I cast some bullets today, employing lots of advice and tips from here and elesewhere. It worked out well.
I ran my pot a lot hotter, I
super cleaned the mold and smoked both cavities, and I sped up my pace a lot.
I cranked the temperature up to 850 once I got the old, not-quite bullets melted down. That helped a lot. It took only a few pours before I started getting well-filled, matte-looking bullets.
I wound up turning it down to 800 after a while, and still got good bullets.
I worked on my pace, and was actually able to open the sprue plate with just finger pressure (ok, very firm finger pressure) most of the time. I still had some cases of the bullets not wanting to release from the mold, but that wasn’t too big a deal.
I also found out that I needed to pay attention to the tension on the sprue plate screw, because I had a couple of pours where the plate was obviously too loose. And once I rushed and didn’t make sure the plate was closed before I started the pour... Yeah, that was messy, but I got it taken care of.
I need to work on getting the mold lined up perfectly under the spout. And I need to research the “Lee bottom pour drip fix,” because my pot started dripping a lot. It’s pretty clear that it’s because something got into the spout from the inside, and I’ll have to completely empty it and clean the spout.
But
success!!!!.