Yes, the stars and planets aligned and I got to enjoy a day off minus my wonderful bride and kids, on a glorious fall afternoon of bluebird skies and 66-degree sunshine, with the dogs and lots of fresh air and Yuengling Black and Tans and PbR.
No I wasn't mixing cold beers....
(Although Pabst Blue Ribbon is a modestly nice crisp little Milwaukee that I enjoy on occasion )
PbR is LEAD (Pb) that I Recycled from tire weights and some other scrap lead.
As I sat on my front porch casting bullets from two different moulds I could see my 2-year old chocolate lab wandering the hayfield jumping up bobwhite quail and the occasional mourning dove. Her older and fatter "brother" black lab was napping at my feet, and our little shih-tzu was soaking up the warm sunshine out in the front yard.
I began by casting 225-gr LRN #452374 boolets from my 4-cavity Lyman cast iron mould.
A leisurely rate of two pours per minute yields me over 400 bullets an hour. And I was dropping really good bullets today with the Lee 4-20 casting furnace holding just the right temperature and the mould dropping them out cleanly without any sticking or wrinkles after the first dozen bullets fell.
And the sprues were cutting off like magic with nice clean swipes and no tearing.
The Lee 4-20 had a tiny bit of dripping from the pour spout resulting in those magical pieces of drip art which I enjoy!
And as the molten lead level dropped and I had made several hundred .45-Auto cast bullets I brought out a Lee 140-gr LSWC mould that makes great bullets that I load in subsonic .357 Magnum rounds for my single shot Handi Rifle. I made about 50 of those in about ten minutes before turning the furnace off for the afternoon.
I figure that 250 hard cast 230-gr forty-five bullets sell retail for around $30 and the fifty LSWCs were certainly going to cost me at least five or six bucks at a store so with the savings I went ahead and opened a few Black and Tans and declared the afternoon as mine... all mine.
Naturally, the dogs had a grand day as well..........
No I wasn't mixing cold beers....
(Although Pabst Blue Ribbon is a modestly nice crisp little Milwaukee that I enjoy on occasion )PbR is LEAD (Pb) that I Recycled from tire weights and some other scrap lead.
As I sat on my front porch casting bullets from two different moulds I could see my 2-year old chocolate lab wandering the hayfield jumping up bobwhite quail and the occasional mourning dove. Her older and fatter "brother" black lab was napping at my feet, and our little shih-tzu was soaking up the warm sunshine out in the front yard.
I began by casting 225-gr LRN #452374 boolets from my 4-cavity Lyman cast iron mould.
A leisurely rate of two pours per minute yields me over 400 bullets an hour. And I was dropping really good bullets today with the Lee 4-20 casting furnace holding just the right temperature and the mould dropping them out cleanly without any sticking or wrinkles after the first dozen bullets fell.
And the sprues were cutting off like magic with nice clean swipes and no tearing.
The Lee 4-20 had a tiny bit of dripping from the pour spout resulting in those magical pieces of drip art which I enjoy!
And as the molten lead level dropped and I had made several hundred .45-Auto cast bullets I brought out a Lee 140-gr LSWC mould that makes great bullets that I load in subsonic .357 Magnum rounds for my single shot Handi Rifle. I made about 50 of those in about ten minutes before turning the furnace off for the afternoon.
I figure that 250 hard cast 230-gr forty-five bullets sell retail for around $30 and the fifty LSWCs were certainly going to cost me at least five or six bucks at a store so with the savings I went ahead and opened a few Black and Tans and declared the afternoon as mine... all mine.
Naturally, the dogs had a grand day as well..........
