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terminal gravity
03-20-2006, 09:24 PM
I have recently melted & ingoted (is that a word?) about 500 lb of ww & somewhere at the midpoint of the process i may have melted a zinker or three (I never knew) :roll: Is it worth trying to cast boolits or is the whole lot scrap? Can I make soilders instead? :drinks:

Ken O
03-20-2006, 10:04 PM
I dont know what temp the zinc ones melt at, they always float to the top in my bottom pour smelter and I skim them off with the clips. Unless you are smelting extremly hot, you problably dont have zinc melted in.

terminal gravity
03-20-2006, 10:17 PM
I just remember a few that were stubbron to melt. It was a hurried session, I used a turkey fryer & cranked the heat up. thx for the reply!

NVcurmudgeon
03-20-2006, 10:23 PM
The hard-to-melt weights could have been pure lead. Lead melts at a higher temp. than WW. I forget exactly right now, but zinc has a very high melting point, unlikely to be reached in normal smelting.

waksupi
03-21-2006, 12:40 AM
Can you tell us, what makes you believe you have zinc contamination?

jar-wv
03-21-2006, 01:52 AM
I thought the same thing after seeing a few pictures on this site. I would have bet I had some zinc weights. Next time I smelted i used a thermometer and discovered the hottest I got the melt was 600 deg, way too low to melt zinc. That was done on a coleman propane stove, with an 8 qt ss pot. the grids on the stove were red hot so I assumed the temp was a lot higher than it actually was. If you scooped out the clips when everything else was melted I wouldn't worry about it a whole lot. A thermometer will tell you lots and for the price is cheap, compared to dumping a whole lot.

jar