I agree with a previous poster who said that casting bullets is a serious money saver. I haven't gotten into casting yet, but have been considering it.
To further clarify the economics of this, let's pretend you have a turret press and load 200 rds an hour, pistol. 50 rds an hour rifle, including all the brass prep.
I conservatively estimate you cast about 300 cast bullets an hour with a 2 bullet mold. Depends on how long you let your molds cool, and that depends on your mold/bullet/alloy. Now let's consider tumble lubing. It takes practically no time at all to tumble lube them and dump them on a sheet of wax paper to dry. But let's bring your production down a bit for setup, inspection and handling, rejects, and tumble lubing. So let's say you make only 200 an hour, pistol bullets ready to load.
For rifle, let's say you apply gas checks and/or size them. Let's bring your cast bullet production down to 120 an hr. Again, we're being very conservative here. Not trying to emulate a sweat shop. Now to load cast rifle bullets, you have to flare your cases, so let's bring your production down to 100/hr to compensate.
So for pistol, casting bullets might double your time spent on each cartridge. (Again, just using rough examples. If you use a progressive press, it might be much worse; but then you might compensate by buying 6 bullet molds?) If you can save more than twice as much money on your reloaded pistol rds by casting bullets, it will be a perfectly reasonable use of your time. Since the bullet is the most expensive part of a pistol rd, this is easy to do in many of your calibers. Esp in calibers (9mm) where you're hardly saving any money to begin with, it could easily increase your savings by that much compared to using commercial cast lead. The cost of your 124 gr bullets could be around 13 bucks, tops, per 500, vs 35-40 bucks, reducing your total reloading cost by about half after adding in the powder/primers. But your actual SAVINGS on 9mm might be increased 10 fold. Granted, 10x a crappy saving to begin with still isn't all that impressive. But if you're already reloading 9mm for the minimal savings vs factory ammo, despite the cost of your time, then it would still be a good investment to cast bullets for it.
Rifle is where it gets really interesting. If you can increase your savings by just 50% more per rd, you're in the black. Cuz it doesn't take that much longer to add casting to your overall time spent reloading. Ask me if I'd rather make 200 bullets or size/prep 200 cases, and it's easy. I'd rather cast/lube/check 200 bullets. And now I'm making each 7mm-08 cartridge for about 15 cents per, rather than 40 cents per* compared to buying commercial cast bullets. Compare that to the cost for factory jacketed ammo of say 50-75 cents per round, and I'm increasing my savings by 2-3.5 times as much by casting and reloading, vs just reloading with commercial cast bullets.
And it's only adding perhaps 50% more to my overall time spent reloading a cartridge.
*My 130 gr rifle bullets cost 3 cents for the lead (that's at a convenience cost of 1.50/lb for ready to cast lead delivered to my door, which is about as expensive as it gets) and 3 cents for the check. That's 6 bucks per hundred, where even commercial cast bullets cost nearly 30 dollars per hundred without shipping (except at gardner's cache, where I'd failed to get an order in for a month before finally giving up and buying my own casting equipment). Add cost of primers and powder, and that's where I get my figures.
Sure, with rifle you're limited to only 2200 fps or so. But then look on the bright side. You are using roughly half the powder charge. And you can even load light plinking loads using non GC'd bullets (with perhaps one quarter a regular rifle charge weight of, say, Unique) that still hit as hard as a 357 magnum. That's at a cost of about 8 cents per rd in this example. 3 cents primer,
2 cents powder, 3 cents boolit. You can't touch that even in calibers where you can buy cheap pulled bullets!
You can argue that casting bullets requires a lot of learning and experimenting. But I think people tend to over complicate this part. Buy some WW ingots; flame mold; lube sprue plate; melt lead; make bullets. Throw rejects back in pot; lube the rest. Once the lead is melted, you will be casting perfectly useable bullets 3 minutes later, even without a how-to guide. Find some tested load info, and load some cartridges.
