If you scientific types watched me cast you'd probably shake your heads and walk away muttering.
Yesterday, I've really been wanting to cast a bunch of those .357-200's not just for me, but horror of horrors, Charlie said he was down to maybe 50 bullets left. Charlie is not only my good friend but he is a guild certified gunsmith in retirement that I have yet seen to to be stumped. Oh he'll tell you he doesn't know much about Colt SAA's, but that doesn't mean he cannot tear one down, fix what's broken, and put it back together.
Anyway, this talented man comes here to shoot, and has donated hundreds and hundred of dollars worth of his time fixing, inspecting, tuning, mentoring myself and other shooter friends. At the May and June shoots he gave away so much of his time coaching, spotting for, and otherwise mentoring one young lady shooter, and another friend's grandson, that he hardly got in any shooting of his own. Not only that, he freely gave away all the ammo for them to do so.
You can see why I viewed casting a bunch of bullets for not only myself, but for my good friend, as high on the rainy day agenda. So to the actual act. I had loaned out a RCBS bottom pour pot and a Lee 312-155-2R mould to my young shooting friend/neighbor. In the fullness of time he has progressed in the family business, developed a romantic relationship with a delightful young woman, bought and is remodeling a house, and otherwise dove headlong into all of the perils of adulthood I tried to warn him about in his care free teens. I got the RCBS pot back a little worse for wear, as in his absence his younger brothers took it out of the controlled environment of the house and stuck it in a machine shed. I plugged it in and it was half full of most likely WW alloy because that's what I used to give him ingots of. I toyed with the idea of adding some linotype but in the end I just gathered up some WW ingots and filled the pot. I plugged in the hot plate, waited a moment to make sure it didn't pop a fuse. One of my guests at the June shoot, (Admiral Horatio Fuseblower), had plugged his A/C unit from his travel trailer into the decrepit electrical system of the old garage I cast in and kept blowing the 15 amp fuses.
Hot plate heating, I wandered up to the house to get the mould and even though I have a half dozen sets of RCBS handles, wouldn't you know that none of them were on the 35-200-FN mould. Handles mounted, mould scrubbed wit Dawn and hot water, I returned to the casting shed, placed the mould on a steel plate on the hot plate, leveled the handles to get full block contact with the plate with an empty Eley .22 ammo box shimmed with a thick piece of aluminum wire. Stick with me here audience, the wing and a prayer system I employ is somewhat amusing.
I added more ingots to the pot to take advantage of its 22 lb. capacity and folded a cloth landing pad hoping eventually to cast some bullets to land on said pad. Pretty soon everything looked ready. I had changed fans in the window to exhaust the smoke created by fluxing or cleaning or whatever I do when I drop a hunk of Imperial brand blue junk in the tin tubes I got from a print shop. Stir stir stir, smoke dissipating, I dump in some saw dust, coughing and gagging, I finish cleaning the pot and it is beautiful, shiny, clean, and ready to commence pouring. I adjust the flow rate to account for the head pressure, turn on my Blue Tooth speaker, fire up an Ed McBain novel on my I-Phone and start casting. The mould was not yet hot enough and apparently I didn't get all of the Birchwood Casey Sheath out of the cavities as I must have discarded the first 20 pours before I got an acceptable bullet. I had opened another window for cross ventilation and the the wind switched with the rain and I could feel the breeze waft across my neck and the pot. I could see the the sprues take a few less seconds gelling over in the manicurist's fan flow. I picked up my pace but I was getting a void in the bottom of the lube groove in the upper cavity of the mould. About once in every 5 pours. That's when I cranked up the heat to an unknown but higher level and very soon the voids almost disappeared. Yup, I'd have liked to stopped and inspected the mould with my Opti-Visor and a piece of sharpened stainless steel leader wire as a pick for a venting issue, but sure as hell I'd have burnt myself and lost all the heat in the mould, so I simply carried on.
I filled and nearly emptied the pot three times in 4 1/2 hours. Filled the coffee can with 32 lbs. of future lead dust, tightened all the muscles in my neck and middle back with little nodules of pain and called it a day. That, my digital friends, is how I cast, in a long and tedious nutshell, for your Sunday morning entertainment.
