Well, I finally went and did my first muzzle casting today. Old retrobate put the cheap cooking ladle somewhere, so I grabbed an old coffe can (metal!), used a vise-grip for a handle, and turned on the heat gun. A few minutes later, the alloy was liquid with no dross, and I poured it (mostly) into the muzzle. Waited 30 minutes like Brownell advised.
Attachment 139820
Well, I am not sure that a muzzle casting and a chamber casting cool at the same rate as the muzzle casting had to be beat out of the bore. It does look nice, shiney, smooth, edges of the grooves are well defined.
Instead of futzing around with math, I just rolled the cast around until I got the highest reading of .445, and that is a lot better than buying multiple special H&I die sizes.Some may doubt the accuracy of my dimensions, but I thought absolute accuracy to the ten thousandth is a little excessive.
Attachment 139821
So I'll start scrounging for an H&I, a 446-ish mould, and we'll see.