Boer seun said:
I don't know squat about casting so. What equipment do i need?
Well, you can go as cheap as a Lee furnace, a second hand cast dutch oven, etc. Will give you shooters and very little investment. For myself, I would spend the money on higher end equipment - easier to get satisfactory results and significant reduction in the annoyance factor.
You need to melt lead. If you have unlimited access to wheelweights, I would strongly suggest you have two lead pots. If there's a local pulp mill or similar source of stainless steel pipe, have somebody fab up a "rough pot" for you that will hold several hundred pounds at a time. This allows you to keep dirty alloy out of your casting pot, and by doing several hundred pounds at a time, your resulting ingots of prepared bullet alloy will be more consistent over time. I have such a pot and I heat it with a bigass propane torch.
Then you need your production pot. I prefer an RCBS 20 lb bottom pour, but those who can't learn how to get consistent bullets out of bottom pour pots tend to prefer ladle casting. If you're going to ladle cast, get a Rowell ladle - the 1 lb ones are great. Never put dirty/uncleaned alloy in your production pot, unless you like plugged up orifices and crap in your bullets. Anything smaller than a 20 lb pot and you'll be finding yourself filling the pot all the time - annoying.
You need bullet moulds. After years of casting, I have decided that custom moulds is the only way to go for success. The catch to that is you need enough time in the hobby to know what to specify in a custom mould. If I was to concentrate my spending anywhere, I would do it on the moulds. Lee moulds are attractively inexpensive, and are all you need for "shooters"; you can get really good results from them as well, but the catch is you will likely need a fair bit of experience before you know all the little tricks to try. Veral Smith and Montain Mould's stuff is quite good. You are equally as likely to have success with Saeco, RCBS, or Lyman moulds when considering the more common brands - success will depend on the relationship between the rifle's chamber and ball seat, bore, bullet design, and bullet fit to chamber and ball seat (not to mention alloy hardness versus load, of course). How's that for confusing?
So, I would start with the well known off the shelf stuff. Look around and start out with the designs that have earned themselves a good reputation in your caliber of interest. Lyman 314299 is a very popular bullet in the .303 British, for example, while Saeco #311 is well thought of in the .30 calibers.
Unless you are going to stick with tumble lubing and shooting as cast bullets, you are going to need a lubricator/sizer. I prefer the Saeco, but the more common Lyman and RCBS lubrisizers have interchangeable sizing dies and nose punches (I think).
http://www.redding-reloading.com/pages/lubrisizer.html
Lee has a very inexpensive sizing system. If you're thinking mostly "shooters", this will probably do just fine.
Then there's the odds and sods. You need skimmers to take the crap off the top of the melt, fluxes (for rough stuff I use any source of wax, for production I use carnuba wax), and various lubes to fit your current bullet of choice. Lyman M dies make for a better seated round in rifles, and I use an LBT hardness tester quite a bit
Is it worth it? (Will be casting for 30/06, 270, 280, 7x57, 303, 30/30 9mm and 45ACP.)
Worth it for what? If it's about cheap shooting, the answer is probably not - particularly for handguns. To expand your shooting hobby, certainly. If the idea of producing cast bullet loads that perform nearly as well as jacketed rounds appeals to you, it can be worth it indeed. And taking a nice game animal with a round you not only reloaded, but with a bullet you cast yourself, certainly has a nice touch to it. As does shooting tight groups with respectable velocities.
For myself, I draw the line at casting for handguns, at least for those I shoot quite a bit. I refuse to cast in those quantities, so restrict myself to casting just for the oddball calibers that I don't shoot much like .455 Webley and .32 ACP. The bulk commercially swaged/cast bullets are hard to improve on when you compare whatever improvement you get over the amount of time you would spend casting those 10,000 rounds/year or so that you use.
How much can i expect to pay for equipment
By scrounging your casting pot from old cast iron pots, you could probably start casting for your first caliber with under $100 invested if you stuck with Lee equipment. This is probably a more representative pricing for a serious caster, although prices are just ballpark figures:
Lead pot: $300
Sizer: $175
Mould: $60
Sizer: $25
Top Punch $20
Again, those are VERY general prices.
I know you have to mix the lead with other metals and Dogleg talked about using solder
If you have wheelweight, you don't need to mix any other metal. There is enough tin and arsenic in wheelweight to cast well and heat treat your bullets as hard as you want.
Anyways, that's enough for now.
