While looking for something else, I found my first bullet mold. I was shooting a '61 navy at the time, just fooling with it, (pre CAS), with BP and pyrodex, and was terribly underwhelmed by RB performance.
Using whatever I had at hand, machining with a drill press and a civil war era lathe, I made this little monstrosity:
which cast a HB bullet of around 70 grains from almost pure lead (NOS lead drain pipe tempered with a handfull of commercial cast bullets scrounged from the range) IIRC. The "bullet" in the pic is a wax mold test bullet I cast while tinkering with the mold.
These bullets carried almost no lube, so I used a gob of bore butter on the chamber mouths, and loaded em on top a compressed load of FFG BP. I dunno how fast they ran, as I didn't own a chrony then, but I know they would open upnicely in wet newspapers.
Anyway, thought I'd post a pic, and ask if anybody else played with makiing molds.