Simple way to make lead wire

[seppos]

It was son nice and shiny day today that I desided to melt some lead..
Wild idea came to my mind and I tooked a some lumber and drilled 6.5 mm holes to it..


Poured the lead in to the holes.. and cut the wood to splinters.. The result was some hairy.. lead wire..


Word of caution.. The wood has to be dry.. Otherwice the water in it might cause an explosion and some molten lead srapnells to ones face..

As I did not cleaned the holes properly there was some wood chips in it that got imbedded to the lead.. I thought that it will have big effect to the core weights..


To my surprise the cores came inside two grains.. Adequite for pistol use..
One trick that might help is to heat up the lead wires so that the wood burns of from the tiny cavitys..

Next time i will propably use 2/4 and drill the holes to it and attach it to another piece of lumber that I use as a base of the mold.. when the holes are completely thru the blank, it is easy just hit them with proper punch and a hammer from one side.. I will get little under 2 inch long peaces of lead wire that I could use to swage the cores in my core swage die.

S

[Matt3357]

Why couldn't you use the same concept on say, a block of aluminum? Drill several holes, put a cap on one end and heat up your block on a hot plate and pour. Should be pretty simple to get a bunch of wires very quickly. Make it about 3 inches tall and you'll get several cores per wire too. Dang just what I need, another project.

Matt

[seppos]

Actually the same idea came to my mind.. Aluminium or flat iron bar with proper dimentions..
I do have 2/2 aluminium bar.. Maybe I will do some drillig later on..

S

[RP]

I been looking at swaging for awhile and thinking of cores myself I seen one post on using a press to make wire but this ideal looks a lot cheaper and easier.

[pathfinder]

Hers how I do it guys. I have a 5 part series on Youtube showing how to make one. Heres the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeTohV4e2m0

[sagacious]

Spend your effort on a simple two-piece aluminum mold. With careful use of even just an electric drill, and one can make an excellent core mold. Install some locating pins and clamp with a metal construction clamp. Good luck.

[ANeat]

Like Sag said,

9 cavity core mold for 223 and 6mm cores

[Daywalker]

I say go with what you got around the house and what you are willing to do. Not one design is better than the other. If it gives you good results and works, then your time was well spent. Some guys like to take perfectly good cast moulds and drill through them, thats fine, they bought em, some likes to take existing moulds and just cast wtih them as they fit in the case just fine without having to do anytihng more to them, hey thats cool too. Some likes to take blank aluminum stock and make their own core mould from nothing. That just shows the imagination one has and the love for what they are doing. If you want to take a piece of wood and drill holes in it and it gives you what you want, great job man...

Bottom line, there is more than one way to skin a cat and none of them is right or wrong. Good job on all the projects guys, good job..

[seppos]

Yes..
The reason for this experiment was to show how simple and cheap it is to make cores..
One does not need to invest lots of money or time to make it happen.
The beauty in these simple inventions is that they incourage people to experiment and develope new ideas.

S