OOOUUUCH!!! My first smelting session!

[Jerry Lester]

Boy did I learn a fast, very hard lesson today!

Lesson #1 "Don't smelt wheel weights in your pour pot."

After about a solid hour of fluxing, stirring, and dipping with a teaspoon, I finally managed to get that mess cleaned up! LOL!

Lesson #2 "You can still get burnt through leather gloves!"

I couldn't find exactly what I figured I needed/wanted for smelting my weights into ingots. I already had a brand new Coleman stove, so I bought an 8" cast iron skillet, and a big steel spoon for my smelting.

Everything went great, and I ended up with several dozen mini-muffin ingots all nice, and clean, and ready to use. It took a while to get the first lead melted, and up to pouring temperature, but once I had a few pounds melted, I'd flux, scrape off the gunk, and add more weights, then repeat. It was actually a lot of fun once I got it going.

The hard lesson was learned when I was ready to quit, and decided to just pick up the skillet, and pour the last few ingots straight out of it. I was wearing really heavy leather gloves, and at first, I was fine. After about 30 seconds though, I burnt the heck out of my fingers with the handle, through the daggone gloves. When I glanced down at my hand, holding the skillet handle, there was smoke drifting off of it.

Naturally, I dropped the thing in the yard(I was outside), and proceded to splash the remaining lead in a 5' circle, while whooping, and hollering, and dancing like a blooming idiot! LOL! I did manage to jerk the glove off my right hand before it completely scorched the meat off though:roll: .

OH WELL. I'll figure it all out eventually...

[GP100man]

JL

other than using a good set of pliers ,the only thing i can advise you on is
be certian when adding cold metals to melting pot be ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN
that they are dry.

or the tensil fairy will pay you a visit!!!!!!

my smelting pots hold about 25# thats enuff to control with pliers
& i completly empty pot &cleanit while the other is on the heat
that way it dries it before it melts,

[kodiak1]

Jerry welcome to the club that would be the one of hard knocks. Some of us once in a while do something really stupid and manage to get away with it.
My dear old mother use to tell me Ken the good Lord looks after Drunks and Fools.
Thanks God.
Ken.

[Jerry Lester]

other than using a good set of pliers ,the only thing i can advise you on is
be certian when adding cold metals to melting pot be ABSOLUTLY CERTAIN
that they are dry.

or the tensil fairy will pay you a visit!!!!!!
.................................................. .................................................. .................................................. .............



That's probably the "only" thing I did know about hot lead before I started this venture. Years ago, a friend, and me used to cast lead sinkers for ourselves, and to sell. Of course, we didn't know squat about alloy's, and a little crud in a sinker didn't matter, so we just tossed anything lead we could find into a big iron pot, and dipped out a bit, and filled the sinker moulds.

At that time in my life, I was a pretty heavy drinker(he was too), and one evening after a few too many beers[smilie=1: , we got a little careless with our scrap lead. He dropped a big hunk in the mud, and proceded to drop it into the big iron pot. It blew hot lead everywhere, and I honestly don't know how we kept from getting seriously burnt. It looked like a small bomb went off in that pot! There was lead splattered all over the place.

[Buckshot]

..............HA! Live and learn .................or learn to live with it. Or maybe even better yet, learn what you can get away with . I'm reminded of a story told by Dean Grennell when he was new to casting. He was rendering some molten alloy in a skillet on the kitchen stove. He had to move the skillet for some reason so he picked it up with some hot mitts and as he turned with it, the seperate wooden handle picked that moment to come loose. He said the pan just tipped right over and molten alloy sluiced out onto the green kitchen linoleum. He said best of all, he was wearing house slippers at the time, HA! So he was hurting even before his wife got done with him :-)

I've seen it recommended in several magazines that you dress up like you're going on a moon walk or deep sea salvage operation to cast boolits. That's a bunch of crap IMHO. I can stand the small burn that is invariably going to happen via a lead splash or drip from the pot, but I do say, "Protect your eyes' regardless how much you hate to wear saftey glasses (if you don't wear glasses anyway).

Unless you're totally brain dead you won't be sticking your hands into the pot or trying to fish something out with bare fingers. Of course I have bent over and picked up a piece of steel I'd just torched off and you're right, a leather glove WILL quickly transfer heat if there's enough of it!

I cast boolits wearing whatever I put on when I got up that morning. I usually wear a leather glove on my right hand so I CAN pickup something hot in a hurry, or just to transfer sprues back into the furnace. I have a pair of tennis shoes and the upper part over the toes on each one has a melted hole in it made by a blob of molten lead. I don't recall the right one, but the blob that landed on the left shoe I do :-)

Mould in one hand, sprue knocker in the other and my left foot elevated up off the floor and I was shaking it to beat the band trying to keep that hot piece of metal MOVING in there, so as not to dwell against any particular toe for more then a nanosecond! Did I immediately go and put on my leather clodhoppers? Nope. I don't bnother with long sleeve shirts either. I personally detest long sleeve shirts to begin with., and don't own any anayway.

..................Buckshot

[OLPDon]

Jerry
Welcome to you and all the possibilities in casting. Back in the day of seamed cans many a worker in can company also learned about cold spoons in the solder bath.
As for pouring off the last bit of lead don't leave it in the bottom of the pot it will help speed up the melting next session. And you bet you got the bug now. I think everyone has done a I wish I hadn't of done that or why didn't I ask first.
No such thing as a dumb question with things that go "booom" or "sizzle"!!!!!!!
Casting just like Deep Dried Turkeys for Thanksgiving to Newbies can make for some interesting stories. Casting boolits is much safer then a hot oil bath for operator.
Don

[NVcurmudgeon]

These smelting stories, all amusing, and thankfully not too tragic raise a question in my mind. I wear ordinary work clothes and leather boots because that's what I always wear. I wear glasses because I like to see, a ball cap because I don't like the smell of burning hair, and a glove on my left hand because I am a southpaw. Never got burned bad in forty years of casting. I read all the posts about some casters casually melting eighty lb. of WW and then pouring it into ingots. Hah! I must be a candy*** because I do my smelting in my twelve lb. Potter casting pot, with handy pouring lip, and that's about enough hot metal for me to handle safely. The pot has two handles and I pour two 4X 1 lb. ingot moulds full. After the first set of ingots cools, I dump them on a steel plate and go back for one more fill. Then I get busy with adding weights and removing clips, preparing for another cycle. The thought of picking up, let alone pouring ingots from an eighty lb. skillet full is the stuff of nightmares to me! Doing a neat job of pouring from a twelve lb. pot is about my limit. With my modest setup, I can turn out about four dozen one lb. ingots in an hour, and my smelting attention span is about two hours. That's about eight hours to smelt the fruits of three years scrounging. There must be a magic trick to help you handle eighty lb. of molten WW with precision!

[Jerry Lester]

I wasn't pouring from an 80lb skillet:confused: .

I had about a pound or so of clean lead left in an "8 inch" cast iron skillet. That was why I just figured I'd pour it straight from the little pour spout in the edge of the skillet rim. I was using a big steel spoon to dip out enough lead to partialy fill a "mini-muffin" pan with 12 muffin places in it. Each little ingot probably only weighs about 1/4 pound.

Heck! I wish I was stout enough to man handle a 80 pound skillet full of lead!:-D

[Dale53]

Those of us who use a pot holding 80 lbs don't pick up the pot until it is nearly empty. I use a Rowell Ladle to dip out of the pot and fill my ingot moulds (from ½ lb to five lbs each). I make a production out of it and can do two pots (working capacity I have limited to 60 lbs even tho' it will hold 80) in about an hour. That will give me 120 lbs of clean metal. If I'm feeling spry I could go to 500 lbs before I stop. I have done 1000 lbs in a day with help but I'm getting too old and creaky for that kind of heavy labor.:roll:

Dale53

[robertbank]

If you want to see this boy dance watch when I drop a piece of sprue into a rubber boot. Wouldn't be a problem but for the fact the boot contained my right foot.

We casters got to be a stubborn bunch lessor men would have quite the first or 2nd time we pulled one of our dumber stunts. What did Will Rogers say about peeing on an electric fence.

Take Care

Bob

[Bret4207]

I'm with Dale, (who by the way, takes GREAT pictures that turn up in the ASSRA magazine. Kudos yet agin Dale!), on the Rowell ladle. An old noisy gasoilne plumbers furnace, a big dutch oven and the 1 lb Rowell ladle have turned a lot of scrap WW into usable ingots.

Funny thing- the best ladle I ever used was made from a soup ladle I found at the dump, back when we still had dumps. I put a little more bend in the bowl, hose clamped a wooden handle on it and used a bread pan for a pot. The ladle worked great!. Made the mistake of filling the pan with lead and I could never get it hot enough to melt again. It rusted away and wound up in the dutch oven.

[FISH4BUGS]

I bought a Rowell Ladle, a skimmer and a 13 section, 1.5 lbs each ingot mould from the Antimony Man. My cast iron pot can handle 60 lbs with ease on top of a 60,000 btu burner (from Buffalo Arms). A GOOD day could produce 500 lbs or more of ingots.
I don't think I have EVER tried to empty the cast iron pot directly into the ingot mould. It didn't seem like a wise thing to do, and the ONLY time I would ever do that is when I was all done with WW and needed to swtich to smelting pure Lintoype ingots. I have about 125lbs of lintype in long pigs to do that with someday. I have 75lbs of lino ingots to go through first.
Isn't it just way too much fun?

[snowman]

I have learned that by the time you start feeling the heat (as in slightly burning) through the welding gloves, it's time to get them off. Because the heat keeps coming through....and keeps hurting more. It's strange how quickly a 900 deg piece of metal can burn you through ya know, 1/8" of leather...hehe

My current setup is a coleman backpacking stove and a 16oz green bean can....seems to work OK, albeit, a little slow. Guess I just need to get the turkey burner out and get it done....I've only got about 50 lbs of WW left. Also need to find a new supplier for that.

What is the process? Heat to molten, add wax, stir, skim, then ingotize? Cause that's what I've been doing.

[NVcurmudgeon]

If you want to see this boy dance watch when I drop a piece of sprue into a rubber boot. Wouldn't be a problem but for the fact the boot contained my right foot.

We casters got to be a stubborn bunch lessor men would have quite the first or 2nd time we pulled one of our dumber stunts. What did Will Rogers say about peeing on an electric fence.

Take Care

Bob

Robert, one of the best things my father ever taught me was that a man must own 5,000 head of white-faced cattle to qualify to wear his pants tucked into his boots. As my "herd" consists of one small old dog, I wear my pants over the boots. Now you have given me another reason to continue this practice.

[robertbank]

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: My herd only consists of a dog and a bird and your Dad was right! The old rubber boots are a pain to tuck in but not near the pain that darn sprue gave me! Now where is that electric fence too much coffee this morning.

Take Care

Bob

[Dale53]

Tpr.Bret;
Thanks for the kind words. I LOVE to take gun pictures. The obsession has gained me entry into more than a dozen magazine covers and several different magazines.

You newbies who are looking for general advice in smelting and bullet casting to do a lot worse than taking a look at:

http://goatlipstips.cas-town.com/smelting.html

He does a real nice job of explaining and using readily available tools for the job.

ASSRA, the American Single Shot Rifle Association has a nice web site for general conversation but we need to update and put general information in "stickies" on our web site. We are exploring doing that and hope to have something up before too long. At any rate, if you want to check in look at:

http://www.assra.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl

Dale53

[VTDW]

Jerry,

I laughed pretty heartily as I read your first post.:drinks: Luckily, being an old and extremely experienced welder I understand completely about molten metals and them smokin gloves.:mrgreen: I once had a welding hood melt down completely on my head while my head and arm were extended and welding inside a wellhead that had to be kept at 600 degrees throughout the entire process. Oh yeah...my glove was smoking too.

Dave