doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Tool Mystery

Attached is a photo of three tools. The brass pair , of course, form a bullet mold. The numbers 74 and 9 are stamped on the back of the male piece. Caliber seems to be in the 30s range. Can anyone identify the period or gun type or mold maker ?

Middle item, the pliers, came with the group. They must be made for a specific purpose. But what ?

The right item is a vice type tool. Purpose or use, well I don't know.

Any help is appreciated.

Daryl,
To me, the two tools on the right look like spring clamps. Spring clamps come in so many configurations and styles, most of them made to suit the gunmakers specific purposes. A lot of them are made for only 1 particular type or make of gun.

I don't know what the plier tool on the upper right is, but I suppose it could be used to remove and install mainsprings. It could also be a small version of the specialized pliers used in sheet metal work to close standing seams, hems, etc.

The tool on the lower right is a hand vise. I have about a half dozen of them in different configurations. They are very useful for holding small parts during grinding or polishing. They hold much better than is possible with your fingertips, keeping small parts from getting flung to the far reaches of your shop. And they keep your fingers from getting burned as the part gets hot during grinding, and act as a heat sink. But that's no excuse to not dunk the part in water to avoid drawing temper. I always have a hand vise and a pin vise within arms reach of my bench grinders.

I'm interested in hearing more about the bullet mold. It appears to be a nose pour mold with a sprue cutter on the nose end. It looks like something that would be used for molding paper patch bullets.

OK, here's an image I found that seems to suggest that the tool on the upper right may also be a hand vise, but that the part which holds it clamped down on the object being held appears to be missing:

Keith, your images are helpful. The hand vise with the screw is most like the third from the left, but with a wood handle. Your picture on the right has similarities to my tool, but my tool shows no signs of the spring or keeper on yours. Interesting that the notch on the inside rear of the handles is similar. not sure why it is there. It would have been interesting to see these tools in operation.

Measurements on the mold are interesting to me, but I am not a an expert with vintage rifles and cartridges.

The bottom half [male part] has a recess of .392" diameter and .202" deep. The upper half [female part] has a .443 " diameter at the base , quickly tapering to a point. That recess is .406" deep. This seems to cast a bullet with a shoulder between the upper and lower pieces. It must have been an unusual cartridge to use this shouldered bullet.

Daryl, there are a lot of different variations of hand vises, and you can see many if you do a Google image search for them. They show up fairly often on Ebay too. I just used one almost exactly like this one last night. They are nice because they have a wider jaw opening than most, and the jaws remain parallel:



Hand vises are still made, but seldom seen, considering how useful they are.

Thanks for the additional info on the bullet mold. That is an unusual configuration. Hopefully someone can shed some more light on it.

The bullet mold may be intended to cast a heeled style bullet. It appears to be a relatively modern solution, possibly to keep someone's old gun shooting at a time when cast bullets weren't so readily available for purchase. It doesn't appear to be able to form grease grooves, but may have been an intuitive project for a gunsmith that was handy with turning on a lathe. Only guessing, neat little pile of odds and ends.

Often times grooveless bullets were intended to be paper patched/jacketed. Without some good dimensions would be hard to say if this one fits that category or not. IF its OD is the same as the bore diameter of some caliber there's a good chance that is what it's for.

For instance, a bullet designed for paper patching in a .30 caliber would have a bullet of around .300" rather than the normal .309"-.311" of a grooved cast bullet to be used lubed & bare.

I'd considered that possibility craigd. But the difference between the heel diameter and the major diameter is around .051", so the case neck thickness would be extremely heavy at around .0255". I also considered that maybe this was designed for use with a heavy sabot, and that the major diameter was intended to ride on top of the lands. Otherwise, leading would be a real problem without any grease grooves, unless velocity was pretty low. But the design does present some possibilities for building a lathe turned paper patch bullet mold.