New Smelting Rig In The Works

[BattleRife]

I am seeing this a little late, so I don't know if my input can change much at this point, but here are my thoughts, accompanied by photos of the pot I built a few years back.

By way of introduction, my design emphasized portability and storage:





As you can see the pot is a bottom pour design, wouldn't all the trouble with pot height and manipulation of the ladle be nullified by moving in that direction?


For the burner, I used a Reil burner design, modified by putting a 90° elbow on the end to redirect the flame upwards. Ron Reil is a blacksmith and his webpage is full of designs for econonomical, home-made burners. But they are loud, as is any design that relies on high-pressure propane to bring air into the venturi.

In terms of heat output, the assumption is that any decent design that is properly aspirated will achieve complete combustion, so the heat output is simply a product of how much propane is being consumed. Thus a chart is constructed showing power as a product of gas pressure and orifice size, as on this page.



My pot has a single wrap of 1" Kaowool insulation under the steel cladding. I think it is worthwhile and makes a significant difference, but you lose so much heat out of the top that I don't know that it is worth spending any more effort trying to stop heat escape from the sides. Everyone who has used my pot has ended up fashioning some kind of top cover to try to slow down heat loss that direction.

[Alan in Vermont]

BattleRife,

I like that setup, especially the way it stores in such a small footprint. I went to that burner site link, there are some pretty knowledgeable folks involved. I looked at some DIY burner plans, before I decided on going with the banjo burner, but couldn't get to feeling comfortable with trying it and wanted to get away from the burner noise. I'm glad I went with the burner I did just for the luxury of being able to work quietly. I can barely hear my burner even at full throttle.

I thought about going bottom pour with mine and it might still happen, I have another tank that could be made into a bottom pour pot. If I was younger I would have liked to build a permanent smelting rig on a small trailer with leveling jacks and a roller conveyor to run the molds past the spout. The whole thing would have been convenient but too elaborate & expensive so I never got beyond the pipe dream stage.

It's nice to know that 1" of Kaowool will help appreciably with heat loss. At some point I will probably make an insulated cover for my pot as the 12" dia. has to be a huge heat loss over that much open surface area.

How big is the pot on yours? Comparing it to the propane tank I'm guessing 10" dia. by close to 18" tall. I wondered about how hard it had to be to ladle out of it and then went, "DUH, bottom pour, Idiot!"

I just got the last fitting I needed to tie two tanks together to feed my burner. I already had a connector hose but the outlet was internally threaded for the old style non-OPD connector. My regulator is OPD type. I looked locally for an adapter, ended up ordering one from Amazon. It arrived yesterday so that is ready to go now. I was inventorying my tanks this morning and realized one of them was OPD threaded but had the round valve handle,,, it had an adapter already screwed into the old type threads so now I have two adapters and one less refillable tank. ARGH!!

Supposed to be rainy here the next couple days so no smelting for a while.

[BattleRife]

How big is the pot on yours? Comparing it to the propane tank I'm guessing 10" dia. by close to 18" tall.

The pot is made from an 8" nominal pipe, so the actual internal diameter is about 8.25". The height is about 13" (35cm). The height was chosen because I wanted 100kg capacity with the pot filled to within 10cm of the top with pure lead.

[Alan in Vermont]

The new rig has been getting some use. A couple weeks ago I melted a batch of "mystery metal", odds and ends that I didn't know the composition of. 170 pounds total, sent a sample off to BNE and now I know what it is and can make a workable alloy out of. In was just given 4 pure lead ingots of 62# each. I was originally just going to cut them in half but with bad shoulders I decided to make them into more convenient ingots to put on shelves that are just about shoulder height. Now I know that the pot will hold 248 pound of lead, it was filled within 1/2" of the top. About 90 minutes to melt it and pour ingots,, gotta love the convenience of that big pot!

I just ordered insulation for it. Hopefully that will help a little with propane consumption as well as cutting down on the heat coming off the exterior.