BHuij
Active Member
In Veral Smith's book, he mentions pouring as large of a sprue as you can get away with, because this ends up making for better bases. I was already aware of the idea of pouring enough sprue to avoid incomplete fill-out from alloy contraction when it cools, but I tried this out last night with my Lee 55gr FP .225" 6-cavity mold, which has traditionally produced a LOT of rejects for me (>50%). It made a huge difference. The idea I think is that more sprue = longer cooling times = more time for the lead to remain liquid, give a really good fillout, and a level base before freezing. Works great.
Between that and refining my sense of when the best time is to break the sprue, and I think of the ~500 bullets I cast last night from this mold, I'm going to have a much higher keeper rate than normal.
These bullets will be culled mercilessly, then sized/gas checked, powder coated, and finally heat treated to around 30 BHN. The design has a lot of shortcomings for trying high velocity work, but I'm going to see how fast I can get them through my AR and still maintain 2 MOA. I've done 2700+ FPS with them, but only gotten about 5 MOA, not good enough even for satisfying plinking for me.
Between that and refining my sense of when the best time is to break the sprue, and I think of the ~500 bullets I cast last night from this mold, I'm going to have a much higher keeper rate than normal.
These bullets will be culled mercilessly, then sized/gas checked, powder coated, and finally heat treated to around 30 BHN. The design has a lot of shortcomings for trying high velocity work, but I'm going to see how fast I can get them through my AR and still maintain 2 MOA. I've done 2700+ FPS with them, but only gotten about 5 MOA, not good enough even for satisfying plinking for me.