scsov509
August 1, 2010, 01:45 AM
Just wanted to give a quick word of thanks for all the exceptional info in this forum. I've been handloading for quite a while now, but just finally decided to take the plunge into casting in the last year. So for the past 8 months I've been accumulating wheel weights from a few friends at church and reading lots to get up to speed on this new facet of reloading. Yesterday my brother-in-law and I took the whole day and set to work smelting, and I was exceptionally pleased with the results.
We used an old camp stove for our heat source (garage sale, $5, converted it from white gas to propane for another $5 in parts), a dutch oven I picked up for $16, a variety of second hand kitchen tools (ladle, slotted spoon, etc), and some muffin pans for our ingots. We spent good money on a casting thermometer, and other than that I think we're about $60 into everything we used. We started out petrified that we were going to mess something up and get zinc in our alloy, but figured out in a whole hurry that it was not all that complicated as long as we monitored our heat constantly. Turned out to be a heck of a lot of fun, much more than I had anticipated, and we walked away with about 180 pounds of good wheelweight alloy when all was done. I even got to weld for the first time since we decided to build stand to keep our dutch oven off the camp stove grate. :D
So like I said, thanks to all for a ton of excellent information in this forum. We've got a family wedding this next week, but are planning to try our hand at casting bullets the following week. I'm sure I'll have lots more questions once we get into that, and look forward to interacting with you all as we learn this new part of our shooting/reloading hobby. Thanks again...:D
We used an old camp stove for our heat source (garage sale, $5, converted it from white gas to propane for another $5 in parts), a dutch oven I picked up for $16, a variety of second hand kitchen tools (ladle, slotted spoon, etc), and some muffin pans for our ingots. We spent good money on a casting thermometer, and other than that I think we're about $60 into everything we used. We started out petrified that we were going to mess something up and get zinc in our alloy, but figured out in a whole hurry that it was not all that complicated as long as we monitored our heat constantly. Turned out to be a heck of a lot of fun, much more than I had anticipated, and we walked away with about 180 pounds of good wheelweight alloy when all was done. I even got to weld for the first time since we decided to build stand to keep our dutch oven off the camp stove grate. :D
So like I said, thanks to all for a ton of excellent information in this forum. We've got a family wedding this next week, but are planning to try our hand at casting bullets the following week. I'm sure I'll have lots more questions once we get into that, and look forward to interacting with you all as we learn this new part of our shooting/reloading hobby. Thanks again...:D