Resmelting Dross

[clodhopper]

I have been saving some dross from smelting.
Started putting it in a metal bucket, the from weight of the bucket. it was evident guite a bit of lead was still in there.
So I punched some holes on the bottem of an old spagetti sauce can 26 oz size and filled the can with my dross, then put the can in the wood stove for the night.
Once the stoves cools off there a ingot, rather odd shapped layin in the ashes.
Im getting from 1lb to 1lb 13 oz ingots from 26 oz of what I thought was waste.
This might be a little hard to pull off for those of you that are not blessed with a wood stove.
You could use a camp fire, throw the can of dross in after the weines have been roasted, collect your ingot in the morning.

[bumpo628]

Nice save!

Another way to do it would be to toss the dross back into the next smelt. Flux it a heavily and you should get most of it back.

[Longwood]

I put it in a can or pot on a butane burner for a while then when it is cooled, I dump off the junk and keep the metal that went to the bottom.

[arjacobson]

I just throw all the dross in my soon to be smelted wheel weight bucket..Seems like I always have a partial bucket of wheel weights waiting to be processed into ingots.

[clodhopper]

This dross I'm working through is the splatters from an indoor range, there is a lot of plated bullets in there, the plating makes many surfaces.
Perhaps it is surface tension but throwing that back into another melt would still take out the same amount of lead when it was scraped off the top of the melt, seperating the lead from the little surfaces seems to work with the help of gravity in the hot, oxygen-less enviroment of the wood stove.

[Von Gruff]

in the hot, oxygen-less enviroment of the wood stove.

Dosent a wood fire need oxygen to burn. [smilie=1:

Von Gruff.

[clodhopper]

You have a point, Von Gruff.
There certainly is a lot of co2 avaliable inside the wood stove.
And I did not say oxygen void.
Maybe..just maybe...it the oxides from the lead stuck to all those copper particals that's keeping the fire going.

[lavenatti]

I save my dross and resmelt it also. I don't use the woodstove because the ashes go into the garden, don't need to lower my IQ more than I already have.