Charcoal for flux

[rockrat]

How about pellets from a pellet grill?

[Gobeyond]

What is the final word on ashes,will they work? Your really,getting to the cheapest most abundant sources now!

[sundog]

Tree bark off dead trees or fire wood - it's free. Bark type garden mulch works okay, too.

[kevin c]

Charcoal briquettes sold for cooking food can include:[5][6]
Wood charcoal (fuel)
Lignite coal (fuel)
Anthracite coal (fuel)
Limestone (ash colourant)
Starch (binder)
Borax (release agent)
Sodium nitrate (accelerant)
Sawdust
Wax (some brands: binder, accelerant, ignition facilitator).
Chaff (rice chaff and peanut chaff)

Read the package for ingredients. I get real charcoal (made of wood only) and it works fine.

Isn't borax a common flux material? I wonder if it's a common enough ingredient and present in sufficient amounts in briquettes to be useful.

[country gent]

Mule team laundry soap is borax. Borax is more a steel flux than lead or solder. Used a lot in making Damascus steel. Also is used in tanning hides.

You want the appropriate flux for the material. For lead wood chips paraffin pretty much anything that burns off to carbon will work for casters needs. Rendering alloys back into mix.

[bangerjim]

Good grief. What happened to just using plain old sawdust from your shop. I have at least four 5 gallon buckets of the stuff from my saws, thickness planers, jointers, and thickness sanders. I keep it because the wife likes to use it in her plants.....EXCEPT walnut. That can poison animals and some plants. I used to just throw it in the garbage can until she found out. I generally use it, or if my little coffee can is empty, I just grab some dried leaves out of the yard & crumble them up. Carbon is carbon.

banger

[kevin c]

I hear you banger. But since the thread started off on a tangent, I figured it wouldn't be a bad thing to help it along and satisfy my curiosity at the same time. I have a few decades old bags of Kingsford briquettes that got wet. Nothing but crumbled bits on the bottom, and since the subject came up...

I usually use pine sawdust, which is free. In a pinch I'll use the dried pine needles from the tree next to my lead processing area. Seems about the same, though I admit my scrap, to start out with, is cleaner than most.

[osteodoc08]

Are you fluxing in your casting pot? At most I use a touch of beeswax. I question that because you mentioned a fan.

When I’m smelting raw material I’ve been using red oak shavings. Smells so good. Love it. But I do that outside when there is a slight breeze and cooler.

[kevin c]

Pine needles, sawdust and paraffin wax go into the processing pot. Beeswax goes into the casting pot (sometimes: I'm not sure it reduces the oxides that much seeing as I still end up skimming out a heavy dross that has rendered out a lot of metal, and BNE's analysis of unreduced dross and of the remains alloy noted no changes).

Charcoal would be in the processing pot for me, if I ever use it.

[GregLaROCHE]

I'd heard the wooden crates for engines & such were made to a spec. where they could be knocked apart,
and dropped in during assembly as the floor boards. That was done on the Model 'A's too.
Other crate pieces went into the wooden door and body frames for the upholstery to be attached to.
Whatever was left of the crates went to Kingsford.

Recycling is not a new concept.

[hollywood63]

https://www.kingsford.com/country/ab...0auto%20plants.

The original plant neighbors my home town ALOT of things came out of this area and this is one of many

[Wooserco]

Old post, I know. But I have to respond to this. While the current Kingsford plant may be in Oregon: the original Kingsford plant was in Kingsford, MI. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, next to Henry Ford's sawmill that cut the lumber for not only the early Fords, but also the side panels on the "Woodies". A relative, last name Kingsford managed the plant. Ford built the town to house the workers and their families. Built schools and churches.

Here is a bit of history: https://www.ironmountaindailynews.co...al-briquettes/

Indeed, it was to utilize the scrap that the sawmill produced.