First melt questions

[stocker]

When I get a few hundred pounds of used wheel weights accumulated I wait till late evening or later and then go check out my local car and truck washes until I find one that isn't busy (there's only three in town). I dump the weights along a wall and go at them with the high pressure car wash nozzle. Sometimes I even wash the truck. Valve stems get bounced right out. Soap and rinse. Nearly clean enough to use again.
Take a small scoop shovel to load them back in buckets that have drain holes in the bottom. Let them sit several days to be sure there is no water in them and you're good to melt. Sure beats any other way I've tried to clean them. And, no mess at home.

[waksupi]

<sawdust>

Huh? For real?

Yup, real! Any carbon based thing you can put in the pot, will flux it.

[jar-wv]

I'm also a newby to this and am telling you info I've learned here, along with my own obsevations. I actually go thru the pain of sorting my WW. I get to the house with a few buckets full and put on the gloves and sort em out on the tailgate. Trash in one bucket. Soft stick ons in another, and clip ons in another. If they got rivets on em they'r most likely zinc, and they go in the trash bucket. I don't pressure wash my weights or car wash them. Thought about that and decided I didn't want to chase them all over the place. I smelt on a coleman LP stove in a 6 qt stainless stock pan bought brand new for $4 at a liquidators type store. I had the coleman stove on hand and never use it for camping. I spent about 9 bucks to get the stuff to use a large LP tank like yo0ud use on a bbq grill. You'l go thru a ton of the little tanks if you don't do this. I also sprung for a thermometer to make sure I didn't get any zinc weights in the mix. I found that with the setup I have it is damn near impossible to melt zinc, which melts at "I think" 783 degrees and the few zinc weights I've encountered spoon out with the clips, which float to the top. I flux with parrifin or stir with a wooden stick. If you flux with parrifin make sure you do the stirring while it's smokin heavy or on fire. If you use a stick to stir and flux be careful of the lead thats going to jump due to the moisture in the stick. while stirring during the flux try to stir air down into the mix and scrape the sides and bottom of the pot. With my setup I can do a mix that yields slightly over 100#, but that is probably over max for my grill and stove. Is a lot of weight for something that was designed to fry bacon. Make sure whatever you use for a base is capable of holding lots of weight. For ingots I use pop cans. One will hold about 6.5-7.5#. I cut them off at the top with sicsors. It takes them a while to cool. when cool I just strip the aluminum off the outside. Ya can't do it much cheaper than I do for smelting. I use a muffin pan for my ingots from the soft lead stick on weights. Mine is on of the steel ones that is not recomemmended from on of the earlier posts. I used Frankford Drop Out in mine and the ingots dropped out well. I have seen it posted here that grahite spray lube from NAPA is the same thing and much less expensive. For casting I have a 20# Lee bottom pour pot. Theres no better place to ask about anything casting as here.

jar

[Blacktail 8541]

Dale 53, is right on the money with his advice on pot size and type. I thought I needed the big deep pot also. I found out it is a real pain to dip lead out of. And very slow to boot. The 16 qt dutch oven is probably the biggest size that is useful, not to deep and plenty wide. Also when you are melting that much lead it takes all the heat a turkey fryer can produce to keep it in a liquid state when full.

[Goatlips]

Howdy BigSlick!

You got a world of good information above, but no pitchers as yet - here's a few you may find useful:

http://goatlipstips.cas-town.com/smelting.html

You're in the right place to delve into this insanity. Good shootin' pard

Goatlips

[Howdy Doody]

Goatlips, great pics. Good job. I think that is the first pic I have ever seen of you. By your alias I had another pic in my mind. You will do You probably have something in mind of what I look like too.
Yup, the muffin tins is the set up I use. The casting of the circus animals is right along thesame lines of stuff I do,but in my case I am a bit devious. I cast soldiers out. I paint them up and I take them to my favorite tire shops and give them to them to use for paperweights. In return they like to give me free buckets of wheel weights. I always bring them a bucket back too. I have never paid for weights yet. I do pay for pure lead though, but a good deal from roofer on that gully sheets keeps me casting balls too.
I sure wish I had a neat set up like yours.


yer pard,
Howdy

[Dale53]

Goatlips web site should be VERY helpful to newbies (AND also some of us "Oldbies").

Dale53

[BigSlick]

Thanks for all the info guys

I read in some of the posts, that the flux will usually light up. That's not a problem, but am I to understand the burning will help cut the smoke ? When I witnessed my first melt (RCBS Pro Melt), the black smoke looked like the derned house was on fire. The casting from ingots was a little smoky, but not much.

I think I will go with an 8 or 10 qt cast iron pot. I hadn't thought of the fact that melted lead takes up a lot less space than wheel weights.

Here's a pic of the burner setup I have, the burner shown is kinda Mickey Mouse, I burned it out in two seasons of chili and gumbo cook offs. I replaced it with a honkin heavy duty three row unit.



I use the pot mainly for gumbo, so it isn't a waste. The base seems pretty heavy duty, but I will make sure I put some paving stone of some sort underneath it just to make sure I don't sink it into the ground from the weight of the lead.

I run a 30 lb tank to fire the burner. I usually easily get three hours plus out of a tank running it full blast (175,000 btu). I'm thinking I can get the first pot melted withing the first half hour, and add to it carefully until full enough to still flux safely.

I know for a fact the stand pictured above will support 55 lbs or so of weight with no problem (5 gallons peanut oil, 12-13 lb turkey and the pot). I will dump a few cans full of bullets on it to make sure it can support more weight.

I have found a 1000 F thermometer, so that should work, I dropped by the local second hand outlet today and picked up a few cast iron corn bread ($4 each) and aluminum muffin tins ($2.50 each, not too wide but 3" deep), a couple of big slotted spoons, a big soup ladle (cast iron $5) and three boxes of broken up dinner candles (.29 cents each)

I saw a few decent sized dutch ovens, but I want to get a camp dutch with the legs on it, so I can drop the legs inside the frame so (I hope) it won't slide off if I jar it by mistake.

Dale53, thanks for the info on the weight on melted lead. That helps a lot. A 16 quart dutch would probably weigh way too much to handle safely on a small scale setup.

Excellent website Goatlips. Good to see some pics and a narrative that is easy to understand. Hell, this LOOKS easy

Good to see some familiar faces here, I knew a couple of you guys had the sickness bad, but it looks like some of you have it awful bad like me I usually hang out at THR, TFL and GT and a couple of other reloading forums. I couldn't resist getting into the good part of shooting any longer. I wanna make my own.

Thanks again for the kind welcome and the help. I will get the rest of the goods together and get my first melt done next weekend.

I'll snap a few pics so you guys can have a laugh or two. I'm not expecting to make perfect bullets the first time out, just melt a bunch of weights without burning the neighborhood down or poisoning myself.

If you happen to see a report on CNN that looks akin to Ms. O'Leary's cow being on the move, not to worry, it was just me

BigSlick
________
Starcraft 2 Reps

[Duckiller]

BS
I use the same cooker to render wheel weights. Suggest you may not want legs on your dutch oven. With a load of lead you are going to have to bump it REAL hard to make it move. If you do need to move pot i.e. to dump the lead you can't dip out, it is easier with a flat pot. To make your gas last longer, run close to wide open until the weights start to melt then turn gas way down. Doesn't take much to keep lead molten and you won't melt something you do not want to melt, like zinc.
Duckiller