[wittzo]

The results of the other day's casting.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00360Medium.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00359Medium.jpg

Now I'm figuring out how to store them. Tupperware for now, but I made another ball pouch out of a leather pouch kit I bought at Hobby Lobby. It's so easy, I'm going to wait for a sale on leather crafts and load up on tools and components and make other stuff.

There's nothing special about my .533 Minie ball paper cartridges. I just cut about 1/2" of rolling paper off with scissors and ran a glue stick along the top edge and glued it to the bullet below the first lube ring. The first few I made, I didn't cut off the excess and some of them were too large to fit in the bore, so I load them with little overlap so they slip snugly into the bore. I loaded those with 60 grains of 777, but the rest of them with 90 after yesterday's good results. Flatten the open end after loading it with powder, then apply the glue stick, pinch the end and then fold it a couple of times with a dab of glue on the folds. You can see that I did the same with the .68" cartridges.

It's been my experience that if I use grease pills, lubed wads, or wonder wads, the gun gets really greasy with 777. I've read that it creates it's own lube, I've had good results so far, so I don't lube the Minie Balls. I thought paper patching eliminated the need for it, since the paper scrapes the barrel tight, keeping it from leading. I read about some guys adding Cream of Wheat to make sure the rifling gets filled with filler to reduce leading and fouling and to eliminate the gap between the bullet and bore.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00363Medium.jpg

I did the .68" balls about the same way, but I didn't have to cut the excess off the paper, I just glued it whole to the flash line of the ball. I added 90 grains of 777 and glued it shut the same way as the .533" Minie ball cartridges.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00365Medium.jpg

Then I read about Buck and Ball, so I made some paper cartridges after doing some research. I had some synthetic sinew handy, so I used it to tie the clusters off for the heck of it.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00366Medium.jpg

The rolling papers are too short to package the balls and the powder, I had to use two of them.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00369Medium.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/wittzo/DSC00370Medium.jpg

The finished product, notice the folds.

There's been no fire hazard so far, the cloth patches land several feet in front of us, can't find any remnants of the rolling papers and we pump the ramrod down the barrel a few times to tamp out anything that is in there. Reckon it gets completely burned or fragmented upon firing? There is some residue left in my cap and ball from rolling paper and Cream of Wheat.

[scrat]

Nice

[BHP FAN]

very cool.I have like 12 coffee cans full of my various casting efforts.If I live long enough to shoot up half that,I'll be about a hundred fifty years old.....

[scrat]

hahahah i thought i was the only one. Actually i usually take 1 weekend a year and i spend the whole entire saturday from sun up to sun down casting. Then sunday all day long sizing and lubricating. Then i have enough for the entire year. Now last year i made way to many 30-30 in 170 grain and 150. I ran out quick on 45 and 9mm. So in another few months when the weather gets better i am going to cast again but this time cast a whole boat load for 9mm and 45 everything else i did ok. i still have about 400 round balls and about 200 .50 cal

[BHP FAN]

Yep,that's how it's done.When I cast too many of one size, we call those ''ingots''...

[wittzo]

I'm about to melt down the ones that were too wrinkled and the lead rings from loading my revolver. I save them in an old cap box, I've got enough shavings to cast at least one .454" ball.

[Voodoochile]

If I did a tally of my casting efforts, I should have some where around:

200 .512 320gr. Lee R.E.A.L. bullets
600 .495 182gr. Ball
500 .456 220gr. Lee Conicals
200 .450 200gr. Lee Conicals
800 .457 142gr. Ball
400 .375 80gr. ball
200 1 - 4oz. sinkers
1200 1/16 -1/8oz. split shot sinkers

I say for my Black Powder & fishing efforts I should be set for a while.

[Rock Island]

I use coffee cans to store my extra bullets, I cast 400 .75 musket balls this weekend, and will do a like number of .69 next weekend. Good to cast in the winter, the heat keeps me warm, and it gives me something to do. I like that tray, I drop them onto an old towel and when there is a buch I load them into the cans, a tray would be nice for the tiny bullets I cast for my .38 S&W. I never thought to use nitrated paper cartridges, I know of them, but just never got around to trying them. I am in the scrap business and I have all the lead I need, both soft, and hard, so I cast everything I shoot in the front stuffers myself.

[wittzo]

The ONLY place I can get lead here is one large tire store. He gave me about 80 lbs of random wheel weights last year, but he's caught on. He SOLD me a 5-gallon bucket full of supposedly nothing but lead clip-on and ribbon ww's for $50. I weighed it on my bathroom scale: 160 lbs, but I noticed a few zinc ribbon weights in it. I have yet to take the scrap iron and zinc ww's to the can buyers to see if they want them. I have a lot of dross, too. I called our local scrap dealer and they don't sell lead but he told me about another scrap dealer an hour away, but they only deal with commercial buyers. All the other tire stores sell them as scrap or sell them to battery companies they deal with.

Home Depot sells lead roof flashing and lead boot seals (for vent pipes used in restoring old homes) but not at our store, you have to special order it. I don't know how much lead you get for $150 worth of new flashing, roofers have been using tin or aluminum for a long time.

That tray came from a Black and Decker toolbox, but you can buy caddies like that at Walmart or Hobby Lobby. I use a cheap steel cookie sheet with an old child's pajama top to catch my bullets. The steel absorbs the heat and the shirt softens the impact, but it's fire resistant. Dross sticks to it, but not the balls. I just figured that I can use the containers I save from when I buy chicken livers and egg drop soup from Chinese takeout. That way I can see what they are. Right now I have my .454" balls mixed in with my .60", so I can obviously tell which is which. Time for more eggdrop soup. :)

This last time I cast (casting #4), I took my .68" Indian bagmold from Track of the Wolf and my .530" Lee double cavity mold and laid them on either side of the burner of my Coleman stove while my scrap rings, sprues from last time, and wrinkled balls melted. I cast about 50 .530 round balls and put my Lee .533" Minie bullet mold next to the burner to heat it up. All the round balls came out perfect.I had to toss a few back in when they were obviously bad..I had to cast a few to get my pouring timing to work. Last time, my .454" balls cast well because that mold had sat against the burner while I was casting the other ones, so the mold was well heated. I ended up casting about 40 .68" roundballs and 40 Minie balls after melting a bit more than 4 more lead ingots. Nice and shiny and smooth. I think I may have had a frosted one or two, but that will wear off.

I've just got two ingots of really hard lead left, so I'll probably cast those with my ROA mold and load some .45 LC Cowboy loads for a friend who does CAS. I left about 2 lbs in the pot for next time and dumped a few ounces of sprue clippiings in the pot.

I discovered with the bag mold, I can grab the runoff lead with pliers and twist it off before I drop the ball and it takes most of the sprue off, then I can drop the run off back into the pot. I use some small wire cutters to pinch at the sprue while rotating the ball and it cuts it off really clean.

I still have 20 lbs of last years ww's to smelt and that full bucket.

[BHP FAN]

I have about 500 pounds out in the garage...

[Rock Island]

I had 400 pounds of hard lead, very hard stuff made from the little lead containers used to hold the material used in medical radiation treatments. I sold off a bunch on another forum but I still have 250 pounds left if you need some. I am not selling it all of course, I need to keep some for my .357 magnum, and centerfire rifle bullets, but I can spare a bit. I cast it into small ingots for my Lee pot, the soft stuff I have a much harder time coming across, nobody has lead pipes anymore around here. I lucked onto several hundred pounds worth and I am going to cast it all into everything from .31 to .75. I have a lot of revolvers, and muskets and they eat it up, but at 580+ grains a pop the Brown Bess takes the prize in lead use.
All molds cast a little rough when cold, it's normal, I save these less than perfect balls to use when I am just banging away at tin cans. My Lee molds will start dropping good balls after five or so, the Lyman, and SAECO molds or any of the other iron molds will take as many as ten before they are dropping nice bullets. Don't worry about the frost, with a patched ball you will not see it anyway.
USGI .30 ammo cans are air tight, and will keep your lead bullets looking new for years, plastic will do it also of course, but avoid leather bags unless you like bullets that look 100 years old in a few months from the tannic acid.

[wittzo]

Ahhh..Since the last time I cast sometime last year, I've kept my .60" balls stored in a leather ball bag for quick access, but they look the same color as the .454" balls I kept in a Buffalo Bullet box. Right now, some of them are in the liver box, but the ball bags get too heavy with them big ole balls, so I only keep 20 or so in them, and will rotate them out. I'll probably end up making half of my .69" balls into paper cartridges.

When I heated the molds like that, they were dropping perfect balls as soon as I figured out how to pour the lead at the right speed.

I picked up a cigar half box from the tobacco shop when I got rolling papers. I'm going to try to hit up all the tobacco shops for more boxes when I get rolling papers, hope to score a couple of the old fashioned rectangular ones. The half box will look good in my wooden ammo crate as an organizer. I kept the cardboard divider in it and it holds 25 .68" paper cartridges with ease after they're folded up and look better than any box I can make so far. I would probably get fancy and buy some thin wood to make wood dividers when the cardstock wears out...And I "need" a lid for it.

I almost bought a rock tumbler from hobby lobby today using my 40% coupon..but I want to get something more robust from Harbor Freight, or make my own using an old ice cream maker I wore out. I'll spray the inside of the ice cream container with undercoat or paint it with tool dip and make a stand that holds it at the proper angle or make my own container out of something else. That way I can swage them to knock off any external inconsistencies..but that leads to another question.

My Indian ballmold from TOW casts an oval ball, with a seam in the center. Would swaging beat the seam into the balls but make them even more oval or change their diameter? They can be pretty tight if I don't start them right or use a paper cartridge to stabilize them when starting them. I've got the sprues taken care of. I wonder how the balls fly through the air, as they find their center of gravity?

I bought a box of TC bullets in .54 that were on clearance where I found the caps, they fit perfect in the bore of my .54 Mississippi rifle, but I have to relube them with Gatafeo's recipe, the original lube is caked and nasty. I have a box of 9mm and .45 fmj from when I had a couple of autoloaders, I'm thinking of throwing them in the pot when I smelt the hard WW's to use for the smoothbores. I know the balls won't be as dense, but they won't have rifling to lead. I'll use them for shooting fun and save the soft ones for serious stuff and throw the copper jacket in with the other scrap.

[WALKERs210]

Question on the BUCK & BALL load. When loaded do you put the ball against the powder charge or the buck shot? Was thinking about trying this but was not sure as to best way to load them.

[robhof]

I usually place the corner of the mold in the molten lead for about 20 seconds for aluminum molds and about a min. for iron and usually get a keeper on the 1st try with al. and by the 2nd or 3rd with iron. Jacketed bullet cores are usually pretty soft, I use them for casting balls and conicals. I recover jacketed and cast bullets from the outdoor range just after prolonged rains, they're on the surface and I can get several lbs, in a short time.

[mykeal]

Powder, then ball, then buckshot pellets, then an overshot card. You need the ball as a gas check for the buckshot, plus seating the ball first ensures no air gaps between charge and projectiles.

[WALKERs210]

Thanks MYKEAL, logic dictates that would be the proper sequence but at time my logic lacks !! Now if it will quit raining/snowing and get above freezing I might actually get outside to waste some lead.

[earplug]

I use empty gallon jugs such as windshield deicer fluid comes in.
Use a funnel to poor bullets in, and then poor them out as needed.
Easy to use a marker on the outside to label them. The handle is nice.
They don't spill the whole container if knocked over.

[arcticap]

For those new to buck and ball, the .30 caliber projectiles go into the barrel first, followed by the musket ball.

http://www.n-ssa.org/SKIRMISHLINE/1997/nov97-6.htm

After all, the buck shot is clearly located below the ball that is located at the very top of the monument in the picture! :)

http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r130/mboyd13/other%20stuff/12thNJbuckandball.jpg


From the following thread:

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=448565&highlight=buck+ball

[mykeal]

From that same THR thread (http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=448565&highlight=buck+ball):
I know for a fact that in the Civil War, for the very common Model 1842 Springfield .69 cal smoothbore and other similar smoothbore muskets, the buck and ball load consisted of only one large round ball with three .30 or .32 cal buckshot placed on top. Standard powder load for a buck and ball cartridge was between 100-110 grains where it was only 60-65 grains for the .58 minie ball cartridges. I'm pretty sure that during the Revolution it was also standard to use one large round ball (be they .69 to .75 caliber) with three buckshot, again, on top of the round ball.
http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r130/mboyd13/other%20stuff/Paper206920Cal20Buck2020Ball.jpg

[wittzo]

I have mine sort of backwards to that, but I'm going to load it with the buckshot after the powder. I loaded the .69 loads with 90 grains and the .54 loaded with 60, but it's Triple Seven. I have a picture of the little ball and buck packet above. I use another rolling paper and run glue stick along it's top edge to glue it to the ball about the buck.

That's an excellent line drawing, I'm going to to try that with some using sinew.