Blue tint to lead ingots?

[marlin.45]

Hi all from over the pond.

Melting down a ton of old roof flashing yesterday and noted that a lot of the 1lb ingots I had cast had a blue ting to them as if someone had coloured them with a felt tip.

Is this a sign of other alloy contamination? They seem to be of similar hardness by a finger nail test.

:castmine:

[felix]

No, just low oxidation number oxides. Shows you have the real thing: 99 percent or better? ... felix

[marlin.45]

Cheers Felix. That's good to know.

Some of the more recent 'lead' flashing here has a high alloy content but this stuff appeared to be at least 20 years old so should be good. Scraped together around 60lb out of my neighbours old roof :-D

Paul

[Buckshot]

...............Sounds like it was hot, but that's no problem with pure lead. When I cast Minie' bullets, or actually ANY boolits from pure lead I just crank the throttle wide open on the furnace. You'll get that lizard belly blue, gold and reddish rumpled sheen on the melt surface, and the bluish tint will carry across to the surface of the slugs sometimes.

Don't even bother trying to flux :-). You drop in a dab of wax and it just goes "Woof" and it's gone. Of course if you're ladel casting the dipper will get all drooly and messy with the oxides.

................Buckshot

[marlin.45]

It was a new pot with much higher capacity say around 20lb so it was retaining more head than the little Lee pot. So it was prob much hotter than normal and that's why I haven't seen that effect before.

I have been doing this for five years but casting is just another learning curve?:mrgreen: