Just a heads up, but with long bullets, dropping them into water often bends them even worse. We cast for a 7.62x39 and they are long bullets. You drop them into water, they bend to where you can not use them. If you use water, make it shallow and with a rag at the bottom. Just let the mold cool a bit and carefully drop them into the shallow pan of water and onto that soaked rag.

Another problem I am finding out about the bigger slugs is that they over heat the mold which give the bullets a frosted appearance. Like I said before in the OP, casting big bullets is new to me so its going to be a bit of trial and error until I git it down.
Up until this point the biggest I ever cast were 320 gr REAL bullets in .50 cal.

Casting BIG bullets is harder than most guys think. If your getting frosted bullets the lead is hard. If you want hard lead that is fine. The frost on the bullets wont hurt anything but you do need to sit a bit longer to drop.
I use a ladle to pour with, I can get far better bullets with a ladle. If you want to know the hardness of your lead you can send me a few bullets and I will test them for you.

Thanks Ron I appreciate that but I don't think I'll need to. As I said, I am going to be shooting them out of the Sharps so they should be OK. I will cast some in pure lead for the .45 Hawken then size them down to .451".

I didn't like those "frosted" bullets so I took Ron's comment with some salt and decided to soften them up some. I added equal weight pure lead to the wheel weights. Then I set aside 4 more trays (4 lb total) of equal parts wheel weight lead and pure lead and started casting. I cast a whole bunch of both 405 and 500 gr bullets. They really came out nice. The molds cast to .457" but I did lube and run them through a .457" sizing die just to make sure they were all uniform.
I'm waiting for my .451" sizing die to come in so I can cast some in pure lead and size down for my .45.
Just any thoughts on the 50/50 alloy. Do you think they would be too hard to load in the Hawken?

Oh yeah about the casting itself. I took an old towel and wet it then rang it out real good so it was just a bit more than damp and put it on a lid to a 5 gal bucket. It was a perfect catch pad. I would drop them then refill the mold. As the bullets in the mold were solidifying I would roll the dropped bullets on the damp towel. I didn't get a single defective bullet.