In a tie with cosmoline for the stickiest crap in the world

is Lee Liquid Alox bullet lube. It comes in a bottle, it's a thick brown gel, and it won't wash off if you get it on your skin. It smells a bit, too.

I renewed my aquaintance with this stuff over those .38 bullets I mentioned casting yesterday. If you've never messed with this, allow me to deliver a short primer.

Get a pot of lead hot enough to melt. If you're being picky, this includes using a particular allow, so much lead with so much tin/antimony/secret ingredient added. Pour into mold. Dump out and repeat. When you have enough, the next step is sizing/lubing. This is best done with a tool designed for the purpose, such as the Lyman Lubri-Sizer. It has a reservoir that holds a stick of lube; a position that holds a sizing die(a round steel die with a hole the precise diameter you want the bullet to be); and a top punch that fits the nose of the bullet. You place the bullet in the die, press it down to size it, turn a crank to force lube into the grooves, pull the handle up and repeat with the next. Nice and neat, and if you're using one of the 'hard' lubes, you can add a heater to the machine to heat and soften the lube.

That's the best way. I'm working with two things here; first, the bullet will fit the firearm in question nicely in the as-cast size and second, I'm a long way from the press I would use. And, I don't have a sizing die that would leave the bullet about the same diameter so I couldn't use it anyway. So, to get some bullets ready to load for testing, I dug out the bottle of Lee. By the time I had this stuff worked into the grooves and around the bullet, I also had the crap all over my fingers. Did I mention it won't wash off? So I wound up dusting my hands with talcum powder, which then allowed me to rub the worst of it off. Note: that helps with epoxy on the hands, too.

So now I have fifty bullets ready to load. This works out like I hope, I'll get a die the proper diameter so I can cast a bunch and lube them by machine the next time I have a chance. It'll be a hell of a lot neater.

In a comment on the previous post Robert asked what these are for, as they're a bit heavy compared to most .38 loads. I'm helping put some loads together for a Enfield revolver in .38 Smith & Wesson. It's the prececessor to the .38 Special, a much shorter case. When the Brits decided the .455 Webley was too large, they went to a smaller Webley revolver- damn near identical design- in this cartridge, which I believe they called the .380/200, 200 being the grain weight of the bullet they used; a 200-grain, round-nose cast bullet at about 650-700 feet per second. From all reports it worked quite well as a fight-stopper. Big reason we're working on this is that, as you may know, when a pistol is sighted in with a heavy bullet, light bullets tend to hit low. Sometimes very low, which is the case here. So hopefully this should put the point of impact right up with point of aim. And really, in a bad situation it wouldn't be a bad pistol/load to use.