Finicky 455 webley mold

[bruner1981]

I managed to get my hands on an RCBS 455 webley mold, and I have to say I am impressed with most of the results so far. My particular alloy is slightly denser, so the majority of the boolits are dropping as cast weighing around 280 grains, with some outliers creating a range of 277 grains up to 284 grains, which is fine by me. The thing that I'm not as huge of a fan of, is the rough surface on the nose of the boolit where the sprue was cut, and some occasional slight flashing around the outer edge of the base. Speaking from a manufacturing point of view, I under stand that boolit molds are already having to conform to some tight tolerances just to produce good, uniform, usable boolits, and trying to throw a core for the hollow base into the mix just makes things even more tricky, so I am not expecting perfect boolits every drop with this mold.

I am more interested in finding a good way to sort of clean up these boolits, in terms of smoothing out the rough mark where the sprue was cut and cleaning up the flashing, short of taking a knife to it. If I end up selling some of these cast boolits, as I have considered to help cover some various college costs, I don't want to sell something that has major visual or functional defects, and the boolits with some flashing are too close to completely usable to justify throwing them back in the pot. What do you all think would be a good and effective way of cleaning these up? I looked in to using a rock tumbler, but my research quickly discouraged that approach. Is there any particular method that has worked well on any cast boolits in general? Thank you for your help!

[lobowolf761]

The flashing that you have might be due to the temperature being to high when you cast or the mould getting too hot. Minor flashing like you are describing can be taken care of by running them into a sizing die of the correct diameter. I have had this same problem and have made adjustments in the alloy mix,melt temps and keeping an eye on how hot the mold is getting. The minor flash is taken care of when I run them through my lube sizer. As for the rough nose you may be waiting too long to cut the sprue. If it cools too much before you cut the sprue it will look like it has been torn off instead of a clean cut. I have it happen to me sometimes whenever I cast. Just make sure that the sprue plate is tightened properly before you start and check it while casting.

[lobowolf761]

I hope I have helped.

[bruner1981]

I hope I have helped.

That's some great advice. I'll look into all of it. I may need to tighten down my spruce cutter. I've had it a little loose to make it easier to cut. I've been waiting until the material in the spruce has turned to a cool, crystallized look before cutting. Is that waiting too long?

[lobowolf761]

I try to cut the sprue just as soon as it is no longer liquid and am always checking the sprue plate.

[lobowolf761]

If it has a crystallized look your temp maybe a bit too hot. That could account for some of the minor flashing also.

[bruner1981]

Good to know. I'll keep an eye on that. I've been casting about 20-30 bullets at a time. Maybe I need to turn down my melting pot temp. And get my hands on a good lead pyrometers. Still getting started here

[lobowolf761]

20-30 bullets barely gets the mould warmed up unless you are preheating it some.

[bruner1981]

I am preheating using an electric hot plate set to warm, on a scale of warm to low to medium to high. For perspective, low is hot enough to melt an ingot of WW

[sigep1764]

Bruner, it usually takes me a couple casting sessions of a few hundred boolits each to learn exactly what a mold likes. I may be a little slower to learn what each mold likes, but if I was you with a new mold, I'd set aside 2 or 3 hours simply casting with it nonstop. Change your cadence, change the alloy temp, change when you cut the sprue. Change it until you find what is working and creating the product you want.

[Bigslug]

The RCBS Webley was my first mold purchase. Here is my learned advice: as a college student, you don't have TIME to accomplish anything profitable with that mold. Don't get me wrong - it makes great bullets, but the heat-up, casting rate, generally high reject percentage, and need to maintain temperature make it a fiddly beast ill-suited to commercial activities. I got lucky and was able to buy a 4-cavity brass clone of it from MP molds that was an overrun from a group buy. This helps production a lot, but it's still a thin-skirt, hollow-base bullet that needs a lot of heat and a pretty rigid cadence to keep the bases from tearing out and the mold from cooling too much. Short version - I have little desire to feed any Webleys but my own, and if I did, the cost would be so high that the buyers would be considering buying their own casting rig (which, if they face the facts of Webley logistics, they should be doing anyway).

But as for the nose. . .you can eliminate sprue-smear by letting the bullet cool a few seconds longer so that it snaps more than cuts, but timing is everything - you still need to keep the mold hot enough to get base fillout. . .which is far and away the more important attribute.

[bruner1981]

The RCBS Webley was my first mold purchase. Here is my learned advice: as a college student, you don't have TIME to accomplish anything profitable with that mold. Don't get me wrong - it makes great bullets, but the heat-up, casting rate, generally high reject percentage, and need to maintain temperature make it a fiddly beast ill-suited to commercial activities. I got lucky and was able to buy a 4-cavity brass clone of it from MP molds that was an overrun from a group buy. This helps production a lot, but it's still a thin-skirt, hollow-base bullet that needs a lot of heat and a pretty rigid cadence to keep the bases from tearing out and the mold from cooling too much. Short version - I have little desire to feed any Webleys but my own, and if I did, the cost would be so high that the buyers would be considering buying their own casting rig (which, if they face the facts of Webley logistics, they should be doing anyway).

But as for the nose. . .you can eliminate sprue-smear by letting the bullet cool a few seconds longer so that it snaps more than cuts, but timing is everything - you still need to keep the mold hot enough to get base fillout. . .which is far and away the more important attribute.

This is some great advice guys! I'll have to try all of that out soon.

I definitely wasn't planning to try to crank out thousands of bullets a week, but I figured if I could cast 100 boolits at the end of the night a few times a week and sell them cheap it could help offset some minor costs here and there, all dependent on my homework load though