Mould Q's

[PPpastordon]

Just received some Lyman moulds. Three are four (4) cavity and I have questions about two of them.
One is 452460KW. From appearances I believe the K to stand for Keith; but i don't know about the W. Also I would like to know the weight. It looks a lot like the .452 I loaded in my .45 ACP's long ago.
The other question is about the mould with 2 cavities for the 439421 - which I am very familiar with and 2 cavities for the 311359, which I believe is about 115 grain. Is that the right weight: And how common are Lymans with two different boolits?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[leftiye]

You might PM floodgate. he's one of our gurus on the subject of molds.

[Glen]

The initials following a mould number are to identify which cherry was used to cut the cavities (rumor has it that they are the machinist's initials, but I don't know if that's really true). The 452460 is a dandy-fine .45 ACP bullet, and it is a SWC design, but I'm pretty sure that Elmer Keith didn't design it.

Lyman moulds cut for two different bullet designs are pretty uncommon, but you do see them occassionally. If memory serves, I've owned two over the years (interestingly, both were 4 cavity moulds, cut with 3 of one style and 1 of another, although I have seen other moulds that were 2 and 2 like yours, or 2 cavity moulds that were 1 and 1).

The 311359 is a 115 grain GC spitzer designed for the .30 Carbine.

[floodgate]

PPastordon; Glen, et al.:

PPastor - To answer your second question first, Yes, in the "good old days" - at least well into the '70's - Lyman WOULD cut two different weights of the same bullet in DC blocks on special order, like the #311241 with 125 and 150-gr. cavities I got way back then; I even got a 4-holer with four DIFFERENT .38 boolits cut into it from another member here. I doubt they'd do this now, but NEI will and I have no doubt Dan at Mountain Moulds could also be persuaded to.

On the first question, Tom Griffin at Lyman recently gave me "book, chapter and verse" on the two-letter suffixes to the recent and current mould numbers. I can do no better than to quote him directly:

"Doug,

I'm not exactly sure when the letter system started being used after the mould number. However, it was used as a code for us to track which cutter was used for that block. In your example of 311291AV and BV, the "A" cutter would have been the first cutter made by our vendor "V" for that design. We often will get several cutters at the same time, so we may also get a "B" cutter from the same vendor, so this would be "BV". Cutters purchased afterwards would use a "C", "D" and so on. For quite a while, we made our own cutters for moulds. It was in the late 70's or early 80's that we started to farm out this work to outside machine shops. The letter system would then tell us if the cutter was made in-house or by an outside vendor. I'm not sure about other letters used. They may have been our in-house tool makers initials, but I'm not positive, so you might not want to use that as fact.
Hope this helps.

Tom"

I suspect that the second "vendor ID" letter is somehow keyed to the name of the vendor: "V" for "Victory Machine Co." or something of the sort.

Glen - it is the other little letter/number combination lower down on the left (usually) block that identifies the machine and operator; this from another response by Tom. Tom and Karen Griffin (he is Manager of the Ballistics Division; she is Mgr. for Customer Relations) have been real friends, and have answered a multitude of dumb questions and outrageous requests from me. They DO care!!!

Doug Elliott

[Glen]

Thanks for the clarification Doug!