Recommend a mold for .223

[suprmatch]

New to casting got some lessons from bigdb1 and I'm off to the races. I got a nice amount of molds for my pistols and now want to expand to my rifle shooting. Trying to lower the cost of my AR shooting. My AR has a 9 in 1 twist. What do you Recommend? Thanks in advance.

[JIMinPHX]

I don't know about AR's, but I've had my best luck so far with the Bator mold. Unfortunately, it's a special order mold & you usually need to wait several months for it to come in. I generally like the Lyman 225415 & it probably has the closest nose profile to a standard M-193 ball round, so it might be a good feeder in an auto. The only issue that I've had with it, is that my rifle has a long throat & that means that I need to seat the slug waaaaay out there to get it to touch the rifling. I don't think that it is practical to seat that far out for an auto loader.

You might want to do a search through the old threads. Mike Ventereno(sp?) did an article on cast in the Mini-14 for Handloader Magazine a while back. It's been talked about here. A lot of his experiences probably cross over to the AR platform pretty well.

More good .223 info here -
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?p=692881#post692881

[Beekeeper]

I had the Bator mould on order from Mid South( the only sourse) for a year and now they are talking about mid year 2010.
Check out babores moulds and the 22 cal mould he has.
357 Maximum says it is as good or better.


Jim