Casting for ML

[brad925]

Was wondering if anyone has cast any conicals for their ML out of WW's.? What make of mold was used? The reason i am asking is i wanted to know if they had trouble loading them because they are alittle harder than dead soft lead. Also did you have to size them or shoot them as cast.

[P.K.]

Dead Soft REALS. All you need.

[brad925]

I understand that dead soft is better. Its the fact i have 7 to 800lbs if cleaned WW's that i am wondering about using them for conicals in my Hawken.

[tomme boy]

Very hard to get down the barrel. I tried one time. It leaded my barrel very bad. The gas must have been blowing by the bullet and melting the lead. I went to pure lead and it never did it again. This was with maxi-balls. They are made so that the bottom 2 bands are smaller so it will load easy. The top band is full bore to ingrave the rifling. When you fire the gun the preasure smacks the base of the bullet and sweels it to full bore just like a mini ball does.

When I used the harder lead, it must not have sweeled up the base and let the gas get by melting the lead. It was a pain in the you know what to clean it out.

[Chill Wills]

Cast a few to try. They will bump and shoot once loaded BUT the question is will they be a size that they will go down the bore when you are loading them. If they are too large they might be a pain to start unlike pure lead which will be softer and load easier..

[wgr]

if you do put a card wad under them. help with the gas blow buy. i have done it but i had a small peice of barrel off the one i built and ran them through it .made loading easier

[corey012778]

I tried some made out of ww this summer. if you can size them to your bore, it is worth an try. with what I tried, after two shots I put them back in my pot and melted them back down.

get as soft as you can.

[brad925]

Thanks thats what i needed to know. Will leave the ww"s for the 45-70 and round balls.

[idahoron]

I shot some wheel weight bullets in my fast twist renegade. I have sizers to put them at any size I want. Yes they shot real accurate BUT. And that is a big but. I had to clean after every shot . I could keep sub 2" groups at 100 yards but if I didn't clean it would throw it WAY off. FOrget paper patching a WW bullet that is not sized right before you patch. Ron

[451whitworth]

i've shot WW bullets in my PH Whitworth and Volunteer and other .451" rifles. i had to size them .001" under land diameter to load. accuracy was good. if you have plenty of WW and not as much pure pb you can mix 50/50 and obtain very good results. i still prefer pure pb or 40-1 lead/tin and i just mine my backstop for my resupply.

[mooman76]

Years ago I loaded REALs in 45 and 50 CVAs. I did it because that's all I had at the time. My palm got pretty sore after loading a few but it did work and they shoot good out of the 50 with 1/48 twist. I use soft lead now and melted all those down.

[smoked turkey]

I accidently cast up some maxi balls out of WW when I though it was dead soft lead. Big Mistake! I did manage to shoot a few. I ended up breaking my ram rod trying to seat one of the boolits. I melted all of them down and now only soft lead for my conicals. I do use WW for PRB, so all is not lost for your wheel weights.

[samcolt87]

I used WW alloy in my sporterized hawken with 320 grain REALS. was very difficult to seat, but i did not get any leading or loss in accuracy once seated. Granted I did not shoot too many of them either

[DODGEM250]

I was using CVA PB's for a while, and the cost of them, and others, is what set my wheels back in motion to start casting my own again. I have always used the old standbys, like Knight, Hornady, etc., but, I'm tired of trying to shove a bowling ball down a garden hose. I can never find a good fitting commercial bullet / sabot combo and I can never find anything but them little 240 grain bullets, so...

No matter what the manufactures name is on the package, at any given retail store here in Southern Maryland, they all stock only a 240 grain bullet. I have been shooting commercial 295's forever, I thought maybe they stopped making a 295, BUT, I now know it is the stores' lack of knowledge in the products they order / stock. ( sort of like the fishing tackle stores in the middle of the country that stock salt water supplies... why? )

I now make my own from a Lee 457-340-F mold and I resize the bullet to .451. The final step is to buy hundreds of Harvester CR sabots and I can shoot all day now if I so choose. The round is as easy to load as a CVA PB and deadly accurate.

I do have 2 different weights of the Lee REAL's that I have acquired through generous donations for testing, but, I'm waiting for our Deer ML season to be over before I go waking up the farm with testing. The only issues I theorize with the REAL's is the lack of lube grooves and the mess of hand lubing and then shoving that mess down the barrel. I hear lots of good things about the REAL bullets, but, I have yet to shoot them in succession to see what they are REALly like.