bullet mold recommendations 45-70

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triple tap

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hey, im looking for a mold for casting some 45-70 bullets. I would like a bullet with a final weight around 400 grains but over or under is fine... it must have a very big/wide hollow point cavity on it... I would prefer double or triple lube groves. im open to anything, so let me know if you have a mold you like, but it must be hollow point...

if anyone has a mold recommendation, or a company that will build me this mold for a reasonable price, please let me know.
 
triple tap said:
hey, im looking for a mold for casting some 45-70 bullets. I would like a bullet with a final weight around 400 grains but over or under is fine... it must have a very big/wide hollow point cavity on it... I would prefer double or triple lube groves. im open to anything, so let me know if you have a mold you like, but it must be hollow point...

if anyone has a mold recommendation, or a company that will build me this mold for a reasonable price, please let me know.
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The only mold I know about is the Lyman 330 gr hp. Mold # 457122. I have one of them, and it's rather tedious to mold as it only does one bullet at a time, but the results are spectacular. I size them down to .452 and wrap 2 wraps of onionskin paper around them. Those shoot with no risk of leading in my gun and I don't need to clean my gun after. It has 2 large grease grooves on it and 3 driving bands. The other way to go would be to get NOE molds to cut you one to your specs. I believe that those cost about $95+ plus shipping. I have been looking at that idea for a few guns...
With paper patching, you can run the bullet at jacketed or higher than jacketed speeds with lower pressures and no worrying about leading the bore. The patch seems to help self clean the bore as well...
Cast boolets forum has lots of info on molds, paper patching, and all kinds of other fun things. The 45-70 is an extremely easy cartridge to load for, and is a hoot to shoot gophers with. :D "No hiding behind the mound for you"... You can load anything from subsonic to high velocity with it with great effect...
 
wish i could find out which moulds bullet barn uses for their 350 grn 45-70 RNFP SLG BB. Man do those things shoot out of my marlin. 5 shot clovers at 100 meters.
 
I looked into HP cast bullets once but the issue is they don't expand unless cast from a fairly soft alloy which means you need to keep velocity down as well. If you are using wheel weights or an alloy close to it or harder than it, the hollow points will either crumble and break apart or just not expand at all and act like a solid cast bullet. I read many reviews, articles, and posts where people used buckets of water, wet newspaper, or wet sand to catch cast HP's and they break apart before they'll expand.

If you are using a soft alloy and keeping velocities down (close to black powder levels; trap door loads/level 1 loads should work) they will expand. My issue is I only have wheel weights and recycled shotgun shot (also a fairly hard alloy) available to me so never ordered a mould. It is possible to paper patch a soft lead HP to bring the velocity up and I do PP for most of my black powder 45-70 loads but, again, I don't have easy access to soft lead.

NOE has a production mould in .460" diameter and 405gr that comes in plain base, gas checked, solid, or hollow point/solid interchangeable (two sets of pins depending on what you want the noses to be). Head over to noebulletmolds.com
 
I use 2 molds from RCBS- 45-300 FN (300gr flat nose) and a 45-400 FN (flat nose). The 300 is a double cavity and the 400 is a single. Both perform very well, I've cast many many 1000's from both. I'd like to try a custom mold from LBT (Lead Bullet Technology) as I have a few 30 cal molds from them and they're the best I've used. Best of luck.BB
 
Zuke, mind if I ask what you paid for the NOE mold? The last LBT mold I got was about $85 but that was over 20 years ago. Today it would be about $150 by the time it was shipped. Still, when you look at the cost of jacketed stuff a good mold at $150 is actually cheap. I like the idea of paper patching. Tried it a couple of times with cheap 45cal handgun slugs that I bought. At .452 (?) they worked pretty good but I'd like to get a regular mold so I can try them hunting. So far I've use the above mentioned RCBS slugs, both 300 & 400 gr for hunting deer. The performance on deer with cast from 35 Whelen and 450 Marlin is very impressive.
 
after searching around a bit I found 2 NOE molds, but im not sure what i want... the 405GR mold, with the hollow point pins in will drop a 372GR bullet. or the 530GR mold that will make hollow points at 513GR... something right in-between that would be perfect, I have a feeling the 530GR one will be too heavy/slow and drop real fast, so anything over 100 yards will be a hard shot to call... on the other hand, the 405GR should be flatter shooting but what im worried about is that if LUTNIT is right, and it hits something solid and the front of the bullet shatters, then im left with a ~300GR bullet, that's just hit something hard and doesn't have the weight to punch down deep... not ideal on something like a bear that's about to ruff you up and take your lunch money...
 
big boar said:
Zuke, mind if I ask what you paid for the NOE mold? The last LBT mold I got was about $85 but that was over 20 years ago. Today it would be about $150 by the time it was shipped. Still, when you look at the cost of jacketed stuff a good mold at $150 is actually cheap. I like the idea of paper patching. Tried it a couple of times with cheap 45cal handgun slugs that I bought. At .452 (?) they worked pretty good but I'd like to get a regular mold so I can try them hunting. So far I've use the above mentioned RCBS slugs, both 300 & 400 gr for hunting deer. The performance on deer with cast from 35 Whelen and 450 Marlin is very impressive.
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It was a group buy over at Castboolit's. If I remember right it was about a year wait and $105. It's a 5 cavity HP GC. The pin can be switched to make a solid boolit.
 
triple tap said:
after searching around a bit I found 2 NOE molds, but im not sure what i want... the 405GR mold, with the hollow point pins in will drop a 372GR bullet. or the 530GR mold that will make hollow points at 513GR... something right in-between that would be perfect, I have a feeling the 530GR one will be too heavy/slow and drop real fast, so anything over 100 yards will be a hard shot to call... on the other hand, the 405GR should be flatter shooting but what im worried about is that if LUTNIT is right, and it hits something solid and the front of the bullet shatters, then im left with a ~300GR bullet, that's just hit something hard and doesn't have the weight to punch down deep... not ideal on something like a bear that's about to ruff you up and take your lunch money...
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What are you going to be shooting them out of? Be warned that worrying about "flat trajectories" in a 45/70 with 400g or heavier boolits can result in prodigious recoil. If you want a good useable hollow point cast boolit, you need to use something like 50/50 clip on wheel weight / pure lead. Also expect tremendous meat damage as compared to non hollow point boolits. You can also cast "soft point" cast boolits by using a pure slug of lead that is small enough to fit in the point of the mold. Get the mold hot enough to keep the lead molten and then pour hard lead in on top of the soft lead. They will fuse together and you will have the toughness in the base area of a hard cast with a soft point that will expand nicely and hold together well. Kind of like a cast Nosler Partition.
 
sawzall said:
What are you going to be shooting them out of? Be warned that worrying about "flat trajectories" in a 45/70 with 400g or heavier boolits can result in prodigious recoil. If you want a good useable hollow point cast boolit, you need to use something like 50/50 clip on wheel weight / pure lead. Also expect tremendous meat damage as compared to non hollow point boolits. You can also cast "soft point" cast boolits by using a pure slug of lead that is small enough to fit in the point of the mold. Get the mold hot enough to keep the lead molten and then pour hard lead in on top of the soft lead. They will fuse together and you will have the toughness in the base area of a hard cast with a soft point that will expand nicely and hold together well. Kind of like a cast Nosler Partition.
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I have been doing this for years for my short range heavily treed area that I hunt moose in. I was finding that most of my hits would pass right thru the moose or deer with no expansion at all so I wanted something that would mushroom out a bit to try and anchor the animal and have less tracking after the hit. Found in article in Handloader about making the soft hollow point and hard base and since I have been doing this I have actually been finding the bullets inside the moose and mushroomed nicely in most cases. 2 years ago I hit the moose exactly in the heart and you would have thought someone had inserted a hand grenade and set it off, there wasn't much left. I think Handloader did another article on it last year or two and added a few alternatives such as adding a piece of tin foil between the halves of the mold only in the nose part so when you pour in the lead it will make a nose that will somewhat mushroom. Haven't tried it yet but sounds interesting.
 
My dad just shot a big 57" Yukon/Alaska moose last week with his Marlin 1895 GBL, with a Lee 340 grain boolit I cast for him out of straight wheel weights, water dropped, over a full case of 3031. This is the second moose in two years with this same load, and he raves about it. Total pass through on a broadside double front shoulder shot. Apparently the moose was right on the side of a river and he didn't want it to go anywhere...
 
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