Lead Muffins Fresh Out of the Oven

[lwknight]

You need the steel muffin pans. Do not get the ones that are tinned. Do get the non stick.
You have to burn the pans in fire to burn off all the non sticky stuff. Get them red hot then your ingots will never stick again.

[alamogunr]

John, Do you have a bail on your large pot? If not, can you make and install one from hardware?
I used to use a 10 inch cast iron dutch to clean my lead. Some years ago I went to a larger pot after the dutch showed signs a failing.

As you can see in the third picture, I too started without the means to pour out the last of it and did not like it.
So, I added the bail and a tab to put a vice grip on and regardless the weight, to a point, I can tip the pot over while still resting on the burner and empty it into a mold.

This way I do not have to lift it - just pour it. Just set a mold next to it and keeping one side of the pot resting on the burner, fill the last of the lead into the ingot molds.

Yes, CW, my pot has a bail that was put on by the welder that made it for me. He went sort of overboard and the bail has such a large arc that it extends more than a foot above the top of the pot. Makes it kind of unwieldy to handle. I might mention that my 12" pipe pot has 3/8" wall and the bottom is 1/2" plate. Takes awhile just to heat up the pot. I would guess it weighs 60 or 70 lbs.

I think that when I get toward the bottom and the #5 Rowell won't work any more that I will just tilt the pot and use a #2 Rowell to dip as much as I can and not leave a huge disc of lead in the bottom. What little lead is left should just drop out. That will go into a dutch oven that I can pour the last ingots from or make just one big ingot and add it to the bottom of my safe.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

[David2011]

Your aluminum pan was probably tin plated steel. Molten lead adheres to it easily and instantly. I made the same mistake once trying to dump all of the alloy in my pot into what I thought was a small galvanized bucket - SWMBO's little decorative bucket, of course. Lead would not had stuck if I had been correct but several pounds of lead became part of the bucket.

[MOA]

I agree that ingot molds fabricated from angle iron are probably best. I don't weld and when I said that I got my ingot molds several years ago, it was probably over 20 years ago. I've got 2 buckets of sorted COWW and one bucket of SOWW that have been sitting behind the shop for at least 5 years to clean up and that is it for me. I'm too old to add to my stash of at least 2 tons and WW are too contaminated with zinc and steel to mess with. You would be lucky to get 75 lbs of lead from a full 5 gal. bucket in this area now.

Have to agree with you alamogunr, hard to find anyone who will even sell WW to you anymore. I was lucky a week or so ago to get two five gallons of WW, about four hundred pounds, got about 325 pounds out of it, here are 64 square muffin tin ingots that are about five pounds each. Took about three to four hours to get-r-done.

[Chill Wills]

Something odd is posting here. I am having deja vu....