Muffin tin for ingot mold?

[chaos]

My wifey scratched the teflon in her prized muffin tin. She is going to throw it away.
Is it a good idea to use it as an Ingot Mold?

[picketball]

No! Teflon turns nasty at Casting temperatures, and, as easily as it scratches, it is nearly impossible to remove.

Just keep using it for muffins.

[wills]

Regarding the virtues of rusty ingot molds.


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[carpetman]

Use a muffin tin for an ingot mold? Never heard of such. Doubt it could be done. Maybe someone has tried it?

[Saint]

I use teflon coated mini muffin pans for half pound ingots and they work great. The teflon coating will start to smoke if you pour the ingots at high temperatures but after the teflon scorches a little it will stop smoking but your ingots will slide out like butter. Teflon has very high heat resistance and is impervious to most liquids. Also i shoot ML so I work mostly with pure lead and I pour my ingots really hot.

[Irascible]

Just don't breath the fumes! Also, there are many, many warnings about pouring molten lead into aluminum, you might end up with a shoe full!

[mto7464]

i got an old cast iron one at an antique mall for three bucks. It makes nice 2lb round ingots. They fit nicely into the pot too.

[Le Loup Solitaire]

Cast iron muffin tins work very well for ingot molds. Lead doesn't stick to cast iron. If you can find a cast iron muffin tin for just a few bucks, jump on it. However read...if there is anything to read...whats on the back of the pan. If it says, Griswold or Wagner it may be a highly collectable antique and worth quite a bit of $$$$. If it says "made in USA", Taiwan, or nothing at all, it ain't worth much and you have a good ingot mold. The only drawback (for some folks) is that a muffin pan with twelve lead pours in it can really weigh when you go to turn it over and the ingots if they land on their side can roll away off the bench etc and be very unkind to insteps and toes. Non cast iron muffin tins can be more trouble than they are worth...which isn't much anyway...if the lead gets soldered/stuck inside the cavities and its a PITA to get them out. The ones coated with teflon can be risky business healthwise because of noxious fumes associated with overheated teflon. Good ingots can be made by cutting the bottoms off of pop or beer cans (make sure that they are dry inside)....choose the height of the ingot you want, cut and pour. The aluminum can be easily peeled off the finished ingot with a pliers or lock wrench and then discarded/recycled. They'll fit in any melting pot. LLS

[Trader Vic]

Followed the good advice here & went to the antique mall & picked up an old cast iron muffin pan, can cast 11 ingots at a time. Works great, I also picked up one of those corn bread muffin pans in cast iron to cast differant lead types in. Makes it easy to keep them seperate for when I mix dental lead & WWs. NRA PATRON LIFE MEMBER

[Saint]

Good advice. The fumes are nasty and i cast outdoors with a respirator. I agree it probably is not a good idea.

[JIMinPHX]

When the temperature gets high enough, Teflon turns into a very very very toxic gas. It makes lead fumes look like something that you would want to breath. Someone left a hardening furnace running overnight once with a Teflon pan sitting on top of it. The next morning I found one pan, less Teflon, & one dead shop cat. Fortunately, the mice were gone after that too. The cat had a little pet door that he should have been able to get out of. He just didn't make it that far. We let the place air out before we started work that morning.

[Whitespider]

I learned a trick with the tin coated pans (after destroying one trying to get the ingots out).
Remove the tin..... easily done by heating them with a torch, burns it right off. Another way, if you have a self cleaning electric oven, toss them in the oven during the cleaning cycle, also burns the tin off. The ingots drop out like the pan is coated with greased owl dung.