Casting ZINC bullets is tedious
Zinc is no fun to cast with. I just made a couple of handfuls of ZINC Noe 225 grain 30 cal blackout bullets. First I had to render the ZN wheel weights -this took hours. I take the ZN wheel weights and put them in a cast iron pot then scoop out the clips which irritatingly end up at the bottom of the pot. I scooped some out with a big metal soup ladle and pour it into this little frying pan and a smaller pot so I can make some ingots. Eventually I just got tired of it so I ended up where I stopped. There was a whole bunch of metal still stuck to the wheel weight clips so I put those back in the pot but after 20 plus minutes there was not enough Heat to separate it so I just pulled it out as one big ugly chunk with needle nose pliers. Then I took the ingots and put them in the pot to cast with and it took almost 40 minutes for the ingots to melt. Finally when I got to Casting I had to maintain a mold temperature close to 600°F and melt temperature close to 900°F in order to get even barely acceptable bullets and to get them to let go from the mold. I don't think I'm going to do this again. In the same amount of time that it took me to render these zinc wheel weights, remove the clips, make clean ingots and then melt it again to cast I could have made several hundred excellent bullets from this two cavity mold casting from the 40 pounds of scrap lead I have in the ammo can behind my toolbox. I guess I'm going to find out how they feel going through the sizer. This might be a problematic because I size bullets with a Lee hand press. Who knows- life is a learning process.
I'm going to have to scale them and then come up with some ideas for load data.
