I greet you with this meme. The reason? Lets dive into it.
Being a Student of the Boolit isn't always fun. Sometimes it is actually hard, stinky, sweaty work just to get the metal you need. It taught me something abut hard work and showed me that all you can do is push forward and finish what you started.
We started the day very early in the morning hauling in 140+ pounds of pure lead from the back of my car. This batch of fun would become ingots but not without a few lessons learned. Brassmagnet was first to the plate to show me how the melting and how to pour ingots. This process consisted of putting metal in, melting it, fluxing it, and then pouring ingots. This is an easy thing to do but isn't much fun when you get the fumes and heat in your face while brewing in the "Witches Cauldron". Once you have melted your metal, you flux it. The choice of flux is wax. When you are fluxing with it in a big 50-60 pound cast iron pot, it easily reaches its combustion temperature making fluxing a PITA. After fluxing comes the pouring into ingots. This is done by ladle into a 1 pound or 3 pound bar mold. This isn't so bad, but it just takes time for the ingots to "cool." This is also a good time to check your safety equipment for holes... (Your gloves.) This lesson was learned by picking up a "cooled" ingot with a hole in the glove thus burning my hand. Thankfully this was a small hole but it still hurt. Once ingots cooled, you moved them and poured into the mold until you had no metal left.
This process is easy, it can get a little tedious because your after the final product. Pure Galena, Pb, or simply known as Lead. After all the smoke, the heat, burning myself, came the best reward of all. Self-Satisfaction of achieving a goal and learning new things. Now I would have thought the story would end here... Nope. I got homework for the month.... I have to turn 75 pounds of rifle alloy into boolits. This is the mandatory fun part. So early mornings are going to be the norm for now until this is done but it produce hi quality boolits.
Ill come back at a later time to complete this with pictures as the device is not working with me. Watch this post...
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Originally Posted by beezapilot
