A friend bought a .45-70 rifle so I thought I would send him a "care package" of boolits. He casts and loads but didn't have any molds for the rifle. I have six different appropriate molds so I started casting for him tonight. He's going to get 100 from each of my molds. The mold is a Lyman 457122E. The boolits weigh about 339 grains. After all of the stories I've read hear about the difficulties of casting hollow points I expected it to be a challenge but it wasn't difficult at all. It didn't take long to figure out that the big boolits were much easier to pressure cast than by just running a stream of lead into the mold. The alloy was a roughly 50/50 mix of other cast boolits and pure lead. There was no need to hurry; that just got the mold too hot. The mold is very small for a 45 caliber rifle boolit and easy to overheat. The smaller boolits are 158 grain from a Lee C358-158SWC mold. It did better with a stream fill than with pressure casting. Neither was particularly difficult to cast. I had trouble keeping the Lee mold hot enough until I realized that my safety timer had turned the power off to the furnace. OOPS!
All will be powder coated.
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