What's wrong with you guys? Get with the program! If you can't get the answer with a few quick swipes of your thumb on your magical touch device, it's not an answer worth having.
I have to admit to having become very annoyed at what I have perceived as a "set" which seems to have come along and discovered bullet casting right about the time it started getting very difficult to buy cheap blasting ammo. There has been a bit of a surge since last December and I hope it begins to subside and that those who are interested in learning from themselves and others stick with it. I also hope that those who just seek to ferret out another cheap way to use up a lot of ammo quickly and loudly don't.
I have been granted the opportunity to teach about one percent of those to whom I have extended the offer to handload. The other 99 percent of the time, the inquiry was more about shooting for free, or at least cheaper and they declined the offer.
I have been granted the opportunity to teach ONE of the very few I have ever offered to help get involved in casting and that ONE became a small, local commercial caster for many years until he remembered how fun casting USED to be. All other inquiries were thinly veiled sniffing for "free bullets." That ONE caster, my Dad and my gunsmith are about the only people I talk to face to face about casting. Everyone else is either not interested in investing the time and work to learn or they are already dead. I do miss the dead guys.
One of the greatest things about casting and handloading is that no matter how long you have done it, or how much of it you have done, there is always something more to learn. I have been at it for over forty years but worked within a narrow band of "what worked" (which was NOT what I found in published sources) until I started seeing what others had ventured into here. It's been interesting and the effort involved in learning has occupied a lot of my time, which might have otherwise been spent on much less productive activity - or as my Wife sees it - it keeps me out of trouble.
I teach, so I see this a lot. The first thing I tell my new students is that learning is WORK and that some of us will just have to work harder than others.
Good thread and a marvelous use of this wonderful thing we call the Internet.