Hi guys!

I am interested in casting my own bullets, but really don't know where to begin. as far as buying a melter, ignots, etc, i can do that, but where/what are the best places to get the proper lead/antimony mixture? i have heard of wheel weights, and i managed to sort though some at my friends auto shop, not the shiny ones (that supposedly have zinc in them), but the old dull ones, as i was told. is there a easy way to determine which ones are "good" and which ones have zinc in them? obviously, i revove the steel hook on the weights before melting them, correct? also, what is a decent hardness tester to get? any advice will be greatly appreciated! thanks!

This'll sound kinda smartassed, but dump everything into your smelting pot and all that ain't lead will float to the top where you can then skim it off. No muss, no fuss, no extra work involved.

Get a turkey fryer (Wal Mart has 'em for as little as $30) and get yourself a cast iron pot of at least 6 quarts capacity. Obviously the initial smelting down is an outside job. Take the melted metal and pour it down into igots of 1 pound or so. You can use muffintins, again I lake cast iron, but the bottom of coke cans work pretty good to, cut 'em about 1" high from the bottom, dry 'em and pour away.

As to your melting pot, from which you'll cast, the best economical model is the Lee Production pot. for $40 or so you get a ten pound capacity pot that will melt metal to cast thousands of boolits. Or you could spend $200 and have an RCBS pot that in 20 years (assuming there is an RCBS in 20 years) if it fails they will fix it free. A point of interest, 20 years ago that pot was less than $100. Your purse will decide.

You can cast from a small pot on a Coleman camp stove, but the melt requires constant fluxing attention. Bottom pours will need that too from time to time, but not nearly so much as a melt for a dipper.

You can cast for a long time without a tester, but having one makes it simplier to get a constant alloy hardness from an assortment of lead. Simple thing is to get wheel weights, add 2% tin by weight and forget the rest, if you need harder you can always heat treat your bullets, but WW will serve better than well for most of your casting. I'm sure others will chime in, just get some WW, a heat source, a pot mold and dipper and cast away, the rest of the answers you have will be answered with time and experience.

I second johnnypaul's motion. I do my initial melt of wheelweights in a cast iron plumbers pot. Putting raw wheelweights in you casting pot is a mess. Raw wheelweights are covered in all kinds of nasty, stinky stuff. It also pays to do the initial melt outdoors.

Before I finally purchased about 650# of linotype to use as melt "sweetener", I cast hundreds of thousands of bullets using a mix of 19# of ingoted-out wheel weights and a one-pound bar of 50/50 solder. (I bought the solder from a plumbing supply house.) The alloy filled the cavities very well, and it didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference if the ww ingots were a bit heavy or a bit light. They always shot well, and leading was minimal.

Like Mark said..
Clean up your starting raw material in aseparate container than the one you wish to use for casting bullets. Pour the cleaned metal into some sort of ingot mold and use those to prepare your final alloy, whatever you choose.
In addition, you need to know that ANY moisture coming in contact with molten metal is a prescription for a very unpleasant experience. The high heat of the metal will vaporize any water that comes in contact with it explosively.
Begin to accumulate reading material and study your new hobby before you fire up a pot of lead.
Casting your own bullets is a great addition to my overall enjoyment of shooting for a lot of reasons. I recommend it highly if you have the time and patience to learn and enjoy it.
Cheers,
Don

I've been smelting wheelweights in the same pot that I cast with for over 25 years. It's not a problem. The odor is a problem so it is best done outside, or on a rainy day, with the garage door wide open.

so basically... it doesn't matter if the wheel weights have zinc, if it does have zinc in it, it will float to the top and can be skimmed away, correct? what about the steel part that is on the back of the wheel weights? do i have to pull those off before i melt them down, or will those go to the bottom, or surface to the top? it may sound dumb, but as i have no experience, i would like to find out the correct way to do this, so i make minimal mistakes. thanks

You can get away with alot of various alloy mixes,contary to some of the garbage you read.

Another real good source of lead,is backstop lead at a range. Its already the correct ratio in most cases.

Yes the metal fasteners will need to be removed. Its very easy.Get a cheap kitchen spoon and drill holes in it and skim the metal out of the pot.Some may float some may sink. Stir the whole pot.

After you get all of the unwanted extras out. You'll need to flux the pot.You can use a commercial flux,or you can get even cheaper and take the dried pine sap clusters that form on pine tree wounds. Take a thumb sized lump and place it in the pot and stir.You'll end up with all the dross and imperfections on the top of the pot. Take your spoon with holes and skim this metal off the pot.

Now you're ready to cast bullets. The moulds will cast best if their at a certain temprature. You can reach that temp by either casting till the mold reaches the proper temp and starts throwing good bullets.Or you can speed things up by placing your moulds across the pot. I've got a shield around my burner and pot that allows me to pre heat the moulds,by setting them near the heat. I've also found that running two seperate moulds at a time,allows enough cooling time between pours and keeps moulds from overheating.

Bullets with imperfections can simply be dumped back into the pot.

thanks to everyone who replied. what is a good hardness tester to get? one that is decently accurate, but doesn't cost more than the melting pot?

quote:

Originally posted by byf42:
Hi guys!

I am interested in casting my own bullets, but really don't know where to begin. as far as buying a melter, ignots, etc, i can do that, but where/what are the best places to get the proper lead/antimony mixture? i have heard of wheel weights, and i managed to sort though some at my friends auto shop, not the shiny ones (that supposedly have zinc in them), but the old dull ones, as i was told. is there a easy way to determine which ones are "good" and which ones have zinc in them? obviously, i revove the steel hook on the weights before melting them, correct? also, what is a decent hardness tester to get? any advice will be greatly appreciated! thanks!

There may indeed be some wheelweights that have zinc in them, but just because a wheelweight is shiny is no indication that it contains any zinc. Tin is also shiny, as is freshgly-cast pure lead, for that matter.

If you can find one, I recommend Veral Smith's (LEAD BULLET TECHNOLOGIES, LBT) "Jacketed Velocities With Cast Bullets", a little handbook that tells you everything you need to know about making and shooting cast bullets!

According to the International handgun metallic Silhouette Association,

"Veral Smith’s Lead Bullet Technology company has quietly returned on the scene and is once again producing high quality bullet molds and other products. I don’t know of anyone that has used one of his molds or shot the bullets that they produce that haven't sung their praises. LBT Blue and LBT Blue Soft bullet lube have also received high marks from cast bullet shooters as well. They also produce the only lead hardness tester available to amateur casters that gives direct readings in Brinell numbers. Other testers give readings that then have to be converted into Brinell numbers. Contact them at (LBTisAccuracy@imbris.net) and request a copy of their very informative catalog. It’s full of great information and just about all aspects of cast bullet making."

byf42 (you a Mauser guy???):

Speaking as a caster of some forty years' experience, I'd strongly suggest that for your first steps you do NOT over-complicate the whole proceeding.

Get a mould, an electric pot, and MAKE BULLETS, learning as you go.

To this day, I do not own a hardness tester, and I do not believe that much of a gap exists in my equipment on account of that. I'm currently using about seventy moulds, in calibers from .22 to .45 in both rifle and pistol designs. Consumption is running around 5,000 to 10,000 rifle rounds per year, but varies a lot due to what 'new' guns (some very old!) have come in the door and where the emphasis gets placed from year-to-year.

Using wheelweights as the basic material, my loads use the alloy as follows:

-practically ALL the handgun loads use air-cooled WW metal, as do quite a few rifle rounds;

-MOST of my rifle loads use WW bullets water-quenched right from the mould; and

-a few rifle loads will use oven-heat-treated bullets for maximum hardness. I've also come up with a successful method of making cast hunting bullets with pure-lead noses and WW shanks.

Be aware that whatever hardness we create in our WW bullets, they will gradually age-soften over a period of months or a few years, right back to where they started out. That is, the hardness figure is NOT a fixed value, and it will change. The obvious solution is to shoot often and with many rounds, and use 'em up before they regress to the earlier state!

Casting is a wonderful extension of the shooting and handloading hobbies, and I trust you'll enjoy it as much as the rest of us.

A good place to hang out on the web, with 1500 members dedicated to bullet-casting, is:

www.castboolits.gunloads.com

C'mon over and drag a chair up to the fire.

Listen to Bruce.

I also don't have a lead hardness tester, well, that's not true, I use my fingernail. It provides relative hardness. I also only use ww's for alloy and don't add anything too them. They make great bullets, cast em hot and they fill out fine. You can use a 5 gallon bucket of water to quench them if they need to be hard, but I've found more and more that hardening is seldom needed.

The three most important factors in getting cast bullets to shoot accurately w/o leading are having a gun that is dimensionally favorable to cast (paticularly in revolvers a tight spot in the barrel or throats tighter than the bore are a killer) and with that in hand, size the bullets to the gun's dimensions, a thousandth or two bigger is almost always better, and finally use a good lube. I've been generally disatisfied with the hard commercial lubes, they are great for shipping bullets and keeping the lube in the groove, but don't produce the best accuracy.

Keep it simple. Cast a bunch, you'll need to to get the hang of it. When you see wrinkles, base porosity and incompletely filled bullets put them asside to melt down and make good bullets. When you get consistant good bullets, then lube/size and work up loads.

thanks for all the info!!

Bruce (aka bren Mk1) yes, i am a mauser guy!!!