Casting Setup Costs?

mmattockx

mmattockx

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I can't believe I am asking this, but can anyone give me some ballpark numbers for a basic casting setup to do shotgun slugs to start with and then moving into pistol bullets (.44 Mag and .45ACP)?

Yes, I know I can go over to the Cast Boolit forum and read up, but I want to know if it is even worth my time educating myself on what I will need to get rolling or if the start up costs are prohibitive.

My understanding is I would need a setup to melt lead into ingots as raw stock, then a casting pot of some sort to actually melt for the mold pour. I need molds and maybe a luber/sizer for the pistol bullets. Am I missing anything major?


Thanks,
Mark
 
Depends on your methods in this madness. If you buy new you can spend bucks, shop for used and make some of your own items it's pretty cheap if you shoot the volume. Do the math. Getting hard to find lead wheel weights now. Lots of steel and zinc. I built my own burner with a free cast iron water heater burner, barb'que side burner hose and valve and some scrap pile metal. Gun show ingot molds and pot for casting. Bullet mold from WSS for my .44 mag. Slugs would be soft lead. Fred
 
You could just buy a mold, then melt lead in anything metal with fire or propane and pour it with a ladle to the mold to try it. It will be easier and faster with the stuff listed below.

Bass Pro Turkey Fryer and a big metal pot (cut an old de-valved BBQ tank in half to melt raw lead/WW. Homemade ingot pans or use smaller muffin/bread pans that would make ingots that fit into casting pot. Ladle and spoon to stir and pour. I had some 2" angle iron with ends welded on as legs to pour triangle shaped larger/longer ingots. Don't put 100's of lbs on the turkey fryer frame at once. It will collapse when it gets hot.

Turkey Fryer $90-115
Lee Pro 4-20 Pot $58
Lee 1oz 12ga slug mold $18 (handles built in)
Lee 44 240gr 6 cav mold $38 (no handles incl)
Lee 45 230gr 6 cav mold $38 (no handles incl)
Lee 6 cav mold handles $18 each x2
Lee Alox Tumble Lube or Pan lube with home made or other bought lubes.
Table, gloves, glasses, bucket, old metal tank or cast dutch oven, lead, ingot molds.

Wood table to set Lee pot and molds on, old bucket with water to drop boolits in. You're right to keep the raw lead in a seperate melter. If you do it in your casting pot a lot of garbage ends up there and causes trouble. You'll switch to two pots later and wish you started the raw stuff seperate. You can still use the clean turkey fryer pot to fry turkeys or boil water at camp etc since you will not be putting lead in it ever. Buy the larger 20lb Lee pot, the 10lb runs out too quick and you'll want a larger one. Topping up the pot takes time to get the new lead back up to good casting temp.
 
I use an electric hot plate from Canadian Tire for melting the WW's that cost me $30 and a free steel pot from somewhere or another.

Slugs also don't have to be cast from soft lead. I have fired wheel weight alloy water dropped Lee 1oz slugs through a full choke before (accidentally). The accuracy was thrown off but there where no negative effects. There is no difference in my experience between C, IC, or M from 900 to 1600fps shooting hard case wheel weight water dropped slugs.

The prices hk33ka1 posted is realistic before tax or shipping (depending where you order from.) I find the 6 cavity moulds more annoying to work with since heating them up evenly is a bit of a pain at times but if you want production it's the way to go.
 
I have seen the initial melt done in a pot purchased at a yard sale ($0.50) over a wood fire in a backdoor fire pit.

Most basic casting setup: Lee Precision Melter: $45, Lee ladle: $5, Lee slug mold $30.
 
Read first, then start gathering equipment for your intended purpose.

A Coleman stove, or a single burner electric hotplate from WalMart, could meet your needs.

Or you may want a Magma Automatic Casting Machine. Just to show the 'other' end of the spectrum.

But really. You can't afford to spend 15 minutes reading up on something that interests you? Strange!

You can cast from the same pot you use to process your wheel weights. Take care not to pound too much heat into the pot, and you very much reduce the chance of melting the zinc weights. (That would be bad)

I started out with an old bottom pour pot that cost me $5. I had to sandblast it clean, but it was used (over many hours) to process 300 pounds + of weights into ingots before I cleaned it out. Once I had clean metal to start with, all was well. If you buy ingots, that will reduce dealing with crappy dirty metal.

Cheapest full commercial setup would be a Lee pot, and a dipper, plus a mold for each size, then you need a sizer, and some form of lube. Lots of cheap and slow ways to meet the latter needs. Lee makes some cheap, push-through sizers, you can use liquid Alox to tumble lube or you can pan lube by melting your bullet lube and pouring it around your bullets in a cake pan. Or you could get a lube-sizer, with the appropriate dies.

Cheap involves more hand labor. Expensive moves faster. Choose what suits you.

But mostly, try to educate yourself before you throw money at it. Reading, esp. on the castboolits forum, is about the best investment you can make, if you are actually serious about starting down that road.
Try to stick to the basics, to start, eh. Clean metal, good bullets!

Cheers
Trev
 
Thanks guys, that is good enough to convince me I need to start reading and educating myself. The prices are much better than I expected overall, which makes it worthwhile.

The reasons I ask are:

1) The slugs I want to use are expensive from my supplier and I want to make up reduced recoil plinking loads for more than the occasional use.

2) My supplier is not getting any younger and I will be screwed when he finally retires or passes on. I am shooting 500+ .44 Mag, 2000+ .45ACP and 2000+ .38/.357 per year now and do not want to be hostage to bullet supply in the future. I want to shoot more in the future if possible and the costs aren't going down as I get older.


A couple more questions:

How much is a luber/sizer? If I want to bang out several thousand bullets in each calibre per winter I think a more production oriented approach will be justified on the time savings alone.

I keep hearing that the supply of wheel weights and other scrap lead sources are drying up, where would I purchase lead if I wanted to avoid the junk and get a known material? Does buying lead at commodity rates make casting impractical?


Thanks,
Mark
 
I've been casting for a only few years now, but not the quantity you are thinking about.

I find it can be relatively inexpensive (Lee pot, molds and push through sizing dies). You should be able to get a basic casting setup for <$200. Don't forget about very good ventilation.

Source of lead is the bigest problem I've run into so far. Most of the tireshops in Calgary that I've tried have no interest in selling you their buckets of wheel weights. Forget costco, crappy tire, wallyworld, etc, I think they have contracts with recyclers. The independent tire shops in Airdrie are more open to selling you the old wheel weights but the last bucket I got was at least 50% steel or zinc; and you have to get there before the recycler and everyone else does. I'm going to start buying directly from a recycler.

Just a quick approximation of your numbers, you are shooting approx 130lb. IIRC, scrap lead was about $1/lb at last check.
 
junkdude said:
Just a quick approximation of your numbers, you are shooting approx 130lb. IIRC, scrap lead was about $1/lb at last check.
Click to expand...

Paying $130-$150 for raw material for a year's supply of bullets seems reasonable to me. Especially if that gets me pure lead that I don't have to fight with on cleanliness.


Thanks for all the replies, I will head on over to cast boolits and do a pile of reading.


Mark
 
Just curious - but has anyone tried casting boolits from lead recovered on the range?

I try to come back from the range each time with a few lbs of bullets I find by the backstop of my range. Some jacketed, some deformed lead.

Also, I bought a portable electric stove at a garage sale for $10. Would this and a small steel pot I bought from Value Village for $3 be suitable to melt down lead?
 
Yes you can use recovered range lead. There will be more lead dust present in this stuff when you pick it up and pour into buckets etc. Don't breath that in. The lead cores from jacketed bullets will usually be softer lead.

You don't have to size lead boolits all the time. I don't own or use a lube sizer at this time so I do not know the price of one. I size rifle bullets with gas checks in Lee sizing dies in a normal press to seat gas checks. Most pistol/.45/70 lead boolits I shoot as cast and do not size. I tumble lube with Lee Alox or pan lube these.

Buying lead from somewhere like http://www.alchemycastings.com/lead-products/bullet.htm but you're looking at around $6/lb shipped. $1-2 per lb scrap starts to sound better at these prices. Large orders are cheaper they say. I have had 100+ lb buckets of wheel weights free or up to $20 but it's getting harder to find at these rates.

Scrap lead like old plumbing, print shop lead and wheel weights etc are drying up do to no new stuff being put out in many fields since other materials replaced lead, and the fact that scrap dealers are after it now and will pay more to a source then you or I will for bullet lead. Lead wheel weights are not installed on new cars and many shops have switched to non lead. It is law to use non lead in some states and soon they will likely shift to making only non lead weights for all markets. If you find a source or make a friend feel lucky!
 
I went about setting up by watching the EE, and buying a semi complete setup through there.I think I spent around $500 for a package with an RCBS bottom pour, some really good quality moulds, sizing dies,and some odds and ends.TOp quality good to great condition equipment is worth as much as the cheaper stuff is new..the muffin tins, turkey fryer, pots and such can be had at garage sales for cheap.Sources of lead are getting tougher to find&but even with $1 per lb or better for alloys it's worthwhile.factory ammo is darn expensive.the equipment pays itself off quickly in savings.but it seems that I spend those savings on more/different shooting stuff.
 
I use the turkey cooker burner with a cast iron dutch oven ,the lee lead pot and a RCBS lead pot in the campfire.They all work well.I have LEE ,RCBS,LYMAN,and even old original Winchester and Ideal molds.The bottom pour Lee lead pot works great on some molds.Some molds seem to produce better bullets by ladle casting.It is all a matter of experimenting.As to cost less than a hundred to more than you can imagine.
 
I was fortunate on my last lead buy. I was at the scrap yard and inquired whther or not the had any scrap lead. The guy said nrmally they only buy, not sell but he was willing to exchange my scrap brass at a fair trade rate for a bunch of lead plate that he had. Turned out it was cutup from some sort of lead tank, clean and pure. They even checked the content with a special tool they have. I was given the exact composition and as it turned out, it was as close to Lyman No2 as possible! Great for handgun loads, not so much so for my black powder interests needing pure lead.
A couple weeks later I was in a similar situation at a different yard and the guy took me over to several 55gal drums full of lead pipe- pure, 100% soft lead, had for 50 cents a pound.... cleaned up and turned into 575 minnies ended up about 5 cents a piece.
 
Cast iron pot - like $45. 12" across or thereabouts. It needs to be solid and strong as you will likely have 40 to 60lbs of lead in there.

Propane burner - cast unit from a surplus place. Again $30 to 50. Big burner that puts out some serious heat. Simple faucet to control temp with hose to connect to propane tank

Metal ladles from dollar store.

Hunk of 1x1 lumber to stir the mix

some parafin wax balls - home hardware I think. this is all I use to flux the WW alloy

Molds from Lee. Pretty darn cheap overall set up and it works

You can pour the largest bullets you want using that ladle and pot

I like my bullets to be a bit frosted which means me temp is higher then some like but I want a hard bullet. I water quench my 40cal bullets. Then tumble lube using Lee liq Alox

I also use the lee sizer gas check tool. Worked very nicely. Then tumble lubed again.

If not for the time and mess, I would pour more bullets.

Jerry
 
My setup was $45 fish fryer on sale a Canadian tire,$40 propane tank at cosco, $5 pot from value village, $20 electric burner from walmart, $2 for 2 ladles at value village, $10 for a couple cup cake tins for molds and $4 for loaf pans from dollarama ( makes 15lb ingots when half full) only thing left was molds of your choice.
 
mmattockx said:
A couple more questions:

How much is a luber/sizer? If I want to bang out several thousand bullets in each calibre per winter I think a more production oriented approach will be justified on the time savings alone.
Click to expand...

The cheapest & easiest way to go is with Lee bullet sizing dies. They are the 'push through' design so they are very fast and all you need to use them is a single stage press. Each die diameter will run you about $20 but that includes a bottle of Lee liquid bullet lube which will do several thousand bullets. Dragon lube (site sponsor) sells the same stuff at VERY reasonable prices. Process is as follows:
1. Cast the bullets
2. LIGHTLY lube the bullet by squirting a little lube in a plastic container and swirling the bullets around in the lube. Dump on a sheet of wax paper to dry.
3. Run each bullet through the sizing die.
4. LIGHTLY relube the bullets to replace the lube that the sizing die scraped off & dump on a sheet of wax paper to dry.
5. You're ready to reload.

Some people complain that the bullets with the Lee lube are slightly tacky (feel, not appearance) which is true but a very light dusting with talcum powder removes the tacky feeling.

One other point. Some people have recommended pouring the melted refined scrap lead into muffin tins or baking pans. While this works the problem is that when you want to remelt them in your bullet casting pot they take a long time to remelt due to their size (I use a Lee 20 pound bottom pour casting pot). I have a Lee ingot mould which makes 2 one pound ingots and 2 half pound ingots at a time but it is slow as you can only do 3 pounds at a time. An easier way to go is to use a mini muffin pan (12 or 24 cavity) to pour the melted lead into. Each little round ingot weighs about a 1/2 pound which melts very quickly in the Lee melter. Saves wasting time waiting for the larger ingots to melt (they also drop your operating temperature more and you have to wait for the pot to heat back up).

Bottom line is that if you can find cheap or (hopefully) free scrap lead/wheelweights it will reduce your reloading cost compared to using commercially purchased bullets by probably 50%. From your numbers it looks like you're going through about 90 boxes of ammo a year. Even at a MINIMAL savings of $5/box that's $450 year in savings which would go a long way towards buying a new gun or more reloading components or 13 cases of beer (whatever your priorities are). The more you shoot the more you save.
 
I use both a Lyman lubesizer and lee push through sizes. Lyman for the common stuff I shoot and lee for the once in a while stuff. Bought the Lyman used for $40 and spent another $140 on sizes and top punches. Use homemade NRA lube and dragon lubes. When not motivated I use liquid Alox.

For a smelter....cut open 20 lb propane tank (bought from a metal recycler with valve already removed) over an outdoor lobster cooker. Muffin tins and a soup ladle and some dollarstore candles for flux. Buckets of wheel weights too but if you want to make shotgun slugs you may want to source softer lead. Lee moulds.
 
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