New Miha mold

[artsmom]

The Castboolits forum has a lot of group buys of custom molds. I have about a dozen, and I would have to say Mihec molds are top quality. Mihec's hollowpoint molds or hollow based wadcutter molds work great and the pins can be reversed to make a flat point bullet.

The only drawback to the group buys on the Castboolits forum is that the mold makers who participate are backed up past six months in orders, unless they have some overrun molds in inventory.

If you are LEO, you might want to avoid the Politics and Religion forum on that site though...

[Stick_man]

Well, I just got my mold from Miha on Friday. It took 5 days from when I sent payment (via Paypal) to arrrive at my doorstep. Excellent! Looks fantastic. I couldn't wait to give it a try, so I quickly cleaned it up with some Dawn dish soap and hot water to remove any remaining cutting oil from the cavities, then followed that up with some brake cleaner/degreaser. I put some handles on it and promptly heated it up (resting it on the top of my casting pot while my lead heated up). Knowing these molds like to run hot, I let my alloy get up to 700 degrees before I poured my first. Started with one cavity, closest to the pivot point, for 2 pours, then added a cavity. Poured 2 more, then added a third. Then the 4th cavity and all was going well. I had each configuration set up, small round hollow point, large round hollow point, pentagon hollow point, and solid flat point. After 2 pours with all 4 cavities filled, this baby was producing works of art. Once again, Miha has lived up to his reputation. Other than cleaning remaining oils off of the mold, no further work was needed. The boolits fall off the pins as soon as the mold is opened. Even the penta pins do great. I am very pleased with the newest addition to my stable of molds.

[Lead Express]

Have any of you lucky son-of-a-guns with the pena HP been able to test these bullets with media? I've not seen the penta design until this post, and am very curious on how they would perform.

[Edward429451]

Someone did and posted pics. The pentas do not open as uniformly as the round ones, but they sure look good!

[snuffy]

This is a 45 acp miha mold, I got it with penta HP and regular round HP.



Round HP on the left, penta on the right. Same in the next pic;



These were cast from some real soft nearly pure lead with enough tin to get good fill-out. Harder lead resulted in much less expansion. But @ 45 acp velocities, that's not hard to understand.



These were cast of wheel weights, they expand, but not like the above softer boolits.

[Lead Express]

It is an interesting design, to say the least. Thank you for sharing the pictures!

[Mike / Tx]

Have any of you lucky son-of-a-guns with the pena HP been able to test these bullets with media? I've not seen the penta design until this post, and am very curious on how they would perform.

Someone did and posted pics. The pentas do not open as uniformly as the round ones, but they sure look good!

Well the expansion being what it is, has to be matched with alloy and velocity. Since most folks pour WW mixed with a bit of straight lead your still going to get a bit harder boolit than necessary due to some antimony possibly being in the mix.

In doing a BUNCH of research on what I might need to get my alloy to perform properly with some of these type boolits, I have come to the conclusion I am going to have to blend up something between a 16-1 and 25-1 lead/tin alloy.

There are plenty of pictures of different calibers in both the round and penta style HP's expanded quite nicely over on the Castboolits site. Since I am running loads which range form mid 900fps through a top end of 1350 for the 454, it will simply depend on how soft an alloy I can get by with before leading rears it's ugly head. I am hopeful however that by using something between the spread above that I can easily hit something which will hold together in my revolvers in a consistent manner. It sure would be nice to only have to blend up one alloy for them all, but I realize that with the differences in velocity, and the sizes of cavities this may not be the case.

As of now, I have been using some alloys which are around a 1/3/96, or 2.5/2.5/95, (tin/antimony/lead), and I have found it to simply be too brittle and while I get great expansion with some of the lower velocity rounds, anything higher than 1000fps will simply shed the noses in tiny pieces. While this may or may not be a bad thing when used for a hunting boolit, I would much rather have the noses rol back into a nice shroom shaped mass which should provide some excellent stopping power on both a deer or a hog.

In the coming couple of weeks, I will be blending up some alloys in the above mentioned range to see which one is going to give me something to work with. Hopefully I can get it done up and loads worked up before hunting season.