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I'm in the Tuttle/Bridgecreek area, and have been casting since 1972. Its getting harder to find lead, but I have a few hundred pounds put back so I will be casting for a while. I have a variety of molds, 2 cavity steel, 4 cavity steel, single cavity steel, a couple of the Hensley and Gibbs but they are 8 cavity. One in 38 wad cutter and the other in 45 acp. I have many Lee molds, single, double and 6 cavity molds. I really like the Lee 6 cavity molds best of them all. I've been playing with reduced cast bullet loads in rifle for several years and I can still shoot when there is nothing on the store shelves. I just built a Savage 111 in 458 Winchester mag and will be playing with the 45-70 bullets for reduced power lead loads in that. It is VERY painful to shoot the 500 grain solids out of it. I shoot 375 Winchester and 375 H&H Mag and load both of them with hard cast bullets as well. As far as the aluminum gas checks, as a welder, I know just how fast aluminum oxidizes and aluminum oxide is one of the harder abrasives used in working and polishing metal. I've been reluctant to use them because of that. I machined a die set to punch them out of cola cans, but don't want to subject my bores to the aluminum oxides. I'm playing with some copper stripped from some old Hard Line Coaxial cable left over from one of my previous jobs. The outer copper jacket is just the right thickness for making the gas checks, and the center conductor is 3/8" thin wall copper tubing. That's what I make my 375 caliber jacketed bullets from. Be sure to check your wheel weights and remove the zinc ones. Zinc does bad things to your molds, making it very difficult for the mold to fill out properly. With the steel or cast iron molds, you can give them a swab with muriatic acid to remove the zinc if you are unfortunate enough to contaminate them with it. Don't do that to the aluminum molds as they won't survive the contact. Be sure to neutralize the acid as soon as you have gotten the zinc out of the mold, heat and spray them with a good rust preventive. If you keep your pot temp low enough, the zinc wheel weights will float on top of the molten lead and you can pick them out with a scoop or pair of pliers. You are surely on the right track in matching the bullet diameter to your cylinder throats. I have a set of pin gauges that I check my revolvers with to match bullet diameters to them. I will usually ream the throats all to the same diameter in a cylinder and keep a record of what that particular gun likes. I use the Lee hardness tester to work up each batch of lead for casting ingots.
