The age old question, spur up or spur down?

[Ironwood]

Ok you folks that shoot cast patched roundballs.  Do you like to have the spur up or down?  I cast the Lee roundballs.  I'm not sure it make that much difference with those.  I still try to always turn the spur up.  What do y'all prefer? 

[Mr Woodchuck]

upp facin ya as ya load ... that way ya know it be center ... hurd it makes no difference but to me it does,
  do not know why   just because
lol

[bwhoffman]

With my Lee molds, it makes no never mind to me. But now with my lyman molds, its sprue up.

[bull frog]

I always put sprue up, "why", don't know.  I can't say I really noticed the difference either way.  Always been told to do it that way so I do it......Bullfrog

[tom-h]

same with me i go sprue up  .

[FrankG]

Sprue up so I kin see it 

[fd-ems-emt]

Up !!

[little jim]

SPUR UP ! And here's why. If you cut some of your own or bought cast balls in half, I'll venture to say you'll find holes(voids or vacuum spaces) in most of them. The voids are always perpendicular to the earth and located somewhere between the center and the upper part of the ball. The balls pictured below are from a bottom cast furnace. You can tell because of the position of the void. On a ladle cast ball you'll have the mold canted to facilitate runoff of the molten lead, hence the the void(if any) will be at an angle. By loading spur up you'll have a more constant ball rotation, as the gyroscopic center will be more constant from one ball to the other. This is nitpicking, but can and will make a slight difference..
At a later date I'll how post to cast 95-99% void free balls.

[Ironwood]

Lil Jim...... Looking forward to that "how to". 

[bull frog]

Well that was interesting, never would have thought of that.  But then, never would have thought to cut my round balls in half either.  Anyway, looking forward to the next post.................Bullfrog

[fd-ems-emt]

Interesting !!!!

[Chaffa Hosa]

I vibrate my balls and load them just however they lay on the patch

[Lady of the Woods]

sprue up fer me, never had a real reason before but do now...thanks little jim, 'preciate the info!
z

[Da Backwoodsman]

sprue up for me... ol timer told me if the sprue got in the rifling it could throw your shot off

[little jim]

ol timer told me if the sprue got in the rifling it could throw your shot off

Of course that ain't true. But he knew something was askew and that was a his rational assumption. When you tumble the spurs off, the bigger voids will show thru as a dimple. The ones you see here probably won't show. You can see that if you align the voids at different positions the gyroscopic centers will be quite different...