well, my first lube experience is over, you would think idgits like me would know better than to not just follow the advice of the stickies...
lesson #1 once you have to much lube on a bullet, you are pretty much screwed.
after lurking here for 2 years, i finally got around to casting my first bullets, in my lead stockpiling and ingot making, i had experimented w/ a cheap mould i bought at a show and had a pretty good clue as to what was involved. i bought the lee 6 cavity moulds in 230gr 45 acp and 9mm 124gr... picked up a small lee pot and ladle w/ the weep hole in it. all said, that went well.
i started reading up on the lubes and decided the alox/jpw would work, so i rigged up a "double" pan system on my turkey fryer, put water in the bottom pan to heat the 2nd pan, did have one little fire, but kinda knew i was vulnerable to that w/ the open flame, so no biggy.
now rather than listen to you all, i opted to try a few slight changes. i took a stainless strainer and hammered it to contour the pan and used that to put my bullets in. i melted down my jpw, added some alox and started drowning boolits... i wasn't smart enough to just do a few, i did 2500. i had them all laid out on a sheet of formica'd plywood, and as everything cooled, i realized i had way to much lube.
never fear, i proceeded to size them w/ the little lee kits...
i then proceeded to relube again, this time i added a little wax to try to cut down on the tackiness, but i had to heat the boolits pretty good to get the excess jpw off, well it just proceeded to get uglier and the mess just kept getting worse...
finally, after much trial and error, i got to the point that if i keep the boolits in motion till they cooled considerably that they did not all dump out in a big globby mess. my neighbors probably questioned my sanity as to why i was wandering around the back yard in the snow constantly shaking the strainer all morning.
finally i got a huge pile of boolits on my plywood that kinda looked like boolits, but still had way to much lube to do anything w/. so i tediously stood all the boolits up like soldiers, and by using a hand held torch i would heat them, then advance the ranks w/ a metal ruler to advance the troops out of the puddle of goop, and after multiple marches forward and backwards out of the puddles, then cleaning up the puddles, and marching some more, i finally got something that could be advanced to the reloading press.
i think next time i will lube as per the sticky suggestions...