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Today, I had a little extra time to cast some .45 bullets for the ACP. Lately, I've been using an electric Lee bottom-pour lead pot for this work. Usually, I just plug it into an outdoor wall receptacle that I have. Today, I decided to power the lead pot with a 4Kw portable generator that I have for emergencies. This sounds like a waste of valuable gasoline, but there was a reason for this.
Generators are like a lot of other mechanical devices: If you don't use them once in a while, they can go bad on you. The most common problem with long-term storage of a generator is with the fuel system. If you don't turn off the fuel valve and run the engine dry when you are finished using it, left-over fuel in the carb. can get gummy. And if you do what you are supposed to and run it dry before storage, that dry carb. can be a dickens to get reprimed to run it again later. We don't have to worry much about fuel in the tank going bad over time like we used to. The refiners now use some pretty long-lasting stabilizing agents to prevent this now.
What I didn't know until recently is that the power generation side of the generator can go bad over time (in storage, not with use) also. What happens is, the coil windings in the generator lose their magnetism and go flat. When this happens, the generator will not put out electricity. This can be fixed and it's called "field flashing". There are a couple of different ways to do this, one quite easy involving the use of an electric drill to excite the field coil in the generator to reinduce magnetism. You can look it up on-line for details.
To avoid having to field flash my generator, I just take it out once and a while to power some tool that ordinarily I would use AC wall receptacles for. Sometimes I power my table saw with it, or use it to charge 12 volt batteries in the field. This time, I used it to run the lead pot.
The .45 bullets came out fine. It's surprising to me how fast you can start dropping good bullets with the aluminum Lee molds. It was a cold day out, so I started with my heat setting a little higher, but soon had to turn it back down to its normal setting as used in warmer weather. I have several .45 molds, but this time I used the Lee mold with the numerous, small lube grooves designed especially for tumble lubing. As it turned out, I didn't have to size them because the few that I tried to size to .452 almost fell through the sizing die they were so close. I got them a little harder than I usually cast pistol bullets, because I had a partial roll of old, degraded solder that I put in the pot with the lead to use it up. Still, they are soft enough to obturate.
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