This is a bit of a detective story, but there is no dead body. There is no crime. I’m the perpetrator. This should be easy, but it has been tough. The Chemo last summer left me with some holes in my memory. It’s all just little things, but I’ve had a devil of a time picking up the pieces. It makes for a fun diversion, waiting out the winter.

The first clue that something was up, was I was digging through a pile of unopened online purchases– things that I had bought at some point, expecting it to fit into a project later. I found that I had ordered a new bullet mold, a Lee 358-147-WC with standard (not tumble-lube) config. I’m thinking to myself WT(?).

For those who don’t know: This is a bullet from a standard mold.

This is a bullet meant to be tumble lubed.

Here is a description of tumble lubing:

Most of my cast bullet molds are of the latter type. This odd mold indicated that I must have meant to do some other kind of lube.

The same week, I found something in the trunk of my car that turned out to be one of the graphite dinguses I’d taken out of the garbage at work. They are a grid of holes in a graphite plate. They are perfect for setting bullets down for pan lubing. I remembered that I had a stash of them in the basement and went and found the stash. I’d asked the shift supervisor and she pointed me to a shelf where the grids were stored when they were rejected by QC. If I remember correctly, each hole used to be stuffed with the makings of a precision hermetically sealed electrical connector and sent through an oven in order to bake some glass beads until they became molten. One man’s garbage. . .

Stored with the graphite grids I found some Lucas Red Lithium grease. I also found a thingus I’d ordered off EBAY that works like a cookie cutter for bullets. You jam it down over the bullet and then use a plunger to eject the finished bullet, ready to size. The bells weren’t ringing in my head quite yet, but I figured I knew where to turn.

Castboolits.com is a wealth of information on cast lead bullets. I go there first when I have a question about how to get things done. I have been using that site since about 2005 when I first cast my own bullets for my Hawken.

I made a search for posts I might have written regarding pan-lubed bullets. I found this:

Pan Lubing Newbie

I got my first pie pan filled with the beeswax/grease concoction. I dropped a plate in that’s perfect for .358 bullets, and have enough of the concoction left for a good 500 more bullets. Yippie! I was on the way! I also researched why I had been playing with the idea of wadcutter bullets. I found where I had been asking about them potential fodder for my Marlin 1895. Loaded in a 38 Special case, I’d be able to feed more rounds in.

The next day, the outside temp hit 50F. I went outside and cast a pile of wadcutters heated up the pie pan of lube and popped in the bullets. After leaving the waxy lube to harden up, I came back and tried to pop the bullets out with the plunger thingus. It worked fine, but I realized I’d put too much wax in the pan and it was over the top of the bullets. I had not accounted for the extra mass of the bullets affecting the height of the wax in the pan. I warmed up the pan again, scraped off some wax and let it cool. After popping out the bullets with the plunger-thingus, I filled the holes again with another batch of bullets and remelted the wax. The graphite matrix hold the bullets upright. If you do a quick little adjustment with it as you turn off the heat, you can center all the bullets in the middle of their holes.

The bullets look like they were sent through a $300 heated lubrisizer when they are done.