anyone with experience casting lead bullets?
 

i bought some lead minie-ball ammunition for my muzzleloader yesterday. $14/20. that is re-cock-ulous. ammunition for my .40SW pistol is less than that.

i found bullet casting equipment for about $80 total.

my question is this: how safe is it to cast lead bullets? how much should i worry about the lead?

TIA

Not so much...

I cast hundreds if not thousands of lead bullets, and sinkers when I was a kid..my concern always with a crucible of molten metal was getting burned...

I do it outside. If I was indoors I would just use the respirator I use for welding Stainless Steel but I got a pretty good pot going too!

Yep, Do it outside. Tab Tanner (fellow Pelican) makes his own lead bullets and wanted to teach me, but I'm not ready for that yet...When I am, I'll make them in my garage, with a fan going and the large door opened part-way and the smaller door open all of the way.

Ya don't want to be inhaling the lead fumes.

At the temps involved in bullet casting, 650-750 deg, the amount of fumes is very, very small. Good ventilation in your casting area is plenty adequate. It's much more important to wash your hands after handling lead. It's not absorbed thru the skin, but it's easy to transfer to your mouth, nose, food, etc.

You can learn all you want about bullet casting at http://www.castboolits.gunloads.com/.

John

Casting
 

Just watch certain scenes from "The Patriot" and you'll see how easy it is.

Many living history re-inactors do it in their camps to demonstrate to the public.

All they use is a campfire to melt the lead

I've cast bullets all my life. I shoot thousands of my own cast bullets every year from a broad variety of pistols, revolvers, and rifles. Muzzle loaders and breech loaders, black powder and smokeless. I own dozens of molds, three lead pots (for three different alloys), several lubricator/sizers (for different lubes), and on and on. All but one or two of my handguns have never fired anything but my own cast bullets. So, yeah, I cast a lot of bullets.

I do my casting on the workbench in my garage, with the doors open. I wear long sleeves, leather gloves, and safety glasses. I wash my hands when I'm done, and my clothes go right into the hamper or wash. That's the extent of my safety precautions. I specifically request that I get tested for lead every year as a part of my blood work, and have never had any cause for concern.

Bullet casting is a very enjoyable, relaxing hobby for me. Plus, I can make ammunition that will markedly out-perform anything you can buy commercially in accuracy, velocity, and penetration. With free lead, I can shoot centerfire revolvers for less than most pay to shoot things like the .17 HMR, .22 WMR, and high end .22 LR. My only real cost is primers and powder. I can reload some cases seemingly forever - I have .45-70 and .45-100 black powder match cases that have been loaded over 70 times by actual count. .44 mag and .45 Colt cases will typically go a couple dozen reloads before mouths start to crack from crimping and flaring. So, other than my time, this is about the cheapest shooting I can do.

guess where he gets his free lead...

















that's right the tire store. what else are they going to do with all those wheel weights?

Wheel weights are excellent. Go around the pot holes in the spring and you can usually find a bag full....

i need pure lead, no alloy. thanks for the advice guys. i think i am going to do it.

Yup, muzzle loaders require pure lead. I get my from a foundry, along with a 20:1 lead/tin alloy I use for BPCR bullets. I use wheel weights for all of my handgun and straight cased rifle bullets. Hence the three lead pots.

how much should lead cost me?

Market rate fluctuates a great deal. I've paid as little as a buck a pound, and as much as two or three. The price depends a great deal on how much you buy at one time; our local foundry gives a break at 200 pounds, another at 500, and a really good one at a ton. That's a lot of lead for even an avid shooter, so we go in on it as a group. Lots of shooting clubs, particularly muzzle loader clubs, will often make such group buys at cost to members.

thanks. i looked it up on ebay and found 99.9 pure lead at about 2.40/lb shipped. that is reasonable to me.

What caliber is your muzzle loader? What twist? What kind of a mold are you thinking about?

Do it outside, wash your hands before you eat, drink or smoke. Launder your work clothes separately.

.50 cal. fast twist. lee R.E.A.L. 250 grain mini-ball. my gun prefers the low weight projectiles.

And whats the problem with using this? You can fuss with the mixture to get the right mix.

I did it for years a long time ago and it was a lot of fun as well as saved money.

You might try the Lyman Plains bullet, or their version of the Maxi Ball. Both are on the heavier side, but I've had great luck with both. They stabilize in my barrels as slow as a 48" twist, although my 66" twist barrels don't like them at all. If your twist is any faster than 48", they should work quite well.

The Plains Bullet is shorter in length but heavier than the Maxi Ball. It achieves that by having much smaller lube grooves, so barrels tend to foul faster with it. The Maxi Ball carries so much lube that if you use the right stuff, like T/C's Natural Lube 1000+, you really can shoot all day without cleaning.

Are you using black powder or one of the substitutes? I've tried them all, and keep going back to the real deal. Nothing works better in muzzle loaders, or for that matter, early metalic cartridge guns originaly intended for it. Too many folks shy away from it, believe all the myths and horror stories about its heavy fouling and resultant cleaning requirements. None of it is true if you do it right. I can have a black powder gun cleaned and put away, muzzle of breech loader, in less time than I can a smokeless powder gun. And the black powder substitutes don't help in this regard anyway.

thanks, jeff. i am getting to the bottom of my bottle of pyrodex. will try the black powder next.

as for projectiles, i cannot buy (locally) what i want. therefore, i am going to start casting my own. i may even list some for sale and see if there is any interest.

i will check out the lyman's plains bullets.

again, thanks!

This has peaked my interest.
Back in the day (in the 80's) we used to cast our own lead hammers.
Kinda like plastic dead blows but much more effective.

With use they'd get smaller and eventually fall apart so we'd cast new ones.
We'd use a large rosebud on an oxy-acet torch to heat up a crucible and pour it into a mold, and we did it inside the shop. I later wondered if that was a good idea or not.

The guys who work for me now asked if they could do the same thing, I said no way.
I wasn't going to let anyone get lead poisoning but they argued that it was safe.
I said if they could get written approval from our health and safety department I'd say OK, knowing full well that the health and safety department would have kittens and ban all lead in any form if they knew we used it and we'd all be out getting blood tested for lead poisoning.

See, where they work is probably the safest place they'll ever be. Statistically much safer than them being at home.
We haven't had a recordable injury at work in six months with close to 1000 employees and our recordable injury rate is historically under .06, yet in 6 months we've had one employee fatality, one loss of limb, one employee became a paraplegic and one became a quad. All away from work.

In the mechanical and machine shops I've run over the past 17 years we've had one recordable injury, a guy got a cut lip.
And we report everything. Get a cut finger or a bruised fingernail and don't report it? Termination.
Of all the things I brag about, that safety record is prolly one that makes me swell up the most. oops, got off track.

As a safety dweeb, congrats Sammy. 17 years with one recordable with 1000 people, is remarkable. We get 1 every year or two, and they are for stupid stuff like someone tripping over a lowered lift gate in the dark and breaking their nose. We try and have our shows put work lights around lowered lift gates at night, but it happens. Believe it or not, 99% of accidents in filming happen behind the camera.

Casting bullets and shooting black powder is a big adventure for sure. I have working on loads for my 45-70 Rolling Block and 45-70 Sharps for about 6 months and got them figured out pretty well. I am working on shooting off-hand and that is a bir harder than an AR-15 or even an M1 as there is nothing to really grab onto plus both guns weigh right at 12 lbs. To cast for black powder you would want soft (pure) lead so the bullet will obturate and seal the barrel as it travels to the crown. To help seal the bullet a good soft lube is best also. A very good source is roofing lead or isotope lead or sinker lead as they are nearly pure. Linotype is hard and many use 1lb of linotype to 5lbs of pure for rifles. For handguns such as wadcutter bullets, wheel weights will work but they are getting hard to find.

If you want to buy black powder, Coonies in Hobbs New Mexico is the best that most of the shooters I know of in the San Diego deal with. You have to buy a case but at 70 to 90gns a shot, a pound will disappear quickly! It is shipped UPS ground. For cleaning, I have found black powder easier to deal with than smokeless as long as I blow into the barrel after each shoot to keep the fouling soft. As for safety, black powder is no more of a hazard than smokeless so keep it locked up away from kids, heat, fire, etc. Here is a link showing a static electricity test as I had heard lost of talk about static electricity blowing us up.... http://www.ctmuzzleloaders.com/ctml_experiments/sparks/sparks.html

Probably the best website for casting is:
Cast Boolits - Dedicated To The World Of Cast Bullets!
and you will see forums for everything remotely associated with casting. Good luck

LOL, it's not quite that good. It's been 17 years with one recordable in a department I ran, not in the entire plant.
Figure an average of 20 or 30 people I was responsible for, mechanics and machinists etc.

The plant averages one or two recordables a year which is still pace setter performance.
We consider a recordable anything that requires medical treatment.

On a slightly related note... why would one carve an "X" into the tip of the bullet? I've seen it done in movies. ;)

expansion, i think.

Noooo, for the same reason you see someone put a silencer on a revolver......

because they are an idiot? but think they will get some expansion?

Actually....

YouTube - Silenced 1895 Nagant revolver (NFA)

YouTube - Silenced 1895 Nagant revolver

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BGoPE7VQ9GY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Z8qCz1clA0U" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The 3rd video seems a bit louder than the first two.