Help please!!

[dmize]

I have cast ingots before from wheel weights into a muffin pan.
I didnt really know what I was doing other than melting lead and removing clips,fluxing and removing dross. The ingots were frosty, the bullets i then cast for my .480 were frosty and they leaded the **** out of my .480.
I figured that I had mixed Zinc into my alloy or cooked out something that I really needed and have used those ingots for fishing weights only.
Well after reading several posts on here, i started out again tonight. I filled my pot full of raw HAND SORTED WW. The pot got hot enough that the paint was flash burning,so I turned down the heat. I then waited untill clips were floating, I then dumped in to big handfulls of saw dust,waited untill turned to ash,then stirred the mess with a 3/4 hardwood dowel, I the tried to carefull remove ONLY the clips and no dross,once clips were gone I added more sawdust,then stirred the ash with the dowel. I then moved the dross to one end of the pot,the melt was shiney and perfect looking,I then ladled it into my new LEE ingot mold. the friggin things came out FROSTY!!!!! I turned the heat down untill melt turned to oatmeal,then increased the heat and tried again... MORE FROSTY INGOTS!!
WTH am I doing wrong??
[smilie=b:[smilie=b:[smilie=b:

[*Paladin*]

Wheel weight ingots always look frosty. It doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong. I've never had any WW ingots come out shiny. Now pure lead on the other hand, often comes out shiny.

[onondaga]

I think you may be a poor guesser of temperature of the alloy in your pot. A casting thermometer would be a suggestion. You need about 700-750 for fluxing to work and about 600- 650 to cast. Few beginners have the patience to wait for alloy to drop from 800 to 650 and then they get frosty bullets and don't understand why.

Without a lot of experience with your pot or burner settings by trial and error and reading your castings, it is hard to start without a thermometer for many and they wind up pretty unsatisfied. Consider a thermometer to help your particular problem.

Boolits and ingots alike frost more the hotter the alloy is and the quicker it cools. That is why a mold about 100 degrees below the alloy temp gives the best castings and that is why you see so many inventive methods of properly heating molds before casting,

I am not saying you have to heat ingot molds. Frosty of ingots is harmless. You could prove it to your self and torch an ingot mold before you pour into it--but don't get it hotter than 800, that will make it frost too. You can deliberately get a lot of frost by cooling a freshly poured ingot mold with water spilled around it.

Gary