Spoiler: make darn sure that whatever you drop your boolits onto from the mold has no synthetic fibers whatsoever.
I bought a pair of Lee 6 bangers for my 44 mag Marlin, namely the 429-200-RF and the 429-240-SWC. I want the plain base for a soft shooting cowboy type load (which this gun loves, specifically the Ultramax 240 grain cowboy load) and the gas checked variant for a racier load (jacketed 240s with 11.5 grains of Longshot is the bee's knees). I cast 20 pounds and change of keepers with the 200 grain mold and they are .432 as cast and are +/- 1 grain of 213 cast with range scrap plus a couple to 3% pewter. All fine and well. I tumble lubed them and will try shooting them unsized with Trail Boss.
The SWCs cast pretty nicely, although I overheated the mold and got some frosty ones at one point. I was using a wool blanket the dogs had chewed a hole in to drop these boolits on. What I did not realize was that this blanket must have had some synthetic fibers in it because a third or so of the boolits turned out to be stuck to the dang blanket and had melted fibers attached to them. I scraped off what I could and tossed the rest in the reject pile when it was worse than I would bother with. Cast with COWWs plus a few percent of pewter, these were right around 233 grains without the check or lube, which means they are right on the money for 240 grains as a finished product. The odd thing is that the diameters seem to range from .432 to .437. This might have something to do with mold heat ranging from barely hot enough to hot enough to frost, perhaps I did not have the mold quite fully closed when I cast some, or perhaps the cavities are inconsistent in size.
Pretty frustrating to toss a third of my production for something as stupid as using the wrong thing to drop the boolits onto. Grrr...
I plan to make up a dummy cartridge to see if the SWCs will cycle through the action of the Marlin. If they do, will I have problems trying to size these in, say, a .430 Lee push through die?