Grabbed a pack on the way home. Should have some results to post by bedtime tonight. :)
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It's your call. I, being an engineer by trade, tend to lean toward accuracy and repeatability, irregardless of the cost. $100 or so for a tool that allows me to do things easily and accurately without any fudges or tweaks is worth every single penny in my book.
I fiddles and messed with a standard $3 Goodwill *** for many bakes before I realized my time was more valuable. So off to the store to get a new conv oven. I gave that high end one to my wife in exchange for our older one (it still cost about $100 when we bought it) and have never looked back.
Let us know how you do!
banger
It's regardless... Just sayin.. Lol
Unless you're on a smartphone with auto-capitalization. In which case ". Lol" gets a pass.
Awh, don't get me started about smartphones and their auto-corrections. :)
Sometimes I think I spend more time correcting its automatic replacements than I would just typing it letter by letter. And of course the speech to text conversion is lets just say somewhat "creative" at times. :)
'Coated a few today. Here is the coating facility, ready for production. :wink:
http://i613.photobucket.com/albums/t...ps1f273516.jpg
I did 320 today while I was smoking some chicken on the Big Green Egg (the base can seen behind the toaster in the first pic)
One of these days I really gotta go fetch my 3-level convection toaster that I bought on Craigslist.
The darker ones had some blue still in the cup when I added red. I had some penta, some cup and some deep HPs.
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Beagle; have you got a video of you making these beautiful bullets? I've been PC'ing my cast Lead for a short time now, but my coverage isn't quite as good as your's especially around the base. I don't have the HF gun, instead I bought the Craftsman gun.
Sparky
I have read about people having inferior results with the Sears gun. I have never had the opportnity to use one so I really do not know the problems. But several on here have voiced problems in construciton & usage. Hopefully playing around with it will give you acceptable results.
As you can see, Beagle is getting excellent coatings as do I and all the others on here do using the ESPC HF gun. Mine look the same way.....perfect coatings every time.
Good luck and have fun!!!!!!!
bangerjim
I don't have a video. I just have an old Sony DCS-T50 flipcam with a "micro" setting that I use to take most of my pictures. But the key to getting a good coating on the bottom driving band is to have enough room between the boolits (I use a 3/4" spacing) and spray from all sides. If you only did 9mm, they could be close and if you only did .45, 'maybe might need a little more, but for me the 3/4 is a great all-around grid. I spray from all 4 sides of my tray with a sweeping motion and aim for the bases. I don't walk around the table with the cord and hose, and I have to stand on the switch, so I just reach over and to each side and spray from all directions, but at an angle. The HF gun will spray upside down for 8-10 seconds at a time while I reach over, especially with a slight flip or tap to keep the powder agitated while spraying.
I know that a lot of folks don't want to mess with the nuts under the foil, but I find that I get a great coat all the way to the bottom and even some wrap-around effect from having the boolit elevated just a little bit. This lets me know that the contact surfaces are all coated in nice slippery polyester. :-D
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Hi PC-ers. I was using a cheap toaster oven while Dry Tumbling (and never had an issue), but I finally purchased things for the ES method and so bought a nicer and bigger "countertop convection oven" and a thermometer. So I crank it up to 375 and toss in the thermometer (oven one from walmart). I go set up some bullets, come back and she's at 550!
Sooo, I'll simply test this tonight by trying it indoors, but does anyone know if outside temperature effects these things? I was in the garage, it was probably 12 degrees out, so maybe it thought it had to keep the burners on??
Here's the one I got, it says convection, but is obviously on the cheap side of the convection line...
http://www.walmart.com/ip/22866805?w...083796&veh=sem
-Brad
One of these days I'll accidentally find a cheap used convection oven at Goodwill.. but until then do no more than 75 as a time and watch the boolits as the cure. You can see them when the curing is complete from watching the sheen.. go a minute or two past then and you are fine. I melted two batches with the cheap toaster oven too.. but both I didn't pay attention. If you use the $13 oven, you need to do small batches, a single tray at a time and pay attention. I never have had "under cured" ones that way... And the HF powder will cure at 375*F even though 450*F is recommended.. and that's with a thermocouple monitoring the cure....
Birdadly I was baking in my unheated well shed in -5 to-15 and I didn't have a problem. I did try to second guess my oven but I learned to trust its temperature reading. But it is a new oven as well as an upper end one. Kevin
Ambient temp will/should have no effect on the inside temp of your oven. It is the cheap thermostats they use in those ovens. You will have to do a test run at different temps and write the REAL temps on your oven front. Those things are about as cheap as you can get.....a bi-metal strip that expands and closed a set of contacts!
But they should be relatively repeatable, so do a cal test.
bangerjim
Let your toaster oven stabilize for 20 or 30 minutes.
At first warm up mine will hit 500 degrees and then slowly cool and stabilize where it's set. If I'm rushing, I'll open the door a little to cool it back down to temp faster.
I am seeing more and more colors showing up, so I thought that I would show my troops lined up.
Nice lookin' ES boolits there, AverageJoe! 8-)
AverageJoe;
What is the color of the copper ones on the right and where did you get it? Got some that I thought would be copper from allpowder but it is a nice carmel when applied.
thanks Dan
Those are my "I over did it" bullets. I recently got some "SUPER DURABLE HIGH GLOSS CLEAR COAT" polyester powder from eBay and I had some leftover metal flake from a job.....so gold metal flake with the clear over it. The stuff is crazy glossy.
OK, I have to break down and ask/beg for some ES gun 101 training. I either get hardly anything coming out or I get the smog cloud coming out. I cannot adjust to anything in the middle. I'm wasting way too much powder and I doubt I'm getting a very even coating. I've tried to adjust the little brass flow knob and that just seems to do nothing unless it's wide open. I know that can't be right but if I leave it at about half it won't work at all. I have seen the second regulator attached between the hose and the gun so that's the only other thing I have left to try. Do I just have a bad gun? I've not messed with the tip since I thought that just effected powder direction.
Maximumbob, have you tried opening the internal regulator about 3/4 of the way and shaking the gun as you spray?
My spraying is far from consistent but after a couple of minutes I always end up with a fairly consistent coat on everything. How much pressure do you have on your line? My gauge is messed up and I just open my line valve until I barely hear air rush into it. My tank is small but I've learned how to coat an entire tray and still have 60+ lbs of pressure in my tank. I can coat two trays per tank now. It really doesn't take much air at all; just a gentle breeze and keep shaking the gun as you spray.
Oh, and consider this: if you waste a whole pound of HF powder in the learning process, you're only out $6.
It's not the couple of bucks I'm out, it's the MESS. The front half of my garage is going to look like the Mars landscape at some point.
Ah, when you are done, do what I do and go full pressure with a little air gun nozzle and just blow the mess into a cardboard box and toss it outside!
Has anyone tried clear PC yet? I have seen some speculation that some people think the coloring in the PC wears barrels prematurely, and I thought "clear" would probably alleviate that. So far I don't see anything abnormal myself, but I'm busy enough (and it's been cold enough lately!) that I shoot, well nothing compared to most of you guys, tho.. so who knows?
A few guys have used the clear. The only powder in question is the harbor freight flat black
MaxBob, that mess just ain't right. But I don't know why you're getting it. When I started PC I anticipated a mess and spread out a tarp, and did make a mess my first time out but quickly made changes. What works for me at least-
- unscrewed/removed the yellow plastic 'spreader-outer' thing on the threaded rod.
- added a small $6 HF regulator (not just a valve) at the air input to the gun. It keeps the air pressure consistent right where you need it.
- set reg around 12psi, tap the gun fairly often while spraying, keep it within a foot of the boolits.
- learned that more than an inch or so of powder in the tank causes tsunamis.
Maybe one or two of these things will work for you too. Once you get it tamed it's pretty easy.
Maxiumbob54, have you tried just putting 1/2 to 3/4 inch of powder in the cup and make sure you're getting a powder tornado in there and not just blasting out pure powder down the tube? I didn't remember you saying how much you were putting in there. I use about 2 inches, never more, but it will spray powder down to the last 1/16 of an inch in there. Just one inch of powder would do many trays.
Shot around 60 boolits in the 45 and in the 9mm. No leading, as accurate as the lubed ones. Cleaned bore with a wet swab of hopped, and no PC residue. Scrubbed bore with bronze brush and hopped, ran another patch and still no PC residue. I am calling this a success. Reclaimed bullets from trap and they still have most of PC on them. Even after going through plywood and 15" of rubber mulch.
I was arranging my shed to start ESPC. Everyone has trouble with bullets falling over, and I got to looking. I set my oven sideways on the bench. I had a leftover short bench from another project that was the same height as the level that I bake at. So I set the bench which is 10" by 14" by 4" high, just an inch beyond the swing of the door.
I will make a cardboard spray booth so I don't get powder all over my shiny new Con. Oven. PC the bullets on the bench lift off the booth. then just slide the tray off of the bench and into the oven. I will report later on how it works. Kevin
Makes me wonder if you can't build a surface between two steel drawer slides at the height of your oven rack so the slides would gently convey your undisturbed boolits right to the oven rack. Much less chance of your boolits falling over. No gap at all between oven rack and PS spray tray. Just need a way to lock the steel drawer slides in the closed position while you are spraying PC until you are ready to smoothly extend them to the oven rack.
Mike
NOE 360160 WFN, in HF red and Lagoon green.
(and a little of whatever color was used last in the powder jar):wink:
I put the checks on em because I'm loading them for Mom to shoot in her Marlin.
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nice you make your own checks
You can't beat free checks!
Also today, made a couple of trays of Accurate 359-162V
http://i613.photobucket.com/albums/t...ps9b541040.jpg
And some 358665 for a friend's new Rossi. (yes, they were sprayed with two different batches of powder)
http://i613.photobucket.com/albums/t...psb60753e2.jpg
And both of these were some older boolits that I had stored after tumbling in LLA. So I tumbled em in a coffee can with some gasoline, air dried, and then a quick swirl with some lacquer thinner to get the gas smell off 'em, then air dried and sprayed.
I stopped at the local HF last night. They had all their powders still on sale, so I grabbed a yellow, a white, and another red.
Now if I only had some time to do some coating.
I'm like several others in really liking the speckled pc colors. And they never are the same.
Another thing to add to my 'to-do' list
I'm trying something this morning, and can't report on its effectiveness just yet - thought of it after two trays of bullets and didn't have enough air in the compressor to finish this third tray - but here's what I did for a hollow-point rack:
I took scraps of aluminum foil from my first two trays, then some other scrap pieces, and balled up tiny little 2"x2" gobs of foil, then twisted a point from one corner, and flattened the rest. This left a base I could stand on my tray, with a little aluminum-foil point sticking up, upon which I cold impale a hollow-point bullet.
I tried 6 or 7 of these and stuck them on unused corners of my tray. I had 20PSI left in a 3-gallon tank and got about 90% coverage when the tank ran dry. As soon as the baby wakes up from her nap (right above the porch where the air compressor has to run) I'll finish this tray, bake them, and try to get a picture.
If this works, it becomes an absolutely dirt-cheap way to stand a hollowpoint bullet on a tray, no fancy racks needed, and the coating with strengthen each little 'stand' and they'll get better with each use. In theory.
Ok, the balled-up foil worked. I figured out that a 2"x3" strip is enough but 2"x4" is perfect; ball each strip up, twist one end into a point long enough to keep the bullet up in the air, flatten the base, and it works perfectly.
FWIW it seems to me that HF red or yellow both cure easier than HF black. I've found that red and yellow with just a touch of black still cures fine and makes a nice fall-themed orangish color that I really like.
Also, I figured out that twelve minutes on my oven timer, with the thermostat set on 350 degrees, is perfect. Complete cure, no melting. If I'm elevating any bullets on a nail rack I put them closest to the door as in theory it should be the coolest part of the oven.