Well I got my Lee BD45 mold late last week and casted a few hundred up in a couple hours Saturday. One thing I did find was that these 6 cavuty molds do indeed like to be run hot and make frosty bullets. However, it takes a little time to cool the mold off enough to eliminate pull out of the sprues. If you let them cool off enough to cut the sprue this mold does a great job of casting bullets. Unfortunately I was having a hard time knowing when to cut the sprue. Just waiting until the sprue frosted over nicely was not long enough to sufficiently harden the bullet.

anybody have some advice on running this mold other than running another mold at the same time. Yea theres an idea - run two of these at the same time and they will cast a bunch of quality bullets in a real hurry.

Thanks

Somebody once told me about rigging a fan. Think he used a hair dryer w/ a no heat option. Never tried that one myself so I just pass it along as an idea. Heat sink might help too. I have a gadget someone gave me that is spozed to thaw frozen food. It's flat aluminum plate weighing a good pound that sits up on ridges to let air circulate under it. Putting mould on that between casts might help. Lord knows I never use it to thaw stuff.

I fiddle with the heat. Start out with the alloy really hot and turn down quite aways just as I start casting. Alloy gets a bit cooler as the mould gets hotter and it seems to balance pretty well. I still have to wait a few seconds after the sprue solidifies, but it's not hard to get a feel for the timing.

You guys heard of Beagle-ing a mold, right? Now, there's the BruceB technique, and that's using a wet towel to tap over the sprues to make them cool in a hurry. Several ways to do it, naturally, besides the obvious. Might rig up a board with a thick bath robe type of towel tacked to it, and let a tail of the robe sit in pail of water as a wick. Install the towel overhead, if you will, so you can push the mold up into it, rather than turning the mold upside down to touch the towel. When the steam quits, you have 200 degree sprues. Try to go for 300 degree sprues, though, for faster production. ... felix

I empty my mold into a pan with a couple of shop towels inside and one end raised so they will not hit each other when I cast. This softens the drop and helps the hot bullets to keep from deforming. Just my 2 cents worth.

I'm not looking for frosty bullets, as I find the melt and mould just needs to be HOT for best castability (850 - 900).

At any rate, at that temp I had a small fan blowing directly on the mould. Still had to wait too long for the sprues to harden. Using the wet towel technique seemed (never really proved) to result in a higher defect rate. I will note that I'm looking for perfect bullets with perfect bases.

I finally found that casting unneeded bullets out of a second mould(single or double cavity) took just the right amount of time. Final solution was to purchase a second 6 cavity mould. Now my main problems are keeping enough alloy melted to supply these two moulds and moving the freshly dropped bullets the heck out of the way.

BTW: I still use the fan on both moulds and neither gets hot enough for the bullets to get frosty. Nothing against frosty bullets, but it's just not what I'm looking for.