Range Scrap and muriatic acid test

Good morning everyone!

When I was melting down range lead over the weekend and casting ingots, I put aside a few ingots that had a different coloring in a few spots. I picked up some muriatic acid today and put a drop on those discolored spots and got an instant, vigorous fizzle. Are there other "contaminants" that could be found in range scrap lead, other than zinc, that could cause a reaction like that? I am wondering if I should toss those 6 ingots or if here could just be something else in them that I can simply flux out on the next melt (something other than zinc).

Thanks in advance for the casting-chemistry lesson!

Mike

I don't know of other metals that will react like that but there may be some. There are zinc and other lead free bullets out there. I would save those ingots and blend them into a bigger batch later on. Yo could try casting a few bullets and see how well they fill out.

Were those six ingots with the fizzing spots poured from the same melt as the rest of your ingots? If so the other ingots are also questionable.

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Originally Posted by kevin c

Were those six ingots with the fizzing spots poured from the same melt as the rest of your ingots? If so the other ingots are also questionable.

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Yes. They were the last ones, I only know because that is how I had stacked them. There is nothing visually similar to the rest, and I dropped some drops of muriatic acid on random other ones and no fizzing of any kind on the others.

Sounds like the fizz may be from some dross or other type of contamination.

well I decided to melt down the suspect ingots by combining them with around 2 ingots worth of melted (lead) clip on wheel weights. I slowly added in the suspect ingots, fluxing along the way and scooping off the dross as I went. Once I had everything up to 650F and was happy with the look in the pot, I brought my 2 cavity 356-120T mold up to temp an cast 6 bullets. They filled out nicely and I quenched them. When I pulled them out of the water they looked like nice 9mm bullets. I poured the rest back into ingots.

Perhaps dondiego is right and the fizz was from some other range contaminant that I was able to flux out on this run.

The learning never stops!