HELP ! WHAT DO I DO !!

rewster

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With the cost of everything "reloading" having gone up a lot, I went through a bunch of old stuff that was hidden away. Found a box of 45 cal. 200 gr SWC cast lead bullets I got from Carroll Bullet, Inc. back around 2004 !!! Loaded up 25 and they shot good enough to convince me to load another 100.

PROBLEM: I had to go through them to find the ones where the lube was still completely in place. Most had missing sections or no lube at all ! I now have about 375 that I guess should be re-lubed. Know ZERO about casting ! Is this something that can be done ? How ?

Any help would be appreciated !!
 
With the cost of everything "reloading" having gone up a lot, I went through a bunch of old stuff that was hidden away. Found a box of 45 cal. 200 gr SWC cast lead bullets I got from Carroll Bullet, Inc. back around 2004 !!! Loaded up 25 and they shot good enough to convince me to load another 100.

PROBLEM: I had to go through them to find the ones where the lube was still completely in place. Most had missing sections or no lube at all ! I now have about 375 that I guess should be re-lubed. Know ZERO about casting ! Is this something that can be done ? How ?

Any help would be appreciated !!

They could be re-lubed by running them through a lubrisizer. You could also just put them in a can and roll them around with some liquid alox. Or you could melt a chunk of beeswax and add a little crisco and roll them in that mixture.
 
Clean the remaining wax off.

Go to harbor freight, buy some cheap powder coat.

Coat the bullets. Wait for your wife to go shopping. Then bake them in her toaster oven for 20 minutes.

Probably be the cheapest and easiest for what you want to do.
 
Options are as follows

Boil off the existing lube.
Tumble with white label lubes 45-45-10 or Lee alox.

Or

Find someone with a lube sizer that can line size them for you

Or

Look into pan lubing. Again you will need to buy more lube than you need.

I would use some Lee alox and be done with it.
Where are you located in RI? If you’re willing to drive to southeastern MA I would give you enough 45-45-10 to handle those bullets.
 
Thanks a lot for the help !! I think I'll go with the Lee Alox since we're only talking 375 bullets. You mentioned I have to "boil off" the existing lube. Does that mean water in an old pan and just boil away ?? I was hoping I didn't have to sit here and pick each one clean !!! Thanks for the offer of the 45/45/10 but I'm going to keep this as simple as possible. Ordered the Lee Alox today.
 
Yes. Use an old pan that you don’t need or set up a double boiler with a disposable aluminum pan and melt all the old lube off. It doesn’t need to be perfect but if you have lube and only half of the groove it’s going to cause flyers.
 
Thanks a lot for the help !! I think I'll go with the Lee Alox since we're only talking 375 bullets. You mentioned I have to "boil off" the existing lube. Does that mean water in an old pan and just boil away ?? I was hoping I didn't have to sit here and pick each one clean !!! Thanks for the offer of the 45/45/10 but I'm going to keep this as simple as possible. Ordered the Lee Alox today.
I would just alox as is , no need to remove old lube
 
Commercial lube is way too hard for 45 ACP velocities so they use a much harder lead than necessary.

Hell, you could wipe some clean bacon fat into those grooves and get some good lube performance at <1000 FPS. Just clean the gun well after.
 
again...i'm a bad reloader. i never worried about bullets with bare spots in the grooves, just reloaded them and shot. life is too short to worry about that trivial shit. it's not like you're going to blow up the gun.
You’re not wrong. As long as there is some lube in the groove you’re good to go. If you look at most lead bullet molds and even some of the classics like a Lyman 358156 The loop grooves are almost nonexistent and there is still enough lube to get the job done.
You’re probably going to have accuracy issues but if this is just for plinking then who cares.

Pastera Did make a good point about the hardness of commercial loops and if these are older and have dried out at all you could run into flow issues and get some leading.

But if the first handful worked well what you have left will probably work fine anyway
 
Hey, it's winter !! It's very cold and tomorrow will not end the snow for the season !!!!! This will give me something to do until the sun comes out again and, who knows, might get me interested in casting !! ;)
 
I think your best bet would be to edit your post and actually put something useful in the title.
Just my $0.02
 
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