upcoming project

[Bill8914]

Guys I am starting all over again after many years (50 or so) not casting anything. Many years ago a marriage gone really bad & her dad being the county sheriff prompted me leaving in the middle of the night with the clothes on my back and traveling far. I had a lot of reloading gear, casting equipment, guns etc etc. No idea whatever happened to all of it as I never looked back.
Well I want to start casting again so have been slowly accumulating stufffff to do it. Managed to find a bunch of wheel weights but my old memory tells me that stuff is pretty dirty but good when cleaned up to nice lead. Don't want to put weights into my new pot so I'm going to build a cleaning set up using a propane burner, old cast iron skillet, thermocouple and a PID to manage heat using a 110 V solenoid to turn the fire off and relight it. I made custom knives for many years and used molten salts to heat treat with and a PID controlled heat at +- 5 degrees and set point was 1550 F. I am a hobby blacksmith and my forges are also PID controlled. So I will make this, melt weights in it, not hot enough just in case of any zinc, scoop out the crap, flux the crud out of it and cast into a muffin tin for ingots. Those ingots can then go into the good bottom pour pot. Any of you folks doing this?

[farmbif]

I make every effort possible to only put lead wheel weights in melting pot, I pinch each piece with pair of dikes before it goes in pot just to be sure but I'm only melting down 20 or so pounds each melting session not hundreds of pounds. from what others have said getting sink melted into your pot of lead can cause problems best to be avoided.
I bet its gonna be like riding a bike for you it will all come back from past experience you have.

[Mk42gunner]

I don't have a PID, but I can see where it would be a good idea to use one. I do however clean up, i.e. smelt, wheelweights and other random lead(ish) alloys into clean ingots. Clean ingots are the only thin that goes into any of my electric casting pots.

Robert

[monadnock#5]

Guys I am starting all over again after many years (50 or so) not casting anything. Many years ago a marriage gone really bad & her dad being the county sheriff prompted me leaving in the middle of the night with the clothes on my back and traveling far. I had a lot of reloading gear, casting equipment, guns etc etc. No idea whatever happened to all of it as I never looked back.
Well I want to start casting again so have been slowly accumulating stufffff to do it. Managed to find a bunch of wheel weights but my old memory tells me that stuff is pretty dirty but good when cleaned up to nice lead. Don't want to put weights into my new pot so I'm going to build a cleaning set up using a propane burner, old cast iron skillet, thermocouple and a PID to manage heat using a 110 V solenoid to turn the fire off and relight it. I made custom knives for many years and used molten salts to heat treat with and a PID controlled heat at +- 5 degrees and set point was 1550 F. I am a hobby blacksmith and my forges are also PID controlled. So I will make this, melt weights in it, not hot enough just in case of any zinc, scoop out the crap, flux the crud out of it and cast into a muffin tin for ingots. Those ingots can then go into the good bottom pour pot. Any of you folks doing this?

You have a much, much better grasp of the fundamentals than the average new caster. I'll be getting advice from you very shortly I expect.

[mdi]

Your approach sounds great. I started with a Coleman stove and a 2 qt SS pot. Worked just fine for melting and cleaning scrap. I worked around heavy equipment/pick ups for quite a while, often balancing tires, so I never have any trouble sorting lead from zinc, I just pick them up and toss the light for size weights. I got used to a decent temperature control without a PID and have made some very good bullets so I haven't needed one. Maybe I'll look into that...

I too suffered from a messy (CA) divorce and had to sell all my reloading equipment to eat and I lived in my camper for a bit, but after 10 years I was able to get started over...