I've been thinking about buying some stuff to do my own casting. Well, my father in law told me yesterday that he has everything needed to cast except lead and moulds for ML's. Right now, I can really only afford one mould, but don't know if I would be better to find something that would work better with a sabot, or a conical mould. I have a KRB, and while I've not shot conicals out of it yet, it sounds like it's a great conical shooter. So, what would be the best investment?

SuperKirby
The Knights are supposed to be good conical shooters and if you go by the forum they are but my Big Horn dont follow that rule, I suggest it would be wise to try what you are interested in before spending your money. Lee

I'd slug the bore of the knight first and see what molds out there will work. My Omega with the way i am able to measure shows it as .502" which is good, most out there are tight bores.

I havent even considered a conical mold due to the lead it would eat up and i just dont have access to that kind of lead. I also haven't seen knights shooting off the shelf conicals. Its always bullshop or no excuse conicals.

An inexpensive mold you might try would be the Lee 90991 for the .500 S&W. It casts at .501 or so and would drop about a460 grain bullet in the purest lead you can lay hands on. It's a gas-check design so not ideal but there have been reports of excellent results in some rifles. And honing to enlarge the cavity is a possibility. Aside from that and a couple of other .500S&W molds that are much more expensive, you would need to take a big jump in bullet size to .515 which would require a two-step sizing operation and would still look "skinned". The truth is there just are not very many reasonably priced, off the shelf, molds for .50 caliber muzzleloaders. Those that are available are mostly minnie, maxi, and REALs and are tapered conicals. I'verepeatedly askedLEE to put out a good mold that would drop a .505 modern conical design that could then be sized to fit most any .50 - but so far no luck.

http://www.leeprecision.com/cgi/catalog/browse.cgi?1216606114.275=/html/catalog/bullmol2.html

Dumb question- how do I slug the bore? I've heard of it but don't know what it is.

So it sounds like at least to start I would be better off to find something that work well with sabots and then play around with a conical mould later on. Whatever I get will be used mainly for shooting paper, but will be used for deer also.

For a .50 caliber I cast a .457 LEE 405 grain bullet. I can load that in a sabot and they shoot real well. Or I can size them down to .451 and shoot them out of my White M97 with some amazing accuracy. MMP sells an orange sabot that fits these bullets. Some people claim you can load them in a .452 sabot. One of these days I will have to try some of them I sized down in a .452 sabot and see how they shoot.

Hey Cayugad, have you ever shot a deer with one of those 405 Lees?

I was loaded with them one day in my Staghorn, sitting in a tree. But no deer would cooperate that day. I was shooting 90 grains of Pyrodex RS and that 405(actually 423 grains on my scale). I was sure it would blow through a deer with little problem and probably make a nice wound channel.

The "405s" that I casted last week weighed in from 420 to 423 also. My mold is at least 20 years old.

The 340 mold arrived today and I ran a batch of about 100. They came out right at 340 grains. Nice looking bullets. I hope to shoot some next week-end.

Now if you was to come up with a mold that was a copy of the FPB with a rounded soft point I would have to have one. Lee