I have been on the case in many directions and today, I am delighted to let you know that the cunning marketeers at Henry Krank, for whom this product is just one small SKU amongst a lot of serious and high value items, have agreed to supply us with a lead pot! It is going into the AMMO double page spread and will have a clickable link to buy them – £78 less thirty pence – here: https://www.henrykrank.com/reloading/lee-reloading/bullet-casting/lee-production-pot-iv-220-v.html
I was asked if I might explain what the heck was the thing with these pots, as they were fully aware at Henry Krank that ‘we’ (slingshot hunters) buy a LOT of them, versus the musket balls casting folks, as we use way more balls than them, too. After all, we do not have historic firearms to find where to shoot and to preserve. We use sticks and rubber!
So I wrote them THIS:
My name is Adam Rayner. I’m a journalist making a magazine about catapults. For reasons I shall elaborate, I have been nagging Henry Krank for a little while now and just managed to secure the supply of one of these for my magazine. I am so chuffed and grateful! https://www.henrykrank.com/reloading/lee-reloading/bullet-casting/lee-production-pot-iv-220-v.html I was asked to explain how come so many of these sell to so many unlikely-seeming customers (my description, not HK’s) and to pop a blog post over to put on the website and that I could thus swipe one. “Delighted and proud to!”, I said and these words came out of my fingertips within the same hour!
What is the connection of catapults to Henry Krank? Well, making a magazine about slingshots, like any title, means you’re trying to please everybody. And although we only date from 1844 and of the vulcanisation of rubber by the lovely Mr Goodyear, we too have many kinds of enthusiast. There are target shooters, there are dyed-in-the wool hunters, there are bonkers innovators and possibly my favourites, the old-fashioned traditionalists. Because slingshots are relatively inexpensive, most every enthusiast has a collection of slings. And we argue about ammunition all the time! Old-fashioned and classics have a huge pouch for flinging small pebbles. (Stones are utterly illegal for hunting by the way, see this page on my website – http://www.slingshotworld.co.uk/slingshots-law/ Top end target catapults have the tiniest little scrap of microfibre, that barely wraps around the UK-favoured 9.5 mm steel ball, while those with the skill and volition to hunt, use lead balls in various sizes.
So THAT may be why the product has a best seller status on the HK website! Because my lot are demons at harvesting rabbits and pigeons and above all, waiting for the silly game birds with enough wanderlust to end up on their permissions. For the sums are savage, even at low relative speeds that our modern latex elastics retract at, we can use human power to send a lovely dense lead ball down range carrying an easy sufficiency of foot-pounds to do the lethal job.
I have the biggest elephant in the room of any but the shotgun market for potential misuse though and shall be addressing that issue in the magazine. We are about responsible use, not like those who cut bits off barrels. But poachers will poach.
The main thing is, that handling lead with a ladle takes serious skill and care. Using a Lee Production Pot is way safer, as long as you do it in the garden or shed with the door open, as the gases from melting lead are not good for you at all.
The size of a lead ammo ball for a slingshot will vary between 8mm, which weighs the same as a 9.5mm steel, to a mighty 12mm, which can pass clean through a chicken, say with big hench double bands! We love the Lee ball moulds as well, but those are a precision tool and a bit of a luxury. Yet the Lee Production Pot is like posh soap. The kind of luxury you can afford all the time.
A massive thank you from Slingshot World for the pot and I promise to show off something rotten about it, as a journalist needs to brag about knowing everybody that truly matters. This is going to make me look cool, or rather hot.. say 1,749 Centigrade….
Adam Rayner, Editor, Slingshot World magazine
