joeb33050
posted this
02 December 2015
John Alexander wrote: Everyone is entitled to his opinion but I am curious as to why you don't like Aluminum molds? I have several Lyman molds that work fine. But I also have several aluminum NEI, NOE, Lee, and LBT molds and all of them cast as well as my molds that rust. With gang molds the light weight is welcome.
I don't like aluminum molds because after many years and many molds from many makers, I've got 1. If they made good bullets that shot accurately, I'd have more. I have Lyman molds in 22, 30 and 45, and they work. I have an iron Ohaus mold in 45 that's just great. I'll buy just about any mold where there's a hope for accuracy, even aluminum, but experience suggests that the outcome is/will be probably less-than-wonderful.
I don't use gang molds.
I too have several 22 molds, including a couple from Lyman, with gas check shanks that are too large (or gas checks are too small) but none are so bad that I have to expand the checks. My theory is that the conventional wisdom is for a certain gas check shank diameter for the 22s that is slightly large and mold makers just follows the conventional wisdom.
NEI, NOE, LBT, maybe 8 22 molds, gas checks didn't fit.
I also have never had an aluminum mold that refused to drop the bullets with a moderate whack at most but I have had Lyman molds that wouldn't.
Fiddled with, my Lyman molds drop most bullets fairly easy.
Your sets of tens are very uniform but if you are still weighing individual bullets what is the range and SD of your castings? Are the extreme variations big enough to justify sorting by weight?
Yesterday almost exactly 90 minutes of casting:
Dot, 139 bullets, 10's weighed 594.4, 595.6, 595.6
No Dot, 140 bullets, 10s weighed 594.6, 594.0, 594.9
4 visual rejects
I had hoped that the bullet weights would vary by cavity, and maybe accuravy would improve if sorted by cavity. Doesn't look like it.
I'm trying to avoid weighing each bullet. The tremor makes handling/weighing a challenge, I throw some across the room.
I hope that after you have shot lots of groups with the dotted and undtted bullets you will report your accuracy results. I never have been able to prove that sorting bullets by cavity improved matters but then I may have just been lucky.
John
And the beat goes on.