Might be of interest...

[TexasGrunt]

Noticed this mold on eBay this morning and thought someone here might be interested.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ideal-Bullet...8AAOSw5UZY-VPv

[John Allen]

That sucker is cool.

[country gent]

Not only is it a cool mould but it has no parting lines, and in the day was thought to cast the roundest bullets. If its like the few Ive seen its adjustable for weight / length also. Its going for pretty decent money though.

[longbow]

I've been making similar moulds for many years and they work well.

Not sure why Ideal went so small with the mould body. I use 1 1/2" round bar. The first one I made was for a 20 ga. hollow base wadcutter shotgun slug. The Ideal moulds were intended for paper patch boolits. I've made moulds for PP boolits, full groove diameter moulds as well and lube those boolits with tumble lube or lube cookies and more recently undersize moulds for knurling up to groove diameter. I've made moulds like this for:

- 20 ga. slug
- several solid and hollow base 12 ga. slugs
- .44 Mag paper patch, full diameter smooth and knurled
- .308 paper patch
- .303 British paper patch, full diameter smooth and knurled - the most recent was a knurled copy of the Ness safety boolit

All work well.

Not sure why these types of moulds aren't still commercially made especially for PP boolits and now for powder coated boolits. As country gent says no parting lines and perfectly round. I'd think they'd be cheaper to make than split moulds too.

Ideal had a good idea there.

Longbow

[barrabruce]

Longbow.
Do you kurl the 30 cal pp bullets or just use them smooth sided.
Also do you use alox for the kurled bullet lube or just dip or pan lube using a "normal lube".
Thnx
Gunna make some up one day.
Soon I hope

Something like this maybe.

Attachment 193940

[longbow]

Now that I have not seen before!

I was planning on making a multi cavity push out mould from a piece of rectangular bar stock but more conventional like with 4 cavities in line.

I call them push out moulds because I typically use a nose for/ejector rod. I drill then bore or ream the final diameter, lap to put a very slight taper (like about 0.0005") and make sure the cavity is dead smooth. Then I turn a piece of round stock to make a slip fit ejector rod with small stem. The end of the ejector rod is then "drilled" using a D-bit of the correct nose shape... or a hollow point pin. I have made these straight through with full diameter nose form and also shaped cavity then drilled through and smaller ejector pin installed. Bot methods work.

You do not really need an ejector as the boolits should slide out when the mould is inverted but I like the added ability to eject if and when a boolit does stick (which has happened to me).

I started out with smooth moulds and boolits for paper patching for my .308 and .44 mag Marlin. When I tried the 0.301" smoothie with thicker paper for my .303 British I got horrible results. The boolit should be bore diameter to a couple thou over bore diameter and I was running 0.002" under bore diameter. So I tried knurling and that fixed it but in all honesty I have not done much more with paper patching in the .303's or other guns for that matter.

I am now working back around to paper patching and want to make a proper size mould for the .303's but with allowance for knurling as several people here say they get better results with GG boolits than smooth when patching for smokeless. I only know that the undersize smoothie did not do well where when knurled up some it did pretty well. Not sure if that is because of larger diameter, knurling holding the patch in place in the bore or a bit of both but since I have experience patch slipping on smooth boolits I am inclined to knurl.

As for non paper patched, I have shot both smooth and knurled successfully (surprisingly to me). I started out with smooth and using LLA or a grease cookie like the BP guys and both worked. The most accurate boolit I have shot to date from my .303's is a smooth 215 gr. boolit similar in style to the Lyman 314299 except no lube grooves.

I decided to make a groover to make "microgrooves" for tumble lubing so not really knurling, just many small annular rings and that worked very well except that using a ribbed but smooth roller, I had boolits occasionally skid while grooving and that was the end of the boolit. So I've moved on to diamond knurling.

I use a home made lube loosely based on Felix lube. I liked the soap idea but didn't have the ingredients for Felix lube so mixed up some paraffin wax, Lucas Red "N Tacky grease and some Ivory soap. It worked pretty well but did not stick well in lube grooves or on smooth boolits so I added a teaspoonful of Bardahl oil treatment to tackify the lube and that did it. It is probably closer to Ben's Red than Felix lube. I mixed it up right about the time Ben created his Ben's Red lube too. Great minds and all! Well, Ben's is, I just get lucky now and then.

I now use that lube on everything and have dip lubed, pan lubed and now usually hot tumble lube by melting some in an old cast iron frying pan then roll a handful of boolits in it. Once the boolits warm up the lube goes on much like LLA leaving a very thin coating which sticks to the smooth boolits or smooth parts of GG boolits and of course holds onto knurled boolits real well.

Long answer to a short question. Sorry, I am particularly gabby tonight.

Longbow

[725]

I, for one, like to read your stuff.

Still haven't gotten back to the round ball 12 yet, but the summer is young.

[Reverend Al]

Yikes! That Ideal adjustable .38-55 mould on eBay sold for $425 US!

[Old Coot]

That is why it is called "Expensive Bay".