Objective...to cast a HP round soft enough to mushroom at low velocity. This is about having a .38 Special cartridge that would more likely than not stay within a perp and not pass through into another room in the house and possibly harm an innocent person. A cartridge capable of being fired from a snubby and delivering all its energy by completely mushrooming.
Here I just received a new/used Lee 10# bottom pour from one of our members and thought I'd use it exclusively for soft lead blends. I built a stand for it and the 20# with slide out trays underneath, one for sprue cuts and the other for droppings casts.
The other thing to note here is that I've found that a large hex nut on the hotplate will keep the pin and the mold at 400-450* and they cast perfectly from generally the 2'nd pour.
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Here I'm showing the mold open [too soon I might add, see the smear on the boolit base?] but am emphasizing that I use the pressure pour method. This mold is so small that if I don't pressure pour I get lead all over the place. My objective is to get hot melted lead into the cavity as fast as possible to avoid voids and wrinkles.
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The load was 4.0g. of Bullseye under this SWC-HP at 166g. This mix of pewter sweetened SOWW [stick-on wheel weights] measures today [24 hours after casting and PC'ing them on the same day] at 7.4 BHN and I would imagine that they will increase to about 8.2 in 48 hours. That I would imagine is soft enough however after testing them on the chrony at 725 FPS avg., I still get mixed results in the water test pipe I shoot them into.
The middle mushroom is where I'd like to stay but I've got to modify something here to make them consistently open up...2 of them didn't want to comply.
Options...are to load up to maximum here at 4.2g. of Bullseye and increase the velocity a bit but I hate operating on the ragged edge of a max load. Possibly use another powder? Remember I'm casting these exclusively for a little snubby and that's why I chose the Bullseye, pretty quick powder.
Of course I might not be seeing the forest for the trees here so I'm asking your inputs...what do you fellas think?
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