Things I learned from Castboolits in 2010
1. +1 on the citric acid brass cleaner. Thanks, Sagacious!
2. Get your brass cleaning media cheap from the pet store or Harbor Freight.
3. How to make the muzzle line of a .22 barrel liner invisible, Thank you John Taylor! Also thanks to Mike from TJ's Liners, without this site I wouldn't have found him, either.
4. Lead wheel weights are becoming extinct, for real. Lesson learned: HOARD.
5. It is possible, although maybe not practical, to make boolits from zinc.
6. Crumb rubber mulch makes excellent boolit trap material for recovery, inspection, and troubleshooting cast boolit performance.
7. Flat, plain top punches work better than shaped ones for most flat point boolits in base-first sizers.
8. PID controllers solve the pot temperature swings and that makes more consistent boolit weights.
9. Accurate Molds (dot) com is a boolit caster's dream come true.
10. Common chucking reamers can be used with masking tape 'bushings' to ream revolver cylinder throats, thanks Bret4207!
Some things I learned on my own:
1. Bronze wool works better than a Chore Boy for removing lead fouling from bores.
2. Carbon monoxide is the real compound responsible for the reduction of lead and tin oxides, not carbon itself.
3. Carnauba wax in boolit lube can promote rust in the bore with certain powders.
4. "Wet" silicone oil makes a great sprue plate and alignment point lube for aluminum moulds.
What I Learned from Various Gun Forums in 2010
1 I learned that many people spend an inordinate amount of time and worry on making their brass look like virgin.
2 I learned that many people consider low smoke and not getting their guns dirty as more important than how accurate a given powder is.
3 I learned that a LOT of beginners can not start simple but must try to solve every reloading problem before they even know if they have any.
4 I learned that a LOT of reloaders see case expansion as only being case mouth belling and NOT getting the case ID to within 0.001" of bullet diameter, and then they don't understand why their lead bullets are being swaged down.
5 I learned that a LOT of people think that their lead pots are emitting copious amounts of lead vapor (10^-8 mm Hg at 700F) and they don't think to be concerned about the heavy metal dust they are generating around their work area.
6 I learned that many people start reloading before they have read the press manual, the die instructions, or a good reloading manual and have almost no idea how each individual die works or how to adjust a die properly.
7 I learned that White Label Lubes will be my new source for bullet lube.
8 I learned that WWs are a thing of the past
9 I learned that a LOT of reloaders think that hard alloys are always best
10 I learned that people were trying case or swaged lead bullets without ever slugging their barrels
11 I learned that almost every beginner appeared to have a brain dead "friend" teaching them to reload