What alloy might this be please?

[Dusty Bannister]

Is it possible that when you stop and wait for the pot to get up to temp, the mold is getting too cold? The frosting is most likely from the antimony in the alloy. It might also be possible that since this is winter your casting area is cooler than usual and this will speed up the heat loss from the mold. Pretty sure guess that you are not using a hot plate to keep the mold temperature at casting temps.

You might find that the current blend is a lot harder than you need or want. I usually run about 3 COWW and 1 Lino for most handgun bullets. I also cast with a lot of Lee molds and not below 40 degrees ambient air temp. Excessive ventilation can also give a false indication of problems as well.

[BCRider]

I keep the mold sitting on top of a piece of thin stainless that I use for a cover while the temp comes up. Plus the frosted appearance stayed consistent warm mold or not. I was also pushing the casting so the mold would stay hot enough to fill correctly.

I've got a few other projects at the moment so I won't get back to casting for a while... Probably a month to 6 weeks. But I want to try using this rather hard spacer material in smaller amounts in with other fairly relatively soft lead. I'll update when I learn more or come up with some better numbers.

With only having around 50 lbs of the stuff I'm interested in but can't really justify the cost of a proper assay. At least not unless the cost is quite reasonable. A couple of acronyms were mentioned above but it's hard to search on what those letters stand for. Too many non related returns from a web search. Can someone tell me an actual company name and roughly the cost of such a test?

By the way. Just want to thank you all for being so helpful. Forums can so often be great places to hang out and this is certainly one of them. But there's other forums were folks tend to talk down to others with basic questions like I'm bothering you with. So kudos to all of you for your wonderful and helpful attitudes.

[bangerjim]

Last time I heard, he charges a pound of lead for a gun shoot. Unless things have changed. Anyone can afford that!

Check it out.

And my local scrap yards will do a shoot for free....if you buy something.

banger