Thread: First time pouring = SUCCESS

Fist time trying to pour my own jig heads. They came out looking like I wanted them.

This adventure started within the past 2 weeks. It started when njones on here posted a shart dart mold in the classifieds. I like the shad dart style head but have been using mostly homemade ball heads due to wanting Owner hooks for my jigs. I've been just crimping a splitshot to the hook and adding a dab of super glue. They have been working fairly well until I tried to bake the pro tec paint in a toaster oven, that did something to the super glue.

Anyways, I bought the shad dart mold then started collecting the other supplies I would need. Found two large ingots, that were supposed to be lead. I believe one is pure lead, the other is mostly likely plumbers solder, somewhere between 60 to 70% lead. Ordered a bottom pour 10lb lee pot from Cabelas, fluxing powder and cast iron 10lb pot from amazon. Got those earlier this week. I also ordered some stuff from Barlow's the lee small ingot mold, ladles, and a ball head jig mold, those won't be in till mid week.

I want to start breaking down the large lead ingot this weekend so I made a trip to Goodwill after work Friday. Picked up a fairly heavy medium sized stainless steel pot, small and large aluminum baking sheet and a small aluminum muffin mold and large stainless spoons.

Next was figuring out how to make the big ingot into small ingot I can use in the bottom pour pot. I started with a 3lb hammer and chisel on the big ingot, but that got old quickly, a lot of work to get a 5lb chuck off, next up was a air hammer/chisel that worked ok for the first inch or so on all four sides then it was back to the 3lb hammer and chisel to get the rest of the chuck off. I've since gone to just using the air hammer/chisel to shave off smaller pieces, a little time consuming but not hard work.

I'm glad I took the time to flux the lead in the separate pot from Goodwill, after fluxing I got a good bit of crap out of it. I was able to make about 30 lbs of muffin shaped ingots, still have a big chuck of the ingot to process later.

With the prep work out of the way it was time to actually try to make my own jig heads. Thought I would start with just the 1/32 part of the mold with a #6 owner hook, loaded up 4 hooks and tried my first pour. Opened the mold and 4 hooks fell out. I poured the 1/64 heads instead of the ones with the hooks. Reloaded and tried again, this time I poured the correct holes. They all came out good. Ended up pouring about 25 1/32 #6 and 1/64 #8 hooks, also poured a couple of 1/64 with the #6 just to see if they would work, the hook fit just fine. All in all a successful first time.

3rd batch fresh out of the oven. 1/64 on #8 hook. I tried holding the eye to keep paint out, wasn't working for me went back to using heatshrink.

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