I’ve mentioned before that I have about 10kg of Alox 2138F but nobody wants it. I think Peter M is right that shooters are prepared to pay R50 per stick ( R1250 per kg ) rather than make the derisory effort of melting and mixing and pouring hot into their lubrisizers at a fraction of the cost. The other day I mentioned it to a guy who casts his own and he was unaware that it could be melted and also clearly uninterested in considering it.
So I made some rudimentary tools and made up some into hollow sticks. Worked quite well, not that it’s difficult, but I found that for mass production some heat needs to be applied to the tooling, otherwise the stuff sticks too hard to the inside of the steel tube and won’t come out without breaking up. Nonetheless it was successful enough that I might improve the tooling and make more of it so I can make a lot of the sticks per session.
Officially the sticks are supposed to be 1″ x 4″ ( 25.40 x 102mm ) but I could get steel tube only in 28mm bore so my sticks are 28mm diameter. I found that they fit easily into both RCBS and Lyman lubricators. I used 10mm rod for the hole. As my sticks are thicker they are also heavier, so to make 40 grammes they should be shorter than 100mm, but I figure they will look undersize so I left them just over 100mm. They weigh 48 grammes so are 20% bigger than Lee or Hodgdon.
I have wrapped them in greaseproof paper and a self stick label. You need to sell thousands of ‘em to make it worthwhile to make those nice little boxes like RCBS or the plastic tubes like Lee.  Haven’t checked postage yet but I expect that it will not be economic for less than five or ten sticks. If anyone wants them I’ll offer them at R20 per stick plus postage. It is exactly the same product as Lee ie 50% Alox 2138F and 50% Commercial beeswax.
Haven’t decided whether to offer it to the trade. My gut feel is that there will be no interest even from the dealers who already stock Lee, RCBS and Hodgdon.
[Originally posted to SATalkGuns -- Admin]