Well I got my mould today and must say it is quite the picture. So I'll post a few here of it.
Looking good!
Here is the underside. It uses the phillips head and a #2 fits just perfectly. The screws go freely up and down and then through the handles, then you start to screw them into the mould on the far side. It works well. I did not put them on my Lee 6 Cav handles but used another set I had lying around. This set of handles has a thinner "plier nose" (can't find the word I'm looking for) and rattled a bit on the mould but they worked well. I just had to hold the mould either upside down or right side up and close them.
Here is the top of the sprue plate closed on the mould. If you look hard you can see the 'square' hole under the round sprue plate hole. They were perfectly lined up. That took some figuring out on the machine if you ask me.
Here is the inside of one side of the cavities and it shows the alignment pin and holes.
and the other side
The long alignment pins worked very well. I was not expecting them to work as well for some reason, why I don't know, but they worked as intended and when the mould was closed it was locked up tight.
The sprue plate had to be loosend a bit to get good flow, plus I like my plate a bit on the sloppy loose side anyways.
There were no instructions with it or spure lube or top punch. But to be fair I didn't need a top punch for a buckshot mould.
I had pleanty of sprue lube so not an issue there.
I turned on the pot, then took brake cleaner and tooth brush to the mould. I then Q tip swabbed out each cavity on both sides and the spure plate, close it up and set it on the pot to preheat while the lead started to melt.
After the lead melted, I tried to cast but just wasn't getting fill out. I cast about 15 throws with all bad boolits. I then dipped the corner into the melt, got it HOT, smoked it "LIGHTLY" like one quick pass with the lighter, say 1/3 a sec per section, loosed the spure and started throwing good boolits. I found ONE small corner that I needed to "sand'' as it was starting to rub. I hit it with the sandpaper really fast and all is good. I then cast about 5 lbs of buckshot strings. WW water quenched.
After I pulled them out of the water I hit them with the hair dryer for about 3 min, then got my wire snips and cut them all apart. I poured them all into a container with some graphite and they are rattling around getting graphited and rounder. I decided to do this before they get their hardest from water dropping.
As I was cutting them apart the BB's had NO trouble rolling around all over the place. Based on that observation I suspect they are very round!
I'm pleased it's a good mould and I hope to cast many hundreds of pounds of buckshot with it.
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