Nope, ain't a tryout for the school play. Today I finally loaded up the pot with some lead and began casting for the first time. Learned a lot but not as much as I did reading all the forums here. There's got to be like a gazillion years of experience combined here. You guys give the best advise and are never anything less than helpful. Because of that I believe I learned some today and was successful. But first things I learned today:
The advise to wear stout leather shoes did not get past me. I now understand why. Not first hand per se, but rather from looking at the lead splatter on my boots after this session.
A putty knife is your best friend for cleaning up. Not only is it great for getting the splatter up all over, but it's also real useful for getting the **** out of the pot once it cools.
Slow is fast. Fast is slow. I started out having one good boolit in 5. Slowed down and got 15 good to 1 bad.
Have a brass brush handy. It's real helpful to clean the mould when alloy starts getting stuck in the air vents.
You can't tighten down the set screw holding the sprue plate screw in enough. The sprue plate will come loose.
The wrench you have to tighten that set screw will fit between the cracks in the boards on the deck and fall into the leaves and other **** there under.
So, the plan was to drop 100 boolits from my Lyman 457677 490 Grain Postell mould today. I started up the ProMelt and loaded 15 lbs of Lyman #2 from Rotometals into the pot. 750 wasn't hot enough. Turned it up to 825 and it was stirring better. Had the mould on the hot plate at Medium. Medium wasn't hot enough as the wrinkles would prove out, so Medium and a 1/8th more seemed to work great. In the mean time, the mould warmed up and I was finally casting keepers.
All in all, I spent about 3 hours casting 103 boolits. The first 25 took over an hour. The last 25 took about 25 minutes.
Here's the results...
Attachment 114982
So a big thanks to all who are here helping the new guy. These boolits are ready for the Sizer/Lubricator (I'll be using the Lyman Moly Lube on them). Can't wait to see how they shoot.
Jim P.
