Smelting accident- kaboom!

[evan price]

UPDATE:

Well, I made my first smelt since the accident yesterday.

300# of soft lead.

I had run out of ingots and had two orders to fill. Yesterday was the first day post-kaboom that I've had off that it was not raining.

I'll be honest- I knew I needed more ingots. I had checks on the shelf. But when I get home and it's raining, it's "Whew, I don't have to smelt, it's raining."

Yesterday I loaded her up and lit the fire. Wen it came time to work the pot it was like I was handling a hornet's nest. Face shield, gauntlets, denim, and sweat. I was fogging my glasses up.

This time I took a plumber's propane torch and flamed all the mold cavities until they smoked then leaned the molds against the furnace. I made sure I flamed all of my utensils. I made sure all my lead was preheated.

And nothing went wrong. I took my time, worked responsibly, and 2 hours later I had 300# of nice ingots stacked up.

It really let me regain my confidence. I had been taking smelting for granted. Look what happened to Sigfried & Roy- they had worked those tigers for decades...one careless moment and BOOM.

Feels good to be back.

[I'll Make Mine]

Back on the horse. Good for you.

[Downunder]

I'm new to casting and this has opened my eyes to what safety steps I will and should take. I will also now be using a full face mask not the safty glasses I was going to use.
Thanks for telling us all what went down. You may have well saved me from myself! I have had a big rethink about my set up and that can only be good!

[Smithy]

I've already posted my mishap with a live primer and molten lead, but as you've read in other posts, the biggest threat to lead smelting is good ol H20, water. I remember another time I was melting and ingotizing a bunch of lead. So much so that my normal method of slow and steady that I use when done casting and draining the pot seemed a bit to long for the amount of lead I had to go through. With a cast iron ingot mold (which I had brazed on a solid padded metal 12" handle) I thought that a tub of water would be perfect. I'd cast the ingots and just as soon as the lead glazed over I'd submerge the ingot portion, dropping the ingot's and immediately pull out the mold. With the temps running so high, the mold quickly evaporated the water that was on the mold and I was good to go.

After I got a full tub of water and freshly cast ingot's, I drained the tub and dried off the ingots carefully stacking them against the wall in my shed. Two months mind you after that day I went to cast some mini's for my 58. The pot was almost full and I added just one more ingot. The explosion was horrendous and was almost as bad as the primer in the lead trick. Moisture is a hard thing to get rid of when it is incorporated into an ingot. NEVER cool any cast lead piece in water if it ever is going to have a chance of being remelted. I don't know where the moisture was? The ingot seemed dry as a bone, but it was there somewhere. In a pocket or the pores of the ingot itself. Smithy.

[alamogunr]

As usual my safety gear was good jeans, a long sleeve flannel shirt, ball cap, an MSA respirator, heavy insulated leather gloves, and polycarbonate safety-rated eyeglasses with side shields.

.

As others have said, glad it wasn't more serious.

One more tip that I got from a professional welder. When I told him I wore a flannel shirt while cleaning up WW, he recommended a new well starched denim shirt. According to him, splatters will adhere to flannel and burn thru. Splatters will bounce off the denim. He practiced what he preached and always had on a blue denim shirt at work. This wouldn't have prevented your injuries like the face shield would but might prevent some discomfort sometime.

[evan price]

Bumping this- because it came to my attention, and it's a great learning tool for young and old!

[Pinsnscrews]

Thank you for your message, much appreciated!

[MaryB]

I wear an old denim hooded jacket, pull the hood up then the full face shield over that, leather apron, gloves, boots. Had one visit when a friend was watching and he grabbed a wheel weight from the bucket and tossed it in the pot from 6 feet away. Besides splashing lead the water in it emptied about 20 pounds out of the pot and all over the deck. He got lucky and just had a few splats, I had to peel lead off an arm and hand but the gear saved me, I saw the wheel weight mid air and turned and got a step further away. Friend got a 15 minute chewing out that he still remembers. I may pick up some seconds leather that has to many scars and range marks and make a longer apron with sleeves like a welders jacket but almost to the floor.

[steve817]

Only having had one pour under my belt, this has been a good read. Glad it wasn't any worse than it was. While I wholeheartedly agree about not needing all the safety equipment if we are paying attention, I'll continue to wear mine. i wore a helmet when I rode a motorcycle for years even though I never went down.

I saw someone mention that sitting was a bad idea. My setup is a turkey fryer with a 4 quart cast iron dutch oven. My knees are shot and standing over my pot or molds is also a bad idea because I sweat like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee so I try to stay at arms reach away from everything because of that. Should I consider raising my burner?

[JSnover]

I saw someone mention that sitting was a bad idea. My setup is a turkey fryer with a 4 quart cast iron dutch oven. My knees are shot and standing over my pot or molds is also a bad idea because I sweat like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee so I try to stay at arms reach away from everything because of that. Should I consider raising my burner?

I don't think sitting is that bad, i just don't like the lack of mobility. Seems like there's always something I can't reach. Burner height (IMO) is less important than a clean work area. Don't have anything on the floor to trip you or any random junk on the bench to get knocked over.

[w5pv]

I had something simlar happen when I poured some melt over a spider in a mold,not near as bad as yours though.

[mold maker]

A rolling chair on a clean floor is the only way I can deal with melting WWs.

[alamogunr]

Several posts in this thread have recommended full face masks. I have one but don't use it. Only safety glasses w/side shields. The face mask I have has a plastic shield and it seems to introduce distortion. I just can't see as well as with glasses only. I don't clean up WW any more, or very rarely, but the next time I have to deal with a large pot full of molten lead, I will give it another try.

[Pinsnscrews]

BTW,

If you have a "Fogging" problem when wearing a full face shield:
1)Any of the soft bar soaps can be rubbed onto the shield, then polished with a cloth.
2)you can use Rain-X. Either the mix your own, or the premixed. Spray on, wipe off with a soft cloth
3)Various Motorcycle Shops (Parts and Accessories) have various products that can be applied to the face shield.

If you need to, you can use window tint from an auto supply store/walmart/kmart etc can be used. Just be sure to apply the tint to the Inside of the face shield. Note: If you wear glasses that have Transitions or Polarization, when looking through the tint, you will get odd colorizations. This can cause Nausea in Some People. It is an effect of the polarization not playing well with the tint.

[DukeInFlorida]

I like this type of shield:


At harbor freight, $7.99

Never fogs!

http://www.harborfreight.com/mesh-fa...eld-97010.html

[Smithy]

As far as the sitting angle? When I first started and had a lead pot, mold, and Lee loader for 30-30. Oh and a cake pan for pan lubing those tall 180 grain bullets prior so Lee sizing and gas checking. That was it and it all fit into a ammo box larger than the normally seen 50 caliber can (20mm maybe?). Well I had already learned not to cast in my dorm room as other residents decided that it wasn't acceptable to do so. Much like letting loose with a few rounds of black inside an indoor range. Kind of frowned upon. I didn't have anything to put my Lee production pot on, so it went on the ground and I on a stool. Otherwise I'd be sitting on the ground with my legs spread around the pot. Even I figured out the possible problems with that idea. Even at age 18, imagine about an hour and a half of casting that way and then trying to get up to a standing position? Not fun at all. I'm old enough now that I couldn't even get down to the stool to sit in the first place. The height I build my bench is such that all of my reloading and casting is done standing up, although I do have the option of sitting on a rather high shop stool. You can still get into trouble standing up with too much stuff in your way or laying on the ground like power cords and the like, but on the stool (or chair), you're stuck period. Not voting one way or the other as now my back is such that standing is the only way I can reload regardless of whether it is safer or not. If I need to sit for a spell, I simply turn the pot to warm where the lead just barely solidifies but is at or near melting temperature. Smithy.

[MrWolf]

Posts like these have helped me when I started smelting. I wear a full set of clothes, welding gloves, full face shield, respirator mask, and my sunglass safety glasses as the reflection from the lead is tough to see through in full sunlight. Overkill? Maybe but makes me more comfortable when doing a full propane tank full at a time - bout 150lbs or so. OP had an angel on his shoulder that day.

[Smithy]

Posts like these have helped me when I started smelting. I wear a full set of clothes, welding gloves, full face shield, respirator mask, and my sunglass safety glasses as the reflection from the lead is tough to see through in full sunlight. Overkill? Maybe but makes me more comfortable when doing a full propane tank full at a time - bout 150lbs or so. OP had an angel on his shoulder that day.

MrWolf's addition above reminded me of my younger days when lead was something you had to scrounge up. To buy lead meant buying a bag of shot or fishing sinkers both of which seemed to be a waste. Well I started collecting lead from various sources. Anytime I was in a gun trade I'd add "And I'll take 20 pounds of your lead too" on the end of each trade or sell. Then I had folks giving me lead. Namely the local tire shops with their used wheel weights. A friend of mine gave me a military wing ballast which was lead at 1.5" thick in a weird sort of trapezoid shape (took two to move). Well now I had more lead than I knew what to do with and it was in every concevable shape and form. I needed a way to mix the lead to get one homogeneous blend of lead that could be busted down to ingots as the need came up. Then I found it. A company that made lead pots. Big ones that could handle the amount and odd shaped chunks of lead I had. The reason I was given some of the lead was simply, the owner could not bust the large piece down into a pot usable chunk so it was worthless to them. Well I bought the smallest pot that they had (175 pound capacity, propane fired). It was a bottom drop pot and you could actually cast a normal sized mold with that spout, but if you lifted the handle all the way the lead poured quick. You could easily fill a 12 pound sinker mold in the time a regular pot would handle a 158 grain slug. The thing was awesome.

Well lifting, letting it glaze over, moving, doing it again and two more times after that just to fill a four cavity Lyman ingot mold was going to take forever so I had to figure out something else. I had a welder make a rack that held four 2X2 pieces of angle iron and that became my little ingot mold. The pieces were short enough that if watched could be fed into a 20 pound normal pot, but I had much more lead than that so I found another answer. I bought a used lead pot that filled would hold about 35 pounds of lead. So I'd end up with bowl ingots. I had a plastic barrel that I lined with bricks and filled just enough water so that the 35 pound pot would sit just 2" or so into the water (that way I'd not get any explosions if careful). I cast and cast and cast until I had everything down to 35 pound bowl ingots and around 20 or so of the angle iron ingots. Now I could count my collection and I ended up with just over a ton of lead since I filled 62 of the bowl ingots. The lead pot company sold different spigots for this pot and molds. This addition included an extra burner to allow the lead to flow down the extra piping and into six different openings for the lead. The set up utilized four cavity molds (not sure of the maker?), so you'd have four cavities at each and every spout coming from the pot. So every lift of the handle and you'd get 24 boolits. I never had enough money to equip myself with what I needed to do this so I finally gave up my lifetime collection of lead and sold it to a fisherman who cast those 12 pound sinkers mentioned above. Smithy.

[osteodoc08]

Wow! Talk about a new found respect for molten lead and water. Glad you're ok. Thank you for the reminder.