hi all at castboolit.long time lurker first time poster here.
i must admit that i've started to be interested by casting my own boolits when one of my shooting buddy gave me couple of his cast boolits coated with HI TEK to try in one of my limited glocks . it's been an eye opening experience .really ; no fumes,no lube, no barrel fooling.....very clean and accurate rounds .
before this day , i was reluctant to walk into casting because all it implies; lubing,resizing, ingot casting,bullet casting....and all the stages involved in the whole proces .
did my own research to learn the ropes ,and then started buying moulds,furnace, collecting wheel weights, a lyman 4500 lubrisizer ; i'm currently working with a lyman 356637 9mm rnfp 147 , and a 401638 175grainer for my 40's.both are 4 cavities moulds. i'm also waiting for an NOE groovless mould in 40S&W.
couple days ago i bought some hi tek powder in zombie green ,a can of acetone, and a hamilton beach convexion oven to get me started into boolit coating .
...and after my fisrt batch ever , here's the result which i think is really not what i should get as result.
for the record i mixed 20grams of powder in 100ml of acetone.
i had 1 pound of 9mm and 45acp boolits for my test , which i've put in a basket with 1ml of the hi tek mix , then shaked the basket for 20 seconds so the solvent evaporate and the mix stick to the boolits.
settled the oven to 400f and cooked the first layer for 10 minutes. here what i got. the boolits were brown.
then after leaving the batch cooling down to room temp i resumed the process for a second pass in the oven. here what i got after 8 minutes at 400 .
i can add to this that when i proceeded to make the mix in a translucid jar,i added a jacketed boolit to help stiring the mix, BUT that boolit have an exposed base,and i'm wondering if it could be the reason as why my mix looke like that with a dark layer floating on top of the '''juice'''.
to conclude i can say that those boolits failed the acetone and hammer test. the coating is chipping away,and when i proceeded to the hammer test the coating peeled off after only one hit.