Some pics snapped along the way, over the past two weeks.



Had to get some of these casting molds out of the way ...



What happens when you use a cheap lead pot where the pour spout drips as you are working elsewhere. You come in and have 20 lbs of lead melted all around the legs of your lead pot, all over your casting bench. First tip to you is the charred wood smell in the air (your bench smoldering). Lovely. You have to melt it out with a torch. Sure, it's soft lead, but you don't just tear and crumble it. It doesn't slice well. You have to usually melt it out.



One of the molds for the commercial program to keep Jerry and the boys casting so that Barnes customers have a place to go for quality slugs cast from Barnes products. This is for the expansion of their 22 caliber program.



Another small caliber mold for shop inventory.



A 32 mold for shop needs. To help provide the slugs customers require, and make sure the products have been thoroughly tested.



Some of the molds are made from a specific fine grain cast iron. It's expensive. It also comes in a non-dimensional format. It's just been bandsawed from the "cake" on four sides. It's up to me to establish machined planes to work from. It's a giant .....



The "100th screw". It arrived in it's own seperate box ... bathed in styrofoam peanuts ... packed in plastic ... with it's own invoice. Evidently, at about 10:30 one night, the warehouse crew found they had 99 of the box of 100 I'd ordered. They packaged them in a bag and sent them. Then, a week later, this arrived! I don't know if I should congratulate them on their spectatular service ... or slap them and tell them to "get real".



More stainless steel .... more miles of razor wire lathe swarf.



Another night shift in the shop ....



Milling more Yukon parts ....



big billet trigger housing/frame with lamb's tongue ...



Yet another casting session. I've GOT to get a better lead pot. I've had six or more of these ... they all leaked. I fooled with them all. Usually put a block of wood wedged under the spout to keep the drip problem at bay, until I'm ready. But ... either some disaster unfolds, or a project doesn't co-operate ... and before you know it ... three or four hours have passed ... the wood chars, and the lead merrily flows all over the ........



Well, it's snowing again. Supposed to get another 20 inches tonight. Global ... .. my foot!!!

Thanks for reading. Oh ... for anyone keeping up, the snow storms have killed the medical schedules around here. There's about no hope of getting back injections in the foreseeable future. If I disappear ... I've flown south for treatment when the airlines resume. I'll be back. (I won't want to, but I will ... haha).

Gary

Thanks for the pics there, Gary. It's always interesting to see what the gnomes have been up to inside the hollow tree.

Your casting pots do seem to be a bit prone to stalagmites, perhaps it's the cave-like ambiance of your shop.

Rotor, it's the hollow shop not the hollow tree!

Gary,
Thanks for posting about the shop goings on! It's a bright spot of entertainment during this dreary season. I love that picture of the Yukon tower being bored. The finish of the interior walls looks like something that has been finish bored and honed with stone. Those old hand made cutters sure are nice!

I love it that you got the 100th screw! It shows an attitude of good service and respect for the customer, well done MSC!

Jerry,

This is not the first time I feel like I've gotten the 100th screw from a supplier.

I believe we missed this one, and man I'm glad. At least where you are Gary it stays frozen. Here when it snows and melts, then snows and melts everything is just a big soggy mush. Trees down everywhere because the soggy ground can no longer support the tree. Power was off here for two days, other places it is still out, I'm ready for spring.
Great pics too, I believe that is the best picture I have ever seen of the shop.

Great pics Gary, Thanks for showing us some of what you're up to. I really dig the pics of things "on their way" to being finished.

It's.........uh............cold here too.

Lon

Arrrrggggh,

So thats why my buddy told me NOT to get a casting pot that has a pour spout...lol.

That sucks.

Is a pour spout always that big a pain?

Seems like for anyone casting a lot, it might make sense, assuming you can get them to quit leaking. Is this a big issue it you're contiinually pouring and casting, or only when you wander away for a while? Or do you guys feel it's still better than dipping and pouring by hand? (seems that Gary thinks so since he keeps buying them like this?!)

Personally, I'd only dip and pour by hand, if I were stranded in the wilderness .... for more than ten years.

There are adjustments on these things that are supposed to prevent this. And also supposed to be able to adjust the flow rate of the pour (i.e. - small flow for small caliber molds). However; all I've ever found the adjustments to do is adjust the drip rate between "annoying drip" thru "constant stream you can't stop". Once the thing gets the spout good and hot (from casting thru it), then the majority of the dripping stops ... kinda maybe.

Of course, Jerry has a Cadilac model that costs over 6 times what my homeless model costs. I don't think that drips. Mine is just a gimmicky design.

Anyway ... that's why I get the big bucks. Standing there in my slippers and smoking jacket ... torch in hand ... melting out the latest "blob" from under the lead pot.



Oh ... wrong "torch" ... sorry old man.

Gary

After the second Lee pot started giving us the ever increasing frequency of drips and need for adjustment I bought an RCBS pot. It costs A LOT more than the Lee but it is also much better and much more substantial. The internal thermostat actually works and sets the pot to a repeatable temperature and it doesn't drip. I'm sure that any bottom pour pot will drip if a bit of contamination gets between the stop pin and spout but the Lee pot had that happen all the time and the RCBS pot has yet to have it happen.

I wouldn't spend the money if I were just casting a few slugs now and then but when the pot is going to be used to make thousands of slugs it becomes worthwhile.

Sure ... and when you fly that gunship to work ... cost is no object .....

I'm guessing that gunship is about the only way to get to work for some of you right now

Hmmm...so if the RCBS melting pot cost six times what a Lee costs, and you've been through six of the Lees...\

lets see...carry the two, divide by zero...times eleventeen...uhm...maybe we shouldn't go there...

At this point, I suggest that you comb through your plethora of pots, find the best two, and fill one with lead. Then park it over the OTHER working pot and just alternate top to bottom when all the lead drips out.

Think of it as a kind of recycling.

Sounds like Lockheed Martin engineering!

Nah. If the military aerospace guys got ahold of it, it'd have a custom-built "ruggedized" (yet still incompletely weatherproof) computerized interface (programmed in ADA, of course). It'd have a heinously complex valve and metering system made up of exotic-sounding carbides and zirconia such and such and lithium-aluminum honeycomb this and that and carbon-nanotube the other thing. It would run off of either three-phase/480 or biodiesel/JP-8, with just a "simple" twenty-seven step conversion between the two. If anything breaks, it would only be possible to repair it with a team of senior company tech-reps with a "portable" diagnostic set the approximate size and weight of a Caddilac Escalade. It goes without saying that it would run at least six figures, minumum, not including development costs

And as soon as they got on the plane back to the factory (on the opposite coast from the users location)...it would still leak.

Murphys law of military appropriations dictates that as soon as you finally got one up and working on a more or less dependable basis, it would be taken away from you by the safety gnomes. Congress would declare that since lead is a known hazardous substance, it would require a complete re-design to comply with current workplace safety mandates. Naturally, you'd custom-foam it in a reusable (oversized) shipping container and send it by express courier at vast expense all the way back to the factory on the other coast. There, they'd declare it unrepairable and dump it into outdoor storage for a decade or so before selling it off as scrap for about 1/100th of a percent of it's purchase cost.

So some guy would buy it at a surplus shop, rip off all the computerized stuff, and run it off used crankcase oil. You see, he'd need it to melt lead tireweights when casting lead for his business. Which would be selling lead castings to the military, since they don't make their own anymore.

And it would still leak.

Reading thru that made my back hurt even more.

Now I'm depressed. It seems my lead pot will always leak. I had such hopes for a military surplus unit .....

If your back hurts now, consider that buying weapons is about the most efficient thing the government does! As pitiful as DoD aquisition is, every other department is even worse... can't wait until these bozos run medicine!

Now you're making MY back hurt....oh wait, something funny about that somehow...let me check. Ah, now I see. It turns out that the pain was actually radiating from the vicinity of my back pocket.

You started talking about the government running the healthcare biz, and suddenly it just started hurting me right in the wallet. How'd that happen?

Now Jerry, you know that despite appearances I'm not actually picking on you. It's just such an easy target.

in a word ,,,, great ,,
lol