Originally Posted by
Cloudpeak
I think happy7 pretty well covered the bases.
I just wanted to second the pre-heating of the mold on a hot plate. If you're using a bottom pour, the hot plate is also handy for "pre-melting" the lead and then pouring the molten lead into the bottom pour. This speeds things up considerably.
After casting awhile, you'll be able to dial in the proper setting to pre-heat the mold just right and when you're "on the money", you'll be able to open your sprue cutter with a gloved hand instead of beating on the sprue plate. When you first start, if you error on the "too hot" side, you'll have to wait for the sprue puddle to solidify. This tells you that the mold is too hot so let it cool down dial it down a bit for next time. I'd rather have this problem than lots of cold bullets that need to be re-melted and hard to cut sprues.
The "Bullplate Sprue lube" is great for pivot points, alignment pins and sprue cutter/mold top interface on any mold, especially aluminum and it works great on the Lyman, too.
Good luck.