Can you top this? NOPE.

[gunoil]

Never had much luck with Amdro but the Ortho white powdered stuff works pretty well when it's dry. Or you could do like those guys who pour molten aluminum down the hole, dig it up and sell as art. Boiling hot water works but my yard is too big. Kind of like the blob, they're everywhere.

new stuff if ya have fire ants, called: " come and get it". Yep thats the name of it. May work on any ants.

[detroitcharlie]

.. Only this one looked different than mine. It was the same mold but it had a pair of handles on it! Wow! I never knew they came with handles. All this time I was holding the mold in my left hand when I opened it to dump out the boolits and then I put it under the spout on a brick to hold it while I poured alloy into the empty mold and shook my left hand to cool off.

That might be the greatest thing I've ever read, lol.

[Motor]

I just read the original post. I'm almost without words. Blind ambition ???

How can you read a Lyman manual cover to cover and not know moulds are supposed to have handles? LOL unreal.

Motor

[Baron von Trollwhack]

I just read the original post. I'm almost without words. Blind ambition ???

How can you read a Lyman manual cover to cover and not know moulds are supposed to have handles? LOL unreal.

Motor

Happens here all the time, in many aspects of what we do. Such things are very good learning experiences.

I have only heard of 5 or 6 hundred newbies a year needing multiple lessons for the first few years. Although some have totally FLUNKED OUT, others keep at it and frequently learn !

BvT

[glockmeister]

Y'all are GOOD! I'm not even going to try to top any of these posts. Like others have said, surprised we even grew to be this old, I know I am. My dad told me, ''Experience is the best teacher, someone else's is better and cheaper.'' My dad never lied to me and now that I'm 72, I'm still amazed I lived to be an adult. Take care, John.

[waynem34]

old post revisited.

[victorfox]

I can't top this but made me remember my school days. I was into firearms since I was 8 but always tried to find my father's gun (I always was the nosy tinker of the family) and always experimented and shot from age 10 onward. I was about 14, a school friend had a book about firearms and he saw a matchlock musket and decided he would build something like that. Well he did but couldn't shoot because he lacked powder and shot/balls. I made him a gypsum mold and gave him a flask with almost 2.5oz of black powder. He cast a semi conical in the mold (he gave me the barrel diameter and I figured some proportion where the length would be about 1.5x the diameter -- little i knew about the effects of rifling doing etc). Well we hadn't internet not even landlines so I gave him the stuff on Friday so he could go home and test. Next Monday he comes to school with face fully peppered looking like he was blast with #12 or smaller shot. Not withstanding laughter I asked what happened. He told me "you sob the powder you gave me exploded in my face". "how much did you put in the gun?" I asked. "well the whole flask..." I laughed so much of him and told that powder should be used for about 40 shots!!! I asked him for the remainings of his gun and next day he brings an old tin flashlight wired to an ugly wooden frame. The gun, before exploding in his face, had a wine cork breechblock!!! Thankfully nothing worse happened to him and I suggested he stopped with his spiriments because he was too dumb... The whole school laughed about how he discovered the powder.

[victorfox]

Another one this was me. I was about 10 or less and found in the house we moved in a nice little metal cannon. It had a open muzzle but no fuse opening. That didn't prevent me from pouring some black powder (man I need to ask my father why he had that powder laying in the house for he had no muzzleloader neither did any reloading...) and lighting it with a match to see the effects of the blast. I was having so much fun I think I got distracted and topped the little cannon mouth. When I lit it it burned all my eyebrows and forehead hair as well as my bed mattresses... Setting my bed on fire. I was able to stop the fire but couldn't scale the beating neither the shame of going to school with the hair all messed as part of my punishment. From that day on I started to respect fire and powder...

[opus]

Sadly, my first post is in this thread.

When I was about 16 I decided to cast some bullets for my 357s to save money. I had been casting roundballs of pure lead for my frontstuffer for a couple of years with no issues. I bought a lee single cavity aluminum mould (it came with handles attached) and was ready to cast. I went to the local public range after dark and scrounged bullets from the backstop. I grabbed every bullet I saw including a lot of FMJ 45 acp bullets, jacketed rifle bullets, SWCs, etc. I went home and dumped them all in the pot and when the jackets floated to the top I removed them.

I poured some very good looking 158 gr SWCs and was quite happy with myself. I proceeded to handload 150 357 magnums with a healthy dose of 2400. I had no idea they needed to be sized or lubed. The next day at the range I fired 50 rds each through my three 357 revolvers, a Python, S&W 686, and a 3rd generation SAA. I noticed that after a few rounds the accuracy was atrocious.

Needless to say when I looked in the bores while cleaning, lead was literally dripping throughout the barrel of each one. I was devastated to say the least. This is also the point where I discovered the Lewis lead remover. I still have all three of these revolvers and they shoot quite well with proper bullets.

The really sad part is that in the 40 plus years since this incident I have not cast a single bullet other than roundballs. I gave up and have missed an important aspect of handloading. At this point the investment needed is causing me to question the value of getting a late start at it.

No, this does not top casting without mould handles, but I felt I needed to share the experience and a sore point to me having missed out on casting the right way.

Skip

[Pee Wee]

Well Skip I can say that it's never to late. I stared casting two years ago, I am 69 now. Since I retired at age 66, I started loading and progressed to casting and in the last 6 mo. Started swaging. I am really enjoying it all and it keeps me busy. I also have gotten into competive shooting. My reloading and casting equipment cost are paid off and the savings has been exceptinal. So go for it you won't regrett it.

[Chris C]

Sadly, my first post is in this thread.

When I was about 16 I decided to cast some bullets for my 357s to save money. I had been casting roundballs of pure lead for my frontstuffer for a couple of years with no issues. I bought a lee single cavity aluminum mould (it came with handles attached) and was ready to cast. I went to the local public range after dark and scrounged bullets from the backstop. I grabbed every bullet I saw including a lot of FMJ 45 acp bullets, jacketed rifle bullets, SWCs, etc. I went home and dumped them all in the pot and when the jackets floated to the top I removed them.

I poured some very good looking 158 gr SWCs and was quite happy with myself. I proceeded to handload 150 357 magnums with a healthy dose of 2400. I had no idea they needed to be sized or lubed. The next day at the range I fired 50 rds each through my three 357 revolvers, a Python, S&W 686, and a 3rd generation SAA. I noticed that after a few rounds the accuracy was atrocious.

Needless to say when I looked in the bores while cleaning, lead was literally dripping throughout the barrel of each one. I was devastated to say the least. This is also the point where I discovered the Lewis lead remover. I still have all three of these revolvers and they shoot quite well with proper bullets.

The really sad part is that in the 40 plus years since this incident I have not cast a single bullet other than roundballs. I gave up and have missed an important aspect of handloading. At this point the investment needed is causing me to question the value of getting a late start at it.

No, this does not top casting without mould handles, but I felt I needed to share the experience and a sore point to me having missed out on casting the right way.

Skip

Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, Skip. I'm 71 years old and just started casting about 8 months ago............and am eagerly waiting for my pot to arrive so I can smelt my first batch of wheel weights. Didn't even start shooting until 3 years ago. Talk about a late bloomer!!!!! It's never too late to start anything you have an interest in.

[popper]

Chris -- got a few years on you and a very late bloomer also. Have fun.

[Steve77]

This story is barely on the scale compared to some of the others, but I'll tell it anyway. When I was 11 or so, we went to stay with my widowed grandmother for a few weeks one summer. My grandma had lived alone since my grandpa died when I was 2 weeks old. Gramps had been a junk collector, scrapper and handyman for decades and grandma had never gotten rid of any of his stuff. Well my 13 year old brother and I had great fun rifling through all of grandpas old stuff and eventually found a box of 22 ammo but couldn't find a gun to shoot them from. We had been shooting and reloading with dad since we could hold a gun with a little help, so we knew that if we could squish the rims of the 22s we could make them go off. After scrounging around a while in the garage, we found a solution to our problem! A small bench vise that wasn't attached to a bench. I know you are reading this thinking that we were pretty stupid for thinking about squeezing 22 shells in a vice in grandmas garage. Nope, we were way too smart for that, we brought it outside first! Well the first couple went ok, you really gotta squeeze them suckers tight before they go off though. Well, eventually our luck ran out and one shell exploded and sent shrapnel through 2 of my fingers, breaking one and mangling another. Still have a nasty scar from that one. When grandma got home, we had everything put back where it came from and we told her that I tripped and fell on an old GI folding shovel. We never told mom and grandma the whole story til about 20 years later.

[JakeBlanton]

You know, I always wondered if anyone had ever tried that.....

Apparently more than you might think. I've known a few people who after having had a couple of beers, will admit to having tried that ONCE. The internet wasn't around back then, so you didn't have anyone to tell you how stupid of an idea it might be to do something like that.

[Crash_Corrigan]

I'm back with another stupid episode. I moved last summer from my tin trailer into a lovely rental home here in Las Vegas. However for many reasons I have yet to fully unpack my stuff properly.

I fell in love with a Mihec mold recently and bought it. It is supposed to cast 130 gr 9mm boolits without lube grooves. It is designed to allow easy powder coating of the boolit and thereby negate the lube that smokes up so badly.

I got busy and cast about 600 or so of these babies in the 8 cavity mold. They were beautiful. I then PC'd about 500 of them in a nice Bacon Grease color coating. I was proud of myself for doing such a good job. I then set up my new Dillon XL 650 press and proceeded to load 300 or so with a loading of 5.6 Gr of AA #5 and a OAL of 1.075. After I had boxed the last of 6 boxes of new ammo I decided to put one into the chamber of my Browning Hi-Power.

It went in until the last 1/8 of an inch. There it stuck. The boolit was too fat. I had not found my calipers yet. I searched in vain for days in my overflowing garage in the miserable heat of Las Vegas. I finally just ordered a set from FS Reloading and they arrived in two days. My boolits were coming up as anywhere from .362 to .364 in diameter and as such did not fit at all. I looked for my case gauge in 9MM and my sizing dies in .357. Again no joy and I ordered new ones. While awaiting the arrival of these I put away the Browning and forgot about it.

Some days later I ran across the Browning and noticed that the slide was not in battery. I pushed on it and it was sticking. I was thinking ahead(too much) of having this weapon looked at by a gunsmith and anticipating another expensive repair when I managed to close the slide. Now I then tried to pull it open, without success. Somehow I managed to get the pistol to work.

Yes! That fat boolit worked just fine....the Browning belched out that boolit to my surprise from the business end of the barrel. The round went through the opened door of the room. It made neat little round holes through both sides of the wooden interior door and continued into the adjacent wall.

It made a neat hole in my side of the wall but a nasty hole on the other side of the wall which happened to be my kitchen. It missed the cat relieving himself in the cat box and plowed into the floor about 6 inches from the edge of a built in cabinet. The cat erupted from the toilet facility with a major yowl and hiked himself into the bedroom and was not found for hours and hours.

The boolit was not yet done...it gouged out a 2 inch chunk of the linoleum and concrete floor spattering the kitchen with pieces of lead, flooring and powder coating flakes as far as 8 feet away as it punched into the wooden cabinet at about an 1 inch altitude. It apparently stopped there as nothing exited from the base of the cabinet adjacent to the refrigerator.

Anybody got a decent way to fix the gouge in the floor and camoflauge the damage so I do not have to pay to have the kitchen refloored? The holes in the wall and the door are a easy fix with the right sized corks and spackle and paint. The floor not so much.

Hey at least I missed killing the cat...........

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

WOW !!!

[dragon813gt]

That's quite and entertaining and impressive story. Now for the bad news, there is no way to patch linoleum. You're gonna have to redo the entire floor. The good thing is that linoleum is cheap.

[woodbutcher]

Holey cow!!!!!!!!!!!!!They say into every life a little rain must fall.But you have been under a monsoon.Wishing you the best.
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

[RP]

Simple patch for linoleum measure how big of a area that is in need of repair and match the color so it will not stand out and pick up a RUG or mat that is about it.

[Atlast357]

Well Crash at least you have mastered the art of casting an ain't a bad writer neither.
I love short stories written years apart , cuzz well they are easy to follow....... 11 years later.
Keep em coming.

Went to my optometrist complaining about seeing double seems one eye worse than the other.He said my eyes have changed drastically, left is now near-sighted,
so turned my glasses upside down..........