Approximately 150 pages
DON'T LET THE TITLE of this book fool you, fellows. This is indeed the handbook for commercial bullet casters, but the make-'em-for -money people are not the only ones who need to keep it handy and consult it often. Any basement or garage bullet caster could tear out and throw away its chapters on the excellent machinery that the Magma Engineering Company makes, plus its chapters on doing business on a commercial producer of cast bullets, and he would still have a manual on bullet casting that's worth more than it costs.
Every bullet caster alive needs to note that an awful lot of ancient folklore persists about the metals and means of casting bullets and that nearly all of it is most accurately described in crude and uncouth pasture terminology that isn't suited to the high quality of this little book. Just let me say boldly and plainly that this book is the word on bullet casting. If you know anything at all about casting bullets but you didn't learn it from this little book, then you know a lot that just ain't so. And you need to get it straight. This book is how you get it straight.
The two fellows who are mainly responsible for this handbook - Paul Moore (author) and Bob Clausen (publisher) - have been pals of mine for a long time, but this is my first opportunity to work with both of them at once. I can't think of any two men who might be better qualified to write and publish a book like this one - in fact, I don't know anyone else who has all the straight skinny on lead-based alloys, bullet molds and casting, casting bullets commercially, or making the machinery that a high-volume bullet caster needs.
First, by pure chance, I worked (in a manner of speaking) with Paul Moore some time before I knew there was such a fellow. His boss at the time - a honcho at the country's biggest producer of lead shot for shotshell manufactures and handloaders, and core wires for manufactures of jacketed bullets - called me to ask what kind of product I thought he might add to his company's line - presumably something for shotgunners and shotshell handloaders.
I suggested something else to him instead. Good alloys for casting bullets were then virtually a thing of the far-gone past, and this fellow's company had something close to a monopoly on both the smarts and the means for giving us at least one good cast-bullet metal. So I urged him to make and market at least one good, dependable alloy for casting bullets (preferably two). Another fellow had called me a couple of years earlier about producing alloys for bullet casters, but that lead merchant had ignored some of my sage counsel and had instead tried to market too many varieties - a separate alloy for every conceivable kind of cast bullet - and a result, his business had flopped.
I suggested to Paul's boss that his company bring out just two bullet metals to cover all needs: a hard alloy that would make good rifle bullets, used straight, and pure lead so any bullet caster could "water down" the hard alloy to get whatever hardness he wanted to his bullet metal. Fortunately, the fellow then went to Paul Moore - his man for doping out lead-shot specs and seeing to it that the shot tower made the shot the way he designed it - and Paul came up with an ingenious chemical design for a "magnum" alloy that would cast easily and cleanly into good hard bullets and could be made with a minimum of the costlier tin and a maximum of the more economical lead. That was no small accomplishment.
Later, Paul sent me an article manuscript on using scrap alloys for casting bullets, which I edited and published in one of the magazines I was editor of at the time. That magazine article is still good enough to be one of the chapters in this handbook.
Dr. Ken Howell
Editor Handloader & Rifle Magazine
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