shooting them.

[MarkP]

I preheat my NOE RG molds on a hot plate and have a propane torch handy to feather it over the HP pins. It took me 2 or 3 sessions to get my first RG mold figured out.

[aharlow]

Thanks for the info 41mag! I do use and have the Casting thermometer from NOE and use it all the time on my Lee #20 pot when i'm casting and on my cast iron smelting pot when i melt down and flux my COWW's. When i cast my fat 405 Gr. boolits for my 45-70 i have my pot running around 730 Deg. so will start around that temp then adjust as needed if Hp's aren't cooperating. My alloy consist of COWW's + 2% Tin and that's just my preference and it works really nice and should work well with the Keith SWC HP's for mold fill out. I know some will say the Tin might not be needed but that's just me and the alloy i like to use. I found a little extra tin can't hurt especially if you might have lost some to Oxidation during fluxing and or a long casting session. I love Pine Saw dust for this matter also which always covers the top of my Lee #20 pot when i am casting to cut down on the Oxidation and it just smells so darn nice also...lol. Great info and thanks to all that have replied with some good info. Pictures coming soon when weather permits!

[Blackwater]

The only thing I can say is that from the experiments I did years ago in wet newsprint, is that cast of straight WW's, the Lee 150-SWCHP's tended to break off the petals at the HP section. Adding 2% tin helped a bit, but they still tended to break off. At 4% tin, they'd hold together pretty well, and mushroom pretty much classicly. At 6% it was slightly better than at 4%, but I didn't see enough difference (for me, at least) between 4 and 6% to be worth the extra expense, so for that bullet, with its pretty thin sides and big, deep HP, I've usually stuck with 4% tin if I wanted the bullets to stay together. However, I'm really not all that sure it makes a terrible lot of difference, because when the petals fragmented off, they produced secondary wounds, and the penetration depth wasn't significantly different either. HP's can vary according to the contour of the HP. Your mould appears to have a more progressive thickness as you go from the HP opening to the base of it, so it should have somewhat less tendency for the petals to break off. I'd only add tin to see what it did, and test it before pouring up a bunch at the greater expense of adding tin, and then would do it only if my experiments made it apparent there was a significant difference. You've really just got to try each bullet at the velocities you're shooting it at, and see what they show you, and decide accordingly. Good luck. I think you'll find good results with a minimum of testing.

[jmort]

That is why Lyman is 90/5/5

[prs]

That is why Lyman is 90/5/5

Lyman #2 is a dream with which to cast. Perfect boolits of greatest detail rain from the molds when opened; BUT the cost of using 5% tin can make even a wealthy man wince if the batch is more than a few pounds. Then also, Lyman #2 has 5% Antimony. Great for the metallurgy aspects of Sn/Sp matrix in the Pb yielding a tough, ductile, yet fairly hard product. That hardness might be counter productive in hollow points in lower velocity rounds such as 45ACP if the intent is for expansion, which is typically the "point". Thus I cast my NOE 68 HP SWC boolits of binary alloy, 98:2 Pb/Sn. Such ammo not for casual plinking or extended target practice where barrel leading might rear its ugly head if it were not for the hard "candy" shell of powder coat paint.

prs

[aharlow]

So i don't have a hot plate but i do rest my mold on my Lee #20 pot as it's heating up with my ingots in it. If i need the mold a bit warmer I sometimes dip the edge of the mold into my alloy to heat it up. It sound like a hot plate might be something to look into though as it might keep the mold at a more constant temp and keep those HP pins from cooling too much. Any ideas on a good Hot Plate or what does everyone else use/do?

[ballistim]

I just don't get on well with the RG2 NOE molds, but I love the solid NOE molds-especially when I find a brass one available. NOE versions of the Ranch Dog molds are fantastic molds that are the best hunting cast designs available. IMO. Cramer HP's by MiHec have always worked better for me if I want to use a HP design.

[prs]

For the hot plate to serve you as it should, you need to repurpose and old small loaf bread pan or even a larger sized food tin can to be your "oven". Most folks prefer a single burner coiled element type hot plate, but the type that has a covered surface works as well. For aluminum molds and shorter iron molds, the handles are heavy enough to over balance the mold, so a counter weight may be needed to place upon the top of the sprue plate to keep firm contact with the plate. Your oven should have a "door" in one end just large enough from with the handles can protrude. As the casting pot is heating I set my hot plate on low. As the temp of the pot approaches about 600F, I turn the hot plate up to med-high. By the time the alloy is up to my set temp of about 720F, the mold is a little hotter than optimal casting temp and my first pour will be quite frosty, but just a few pours with small sprue puddles and slow reps will have it to my Goldilocks temp where the produce is just slightly and evenly frosty. A PID controller for the Lee pot is a very well appreciated item too and not all that expensive to buy pre-built or to assemble from parts.


prs

[aharlow]

Thanks prs for the info and others for the nice tips. Just waiting on my .358 sizer to come in and some Brass and i should be all set to give it a run! That and for some warmer weather. Don't have a set-up yet to be running a cast session indoors yet. Maybe a project for next year...lol.