Sizing, lubing, and gas checking some 158’s out of the Lee C358-158-SWC 6 cavity for some full house H-110 357’s. I water quenched these and got the hardness up to around 15bn. I use the older Original Lube A Matic I bought from a fellow THFer. I like the bullets it turns out. 357 is the only thing I load Hot enough to benefit from hard casting and gas checking.

Nice work. The only thing I miss about grease lubed bullets is the smell.

Nice work...one of those SWCGCs in a .357 Magnum, on top of H110 at 1400-1500 fps depending on barrel length, is bad medicine to a deer or hog.

Loaded a stack of 230 round nose .45acp tonight. These are tumble lube bullets with the micro bands. I use liquid alox some and pan lube some. Lubing with the lube a matic and a homemade concoction of carnuba wax, Vaseline, and automatic transmission fluid yields a hard lube that I like. The lube is only in the lube grooves and yields finished ammo that is not messy to handle of shoot.

Pretty sure I have the same mold.

Nice work Gas Guzzler.

I just brought home 43.2 pounds of wheel weights. I sorted into three groups.

• Steel, iron, zinc COWW, plus any stick on weights I do not trust
• "Soft" stick on weights
• Lead clip on weights.

The weights are as follows:

• 26.4 pounds (61% trash)
• 5.2 pounds (12% soft SOWW)
• 11.6 pounds (27% lead COWW)

This is BEFORE smelting off the steel clips and trash. Percentage goes down every year and quickly on lead yield. Used to get about 1/3 usable material AFTER smelting. Now it's before smelting off the garbage.

#1 reason I don’t deal with buying WW anymore. If I go to a small town shop and they give me the old WW I’ll take them, but the time investment is pretty large.

I don't have to pay for them, just take them home. Showing how the lead weights are disappearing.

I am still in the take them when you can get them mode. Recovery rate is not what it once was. I wait to melt them down till I accumulate several hundred pounds. Did a batch last weekend. 3 five gallon buckets yielded 192 pounds of clip on ingots(the round ones) and 36 pounds of soft stick ons. I probably have enough to last a lifetime but I take it and clean it up when I find it.

Then I went and cast a run of 158 gas checks mixed 2# ingot of clip on for 1# stick on ingot for my 357 before co mingling it with my stock pile.

I have not dabbled with the powder coating like you boys do.

I use a cast iron dutch oven and a turkey fryer base too.

man that's serious craftsmanship.

Thank you for the kind comment. There is a learning curve but it is a lot simpler than it looks. With a pretty simple setup you can cast surprisingly consistent bullets sized to your bore that shoot as well as store bought ammo.

Being particular about alloys and fluxing, closely regulating mold and alloy temperature, as well as pouring tempo and dwell time in the mold, I just cast 500+ 40 S&W projectiles at a pace of around 18/minute.

These are 175 grain tumble lube bullets. Weights are so close I’m not going to post the spread for fear of being accused of padding the numbers. This is one good mold when all the details are dialed in.

These are all sized at .401 which is .0015 over the slugged bore diameter of my M&P40 and lubed with 45/45/10 which is a home brewed tumble lube that dries in an hour, is not tacky or messy and does not accumulate on the seating die or inside the pistol. The dried lube accounts for the dull golden finish on these 40’s.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Funny how similar our methods are. I use a slotted spoon I got at the dollar store to pick the trash out of my smelt and an old table spoon for the bottom pour Lee pot. I keep my pot on an old discarded cookie sheet to contain the splatter and I use a hammer handle for a knocker-looserer. I need to wrap mine in tape too. Good idea. I drop my bullets onto a damp cloth diaper, a silicon baking sheet, or into a bucket of water depending on what I'm making and how fast I want it to cool.

I also have a pot without the bottom pour for ladle casting but it gets very little use.

Got around to loading up 10 for the S&W M&P40 to verify the alloy I mixed gets along with my pet load for a cast 175 SWC. I am a fan of the Hornady taper crimp seating dies for pistol cartridges that headspace on the mouth of the case. I seat and crimp at the same time with no degradation of quality I can detect. For the life of me I don’t understand why Hornady also sells .40S&W/10MM dies with a roll crimp?


After manually cycling them all from the mag through the pistol and measuring for setback, I went out and shot them. Taking my time, slow fire at 25 yards I still managed to shank two out of the 10 out of the group. One low, one left as shown. The M&P is surprisingly accurate. The trigger on the M&P is not conducive to me shooting for maximum accuracy. I am not good enough to consistently hold it dead on with the factory trigger through every shot. I felt a little bobble on two of them and the target verified it. A more capable shooter with steady hands and young eyes could likely tighten that up some. The sights on my M&P have no adjustment for elevation. At 25 it is a little high. That it is what it is and I can live with it.


Using Lyman #4 cast data, a starting charge of W-231 and these cast 175’s sized to .401 work for a nice plinking load that doesn’t beat up the shooter or the pistol. They are a little Smokey….

Looks like a nice consistent load. Good shooting.

W231 is one of my .45 Colt powders ... or is that .45 AUTO? Anyway I don't have a .40 SW but my dad does. The roll crimp dies are for revolver with moon clips?

Thank you sir.

I’m sure you are correct Guzzler. A man needs options.

Back at it again. Fed the habit with some home cast 45acp after Easter dinner today. These are fairly soft cast 230 round nose bullets that I size and conventional lube with the RCBS Lube A Matic. Powder charge is 5.3 grains of W-231. Pistol is a 1911 colt government model. Charge weight and bullet diameter is optimized to shoot in this old school 1911. The load is more accurate in this pistol than I can shoot it. It makes this combo a lot of fun. Picture is the first magazine of the day. Slow fire at the 25 yard line. At 61 my eyes and shoulders fatigue faster than they used to. To shoot pistol for my best groups these days, I need to do it when I first start. My nerves got the best of me today and the low one was the last in the mag but that is what it is….
Cast lead makes a quality pistol bullet. I dug a slug out of the berm behind the target. Expansion and weight retention of these soft cast lead bullets is pretty darn good.

Yeah, you might be able to defend yourself with that.

Good Shooting.