Last weekend when to a friend and shooting/hunting partners place and we did a little bit of Smelting.
The story starts with several years of WW gathering, begging and buying. A few scrap yards and a lot of tire shops.
First we would empty out the wheel weights on a steel trailer with a diamond tread pattern and clean out a bunch of the dirt and start sorting. We sorted off ZN and steel WW and separated all the Soft Lead stickons to be smelted at a later date.
Firing up the 1200lb pot with a barrel for a heat jacket and LP torch as a heat source. The PID I believe was from Hatch, the lead(not lead) was inserted into a steel pipe so it could be allowed to set down into the melt
Clips were separated between each loading by a Basket closely fitted to the pot. Making clip separation a 1 step 2 minute process.
More weights simply added with a shovel. All was repeated until pot was a full 1200 LBS.
At this point we alloyed the WW with an additional 1% Tin
Pouring was into 5lb homemade IGNORANCE trays and passed along in assembly line type fashion. We were running 4 trays with 3-4 guys.
The tray would leave the pot and be placed on a cooling tower built from a barrel and a simple pump. Water was cooled with snow. This is the single thing that makes this whole process fast and efficient.
The Ingots were cool and ready to be removed from the tray in about 8-10 seconds, than would be stamped with a crude tool(sorry MessyBear) to remind us that they were WW plus 1%tin.
We were able to produce about 1200 LBS on day one and another 1050 on day two, (if our bars averaged 5lbs, They might be slightly over but we only weighed a dozen or so). One big project in the books that will allow more time for Casting and shooting in the future!
Any questions would be happily answered by Messy Bear or Myself. Its a lot of work but a fun setup to be around!!
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Originally Posted by Gewehr-Guy
more bulls
