Anyone Cast Bullets or fishing weights?

Anyone here do it ? Looking into making fishing heights right now and cast bullets later on down the road.

i do. i have a large pot i made out of a propane cylinder i use on a turkey fryer base to melt the large stuff, ladle it into ingots and then use the ingots in a Lee Production pot, have around 20 different molds in various shapes and sizes. it's a fun hobby that is perfectly safe as long as you follow certain safety precautions.

I have made a bunch of egg sinkers. Wheel weights work great for them
My son worked a few years at a school bus repair shop. They did not reuse the weights. He brought me close to a 100 lbs.

Lee hot pot....make all my round balls for muzzleloading

Got the same setup i pour for 41 and 44mag spinner bauts buzz baits and jigs
J

I use a lee 20# bottom pour I only wish I had 2 pots when I really get a rhythm going on the 6 cavity mold I am running low and would like to just switch pots and keep going while the other pot melts more ingots

I smelt in a Stainless steel 8 quart stock pot on an LP burner I have though about cutting down an LP 20# cylinder to make a pot but haven't gotten to it yet

DO NOT use an Aluminum pot they fail under that kind of heat and they do it all at once.

if you use cast iron , it never goes back to any sort of food ever again.
do not tap or bang the ladle on cast iron

always wear long pants , boots , long sleeves and safety glasses shoes need to not be tennis shoes made of plastic the led goes right through them but boots of leather

it is not nice when a live primer finds it's way into your lead pot , spewing hot lead when it goes off , it apparently fell into the bucket of sprue and got put back in the pot , they detonate about the same time they are surrounded in molten lead. got saved by the PPE.

I keep thinking I need one of those lee pots. I use a ladle. Do it outside so fumes are not a problem. use an old kitchen pot with no handle and my turkey fryer. I made two ladles. One out of a big spoon and one out of a smaller spoon. smaller spoon is for balls and bullets and small sinkers, the big spoon for big sinkers. i reshaped both spoons a bit with pliers and mapp gas. I put wood handles on the small spoon by drilling and making rivets with round stock brass. Else it was to hot to use. I have shot a lot of wheel weight bullets out of my 357. blackpowder i use soft plumbers lead. Wheel weights are used for sinkers too.

I do bullets and fishing sinkers and some jigs and buck shot. I use the bottom pour and the ladle , my dad taught me how to make fishing sinkers with the use of sand and news paper and lead. He use to work in the foundry before I was born . I cast for shotgun and rifle and hand gun and muzzle loader also.

You might find some info at:


Cast boolits . Com

I do and have for even longer then I have been reloading because I started out shooting black powder and cap and ball revolvers and started casting my own bullets soon after and it grew rapidly as my shooting did

Back in the day it seemed every tire shop had buckets of old wheel weights but not so much anymore and more often then not what they do have is spoken for so it can be hard to find lead for casting

One way that I have found is to keep an eye on Craigslist for someone that has an old sailboat to scrap out the ballast is often made up of lead and just one can give you more lead then you can use in a year also a lot of sail boats that have lead ballast are changing over to water ballast so have to get rid of the lead which is often in large blocks often as much as 50# which can be hard to handle but worth it in my opinion

Casting bullets is as addictive as reloading

I used to cast a lot, just hit me up on Discord later if you have a specific question.

I've probably got a couple dozen moulds. It's all ammo. The most used is #1 buck which I also use for subsonic 30 caliber loads, 9mm which double as slugs in my Whammer Jammer ® crossbow, and 1oz 12ga slugs. I wouldn't bother with the shotgun slugs if they were just for hunting; but, I go through tons of them in a Saiga 12 with 20 round drum magazine.

I have not melted anything as of yet but the old man who owned the cabin before us was an avid reloader. He left behind basically everything needed including about 5 5gl buckets full of lead and a couple buckets of ingots he had made.
At this point I have too many irons in the fire but some day in the near future I will be adding this to the to do list.
Let’s see some other folks set ups and keep this going!

So what would pot would yall reckoned for somone wanting to make alot if fishing weights? I was looking at one of the small electric laddle looking ones but seems like it's a little akward

So what would pot would yall reckoned for somone wanting to make alot if fishing weights? I was looking at one of the small electric laddle looking ones but seems like it's a little akward

Making sinkers out of wheel weight lead is a real waste of good bullet lead. The issue being wheel weights are not lead any more but zinc or steel. A couple ounces of zinc in a 10 or 20 pound batch of bullet lead will ruin the melt. The mold won't fill out properly no matter what you do. The alloy that I use most is 20 pounds of WW plus 2%, about 6.5 ounces tin. The tin decreases the surface tension of the melt for better mold fill out. I get my tin by melting down pewter cups, bowls, or nick nacks that I pick up at garage sales. I have a stock pile of old WW's (7 or 8 hundred pounds), 300 or 400 pounds of linotype and I don't know how much pure lead from lead pipe, x-ray sheathing, flashing, and plumbers lead pigs. Another source is range scrap. Once or twice a year I go to work on the pistol bay at my local gun club on a Sunday morning. Can't shoot before 1:00 pm. Just take a shovel, my dirt sifter, and a couple 5 gallon buckets and have at it. Range lead makes pretty fair alloy, just add a little linotype to harden it up a touch and you are good to go. Never smelt in the same pot you are casting from. When smelting I flux with pine sawdust, when casting I flux with bees wax. Don't worry about the bullet jackets or WW clips, they float to the surface and you just scoop them off. I rarely use anything but WW. Once in a while if I want something harder I use Lyman #2. It's easily made up using 9 pounds of WW and 1 pound of 50/50 solder or 8 ounces of pure lead and 8 ounces of pewter. Reclaimed shot works well though it's a little expensive.

Bullet casting is enjoyable and not overly complicated. You just need to be aware of a few things, willing to do a little home work/leg work, and be ready to spend some cash. Smelting equipment, casting pot, ladle, mold and handles, ingot mold (an old muffin pan), a lubricator/sizer and sizing die of the proper size with top punch, and a good micrometer. A lead hardness tester would be nice but a set of good drafting pencils will work. You use the different hardness pencils to scratch or not scratch the lead. You'll have to google the chart to figure out what corresponds to what hardness.

Wolfie, I have only scratched the surface and I know you will have lots of questions so shoot me a pm and I'll help you figure it out. The only guns of mine that get fed jacketed are my rifles. All my hand guns get cast. I've killed an good bunch of deer with my hand guns using cast bullets. Never really had to track any. They either drop right there or go down in sight.

wolf it is hard to beat the lee production pot for a pour pot, i recommend the 20 lb capacity version.

I make weights and jigs

I run a Lee pro 4 20

because no one makes a 40# pot

those little electric ladles are if you pour a few jigs or weights occasionally. if you plan production then a bottom pour is the way to go.

an electric hot plate is also handy toss an old saw blade on it and you can pre heat the ingots then set your mold on it to keep warm

a ingot at 350 gets to 700 a lot faster than an ingot at 50 does , it also makes sure there is no moisture on your ingot use a channel locks to pick up ingots and add them to the pot and keep that mold warm


if you are pouring more than 2-3 oz weights you drain that pot fast

I cast some 1oz conicals for the muzzle loader , those drain a pot quick you never actually want to fully empty the pot (unless your cleaning it ) just get down to about 1/3 to 1/4 full then add more lead

when I set down to knock out a thousand of something in the 125-200gr range I am wishing I had 2 pots but don't know that for the money there is anything better than the Lee Pro 4 20

so I just take a break and keep the mold warm on the hot plate

if your trying to make 1/2 or 1 pound weights for nets and such , a pot on a gas burner with a metal ladle a big ladle https://www.rotometals.com/ladles-dippers/ big enough to get the weight of the sinker in a single pour +20% for the sprue a good puddle is essential to a fully formed casting.

I pour my 8oz. egg sinkers for ditty poles and decoy weights since I can't buy them reasonably priced, and the ones I do find have too small of holes to run my braided lines through. Since I'm doing it to save money, I do it on the cheap.

You can get your led alloy form a salvage yard if they sell it , you looking for soft lead but need to watch it at times for zinc get mix in

Stop using lead; kills loons and other stuff.

Just registered look like a good place to get started

This was one if the things that got me wanteint to do it. Seems like a nice little way to make gas money selling fishing weights on the face book fishing groups

If your registered at Castboolits, go to the Lead and Alloy section. In that forum you will find a post titled" Lead Alloy Calculator". It will give you a cover sheet telling you what is in the lead you scavenge, and what other alloys are in them. Real important when you start adjusting alloys.

Now I feel stupid, I just toss some wheel weights into that little cast iron pan and use a spoon to scoop out anything that don't melt, then poor the rest into that little mold (preheated). lol

Doesn't much matter for slip sinkers Jayme, but the softer stick on wheel weights are softer denser lead. Split shots made with wheel weights (clip on type) have about.5 % tin and some antimony in them, to make them harder and tougher to close or could crack. Probably some of what you are skimming off your melt is tin, a metal we try to keep in the melt to increase metal ductility, ie mushroom rather than shear off the nose, especially important for dimple or hollow point bullets.

Well y'all went and bit the bullet on a lee production pot, gonna try to find some wheel weights and stock up till it comes in

I did be I can't find my molds right now... I have a couple hundred pounds of ingots. A lot of of it came from the indoor shooting range at Camp Perry. I used shoot a lot of pistol rounds in there And the Colonel ask me one day if I want to clean out the pit and gave me a sieve. I spent I don't know hour many hours I was in there over a 3 day period, but I got about 300 of lead. I made about hundred pound of sinkers and still have the rest. I need some more sinkers of a couple sizes... so need to find my molds. All I have is a ladle and a gas burner. It takes a little longer, but gets the job done.

Garry-

Turn around now! Sell the pot when it comes in. Do not go down this road. I have been down this road. I went down it before I got into trapping. It is just as addictive as trapping. Before you know it you will have a couple pouring pots, several lubsizers and several tons of lead. I have 20+ moulds with most of them being custom.

If you do not wish to adhere to that warning then you have been given good info about joining castboolits. Stay out of the swagging section. I put my toe in it and doing the best I can to not go in the deep end.

The biggest thing with boolits will be size. The boolit needs to be .001-.003" over bore size. There is so much that I can not type in one post, just read every thing you can on the castboolit site. That is if you want to go down this road.

same Lee Prod Pot here but 41 and 357 mag and 380 and 9mm

as Jerry said,^^^ here is the place for info! : http://castboolits.gunloads.com/forum.php

smelt in a separate pot

WW (wheel weights) are nasty dirty a basic stainless 8 quart stock pot if you can find one at a thrift store with metal lid they sell them brand new at grocery stores for like 10-15 dollars they work find for smelting fill it about 3/4 of the way up and put it on the turkey fry burner a little top heat from a torch speeds up the process , I use an ice fishing ladle that is metal but a big slotted spoon works get allt he clips and garbage out , put a little candle wax on and let it burn, stir in some saw dust it helps to grab the impurities , then scoop that off with the slotted spoon. a litt more candle wax , having it burning robs the oxygen from the air so your molten lead doesn't oxidize so fast. when the flames go out start ladling it into muffin tins the cheap ones are fine but I found a use for wd-40 spray the tin before you pour and the muffin ingots don't stick

last peice of advice do this all over a sheet of plywood or cardboard lead sticks to grass , dirt , drive ways , gravel but on wood and cardboard once cool pulls right up

the muffin ingots are the right size to put in the pot and already clean lead

dirt in a Pro 4-20 is not good and a pain to clean out

and I third or whatever we are on cast boolits I go by the same name over there

Yeah, i do. 45, 44, 40, 38, and #4 buck. Pictured is a Lyman 452423 in 1:20 tin/lead

Anybody heat treat rather than mess with different lead mixtures? Much easier.

I have cast my own sinkers for ages, having first being taught back in the mid 60's. As for bullets....I didn't start that on my own until the early 90's. Mostly for my pistol (.44) & muzzleloader (.50 & .unless54). I have slug molds for 12 & 20 gauge, but have never shot anything with them. I also use WW mostly, but have X-ray room lead sheeting I use as well. It makes a buck even more special if you cast the bullet that you got him with!

I haven't mostly because I don't push my cast lead very hard good fit and lube can make fairly soft lead go fast enough

I also powder coat for my 9mm as it runs in glock barrels I cast , coat , bake , size to .356 and load in 9mm glocks love them barrels are always clean as the lead never touches the barrel

Well managed to find a half way decent lead supply. $35 a bucket ain't too bad I figure. Gonn go though all these with a set of snips and sort everything out soon. Picked up a propane fish trying set too so blot all I need not is a old cast iorn pot and a muffin tin for my smelting and ingot making

not all wheel weights are made of lead.

more and more a 1/2 bucket of lead weights is doing good

you don't need to use a snips , just start melting , keep the heat not too hot and the non lead comes out with that big slotted spoon .have a metal bucket or coffee cans to put it in

ladle off muffins so that you have an inch or so of lead in the smelting pot let that cool till it has a firm top then add more WW , if water gets below the surface of the lead it makes steam that sends molten tinsel everywhere

you may want to sort clip on lead from stick on lead

if you can easily tel it is not lead don't put it in the pot.

If you know somebody that remodels apartments in the old old part of downtown they often find remnants of the old lead pipes in the walls maybe even an old lead bathtub .