Hobbies! This is where man meets ignorance, thank the Lord for the IGAO ( I got an opinion )
First off I have yet to clean my size dies. I have hit the bee's wax, Lee alloy lube, case sizing lube, and just plain dry. I also run bullets from .309 to .452. I have found the mix of 10part drug store alcohol cut to 1 part RCBS case lube2 in a small squirt bottle works great. lately I have taken to cutting a couple squirts of this and Lee resize lube (Large pea size blob) and q-tip painting just the lube groove/bands part of the bullet. It dries quick and aids in sticky issues, I figure it has to help lube the bullet down the barrel as well. After all I am using HF Matte Black powder for now. Kids tossed out my red, loved that powder.
I use the #5 recycle tub (sour cream tub) does enough bullets to cover my tray. Dump from there to a quart size pot sifter, couple shakes to lose the loose powder and dump on oven pan atop a silicone pad. Bake 12-20 minutes and use this as my timer to be shaking up another tub of bullets to be ready. Once I hit my time mark I pull out the tray and dump mat/bullets all into 5 gallon cat litter bucket. In 5 minutes I pull them out and dump atop the porch table so they can dry off. I just repeat the process. Does this process work ?? tho 5,000 bullets later ... I can honestly say it does not hurt. My look at the process...
I use ANYTHING I can get my hands on for lead... range drops, battery clamps, roof vent shielding, wheel weights (more later), hammer heads, fish weights, ... literally anything lead. Would love me a 900lb keel from sailboat. I also salvage brass, copper, steel and exchange that for lead 200lb steel normally get me 20lb lead. Now that said, I have run into a BUCKET LOAD of issues with my lead... too hot, too cold, (get a thermometer) temp does play a part in retaining the metals that harden lead. If you use wheel weights there is a plethora of weights out there take a 2 penny nail and fridge magnet with you ... if you cannot scratch it or a magnet clings to it ... don't toss it in the pot. These normally will be flagged as ZN or FE denoting zinc or iron. You may see some zinc melt and will make your lead unusable till you get a couple good skims out of your lead. When skimming and melting I will toss half a tea candle into the lead as a flux. Once it ignites, and it will scare you, you can hold your molds over the flames to get them good and sooty to work as a release agent for the bullets. Once it is black is all you need and when I see the shiny of the mold come through again I re-soot them and press on... I also shuffle 2 molds say .356 and .401 giving each mold a second to cool down... IMPORTANT note: A TOO HOT mold can drop bullets up to 0.002 larger than stated. What others were saying, a larger bullet will cause issue in the molds and some form of lube such as when case sizing is needed to grease the works. Of all my casts and problems with bullets... it is when I let them get hot enough to literally HISS when dropped in water that I over sized bullets. I drop .312 as I shoot Nagant and 7.7Jap, I also size these to .309. anything +/- 0.001 from mold works fine in my dirty Lee size die. Periodically I get a random series of drops .315+, not truly random. I get some rogue tag of lead between the plates and it boogers up everything and one of those bullets ends up in the mix rather than back in the pot. My looks at lead...
So now that we have arrived here what have we learned so far... do what works for you and expect some flaws. All flaws are people oriented, so learn from the process and make changes. All of us here are just really sounding boards for the truth... We all have one of those days
I mass melt on a coleman stove with a 3qt iron pot. I use a mini corn muffin iron mold, each corn is 1.5 dippers of lead. These small corns can be dropped about 5 at a time into the small series of lead smelters. At this point I also cast whatever bullets I am low on at the time. I keep my furnace in a 18" tool box, leaving room for about 20 or so corn bars. I have a second box that holds the rest of the corns in the shed. I am a few hundred pounds into casting at this point, scrounging roughly 50lbs of lead every weekend. Cook your lead around 700F you should do fine. In my small pot this is just hot enough to keep lead melted, a stiff breeze over pot 10-15mph will create a minor skimming of partial solidification. The larger pot of iron does not get this effect.
Example of .312 cast and .309 resize ... HF Red and Matte Black
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Actually, I’m fully capable of doing similar.....so, I double-checked! memtb
