Don't bother buying an ingot mold, just use a dollar store steel muffin tin. Then scratch the lead type on the surface.
As to the question about rifle guys always looking for hard and Bp guys always looking for soft; the answer lies somewhere between geographic supplies and the fact that WW are middle of the road and thus a bit soft for high velocity rifles and yet too hard for BP use.
For rifle guys a bullet can't be too hard because many mistakenly try to get jacketed velocities from a gas checked cast bullet. In actuality anything over 1850fps (approx) is counter productive in terms of accuracy. Now some guns have accuracy nodes above this (which is too bad) but pushing a cast bullet to 2100+fps is generally counter productive.
That said, a spool of 50/50 tin antimony hard solder is a great thing to have. A garage sale pewter cup or silver solder is a good thing too for anyone with a rough bore or with higher velocities in mind.
For BP guys ww can be softened a bit by over heating at the smelting stage and NOT fluxing before skimming the top. When the top is skimmed off and the clips and slag are removed the tin and antimony is also removed as they are less dense than lead and so float to the top. Then reduce heat,flux,stir and skim slag only.This will help soften it up but the end product is not 100% pure lead. Usually comes out at about 20:1>30:1 impurities like barium do not seem to be removed like this.
I got about 600+lbs of lead anodes from a chrome plating shop the alloy was supposed to be 94% lead 2%tin 4%antimony.
But barium was used to control the acid levels in the chrome acid bath. The resulting lead was WAY to hard for most of my fathers BPCR guns but worked in my Mosin Nagant, for targets only. Recovered slugs from a 50yd target, through 3/8" plywood, multiple feet of frozen snow bank and found carving a swath through the dirt below showed no signs of deforming and the tooling marks and mold joint could clearly be seen!other than the rifling imprint and a bit of base melting it looked as though I had just cast it?! (165gr{32-40} RNFP sized .314" with 27gr of 5744 from a 20" M44 barrel)
