new to casting questions

I reslugged the Kar98K bore and measured .324" for the groove diameter. I carefully drove in a cast and resized (.323") bullet and it didn't appear that the upper grease gooves, not the body of the bullet was making much contact with the bore. So I opened up the lee resizing die to .3245" and casted a batch of bullets. Observing one of those after driving it into the barrel shows that there are good inscriptions of the lands and decent contact on the bullet body. We'll see how these shoot and if it has a positive impact on expanding the brass sufficiently to seal the chamber when their fired. Time to chrony them as well.

Question:
I hit a pretty good rhythm when casting but upon inspecting the bullets after they cooled down several were bent. Like a jelly bean, but not as severe a bend. Would this most probably come from dropping them directly into water, where one side is quenching faster than the other? Is it from dropping them from the mold too soon? I am dropping them directly into a tupperware bowl of water. The sprue is cooled and the bases look good...I open them mold and tap on the handles to drop them out. I suspect it's that they haven't cooled enough before hitting the water.

I slowed things down and a much higher percentage of the last batch were fine...but still a couple that had a bend. No issue with going slower, I was just wondering what the cause might be.
 
The bend is from dropping them out before they have solidified 100%, and they are falling too far, hitting too hard. Dropping them 6" onto a pad like an old folded towel works great.
Also if your bore is .324 your cast bullets should be between .325 and .326....too much slugging up will cause your bullets to deform in the bore and they may look like a jelly bean when they exit, if a recovered slug shows uneven engraving on the bullet you can almost gaurentee this is what is happening....by the same measure your bore riding nose should NOT be engraving but instead have a .001 to .0015 clearance
 
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While having the proper bullet size for your barrel is extremely important, hardness does have an effect, BUT, only if you give a dam. A person can load a proper sized bullet and get good to great performance from it but it can be better ! With the ton of reading I do, just to educate myself to all possibilities I have read reports where people have loaded different hardness's of bullets and shot them out of several firearms, all being with the same load, the only difference was the hardness of the lead. And in 100 % of all the trials the lead that was softer had more speed by a decent margin than the harder lead. The base of the lead bullet needs to flatten out to seal off the pressure from the powder and the soft lead does that. There are formulas out there that show you what hardness will work for what load at what pressure to get you your max benefits. It all comes down to how much you want from your load and firearm. Some don't care much, as long as it doesn't lead the barrel, but for people like me that really strive to get the max ( why I reload at all ) it is an issue. Its for you alone to decide what you are happy with, to each their own. IMHO
 
I'm not sure that I'll be able to recover any...but I'll try if I can.

This is still all new to me and I'll need a couple of more outings before I make any more changes to things at this point. What I really need is a big bucket of scrap lead to build up a reserve of material
 
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