Loose Ned Heads

[blll]

Hey everybody, poured a bunch of midwest finese jigs and almost everyone had the head wobble on the hook after cooling. While powder painting mitigates some of this, it's just not right. Especially bad on the smaller sizes. It seems the act of removing the head from the mold loosens up the jighead. Will waiting longer to remove the pour help? Big time waster if that is the only solution. Anybody else experience this?

Edited August 5, 2019 by blll

[smalljaw]

You need harder lead, Rotometals sells 5% antimonial lead and that works really well. They also sell nuggets of 70% lead with 30% antimony, if you use 1lb of that to 19 or 20 lbs of soft lead it will really help and isn't too hard. I use 5% antimonial lead and it makes a difference, if you just want to use scrap lead find older wheel weights. You need to be careful with wheel weights as the newer ones have a high percentage of zinc which will corrode your pot in short order. Don't worry about hard lead and other molds, 5% antimony will harden the lead up that you may need to run your pot at a little higher temp but all your molds should pour fine with it.

 

EDIT: I almost forgot, you NEED to cut the sprue off with a gate shear or diagonal cutter. If you are twisting or breaking the sprue off then you'll loosen the head all the time.

Edited August 5, 2019 by smalljaw

[Basseducer]

I found that demolding by grabbing the jig by the sprue then cutting it off helped a lot. On the ones that were left raw i would put a drop of superglue at the base of the hook and let it soak in. the less you handle the jig before painting the better.