Defcon-One
04-13-2011, 04:25 PM
I had a few pounds of stick-on wheel weights and a few pounds of clip-ons ww sitting around and I decided to melt them in my old 10 lb. Lee pot just to get them out of the way. I was gonna make one 5 pound ingot of pretty close to range lead composition.
Any way, I melted it all as usual with the pot set to a temp of about 700 degrees. It melted fine, then I fluxed with an old candle and cleaned out a few dozen clips and the stick on adhesive. The metal was oatmealy or lumpy on top and I could not get it to flux back in.
I had sorted the wheel weights and thought that I had all of the Zinc out and the temp didn't seem that high, but I still got this mess. I eventually spooned out about 1.5-2 lbs. of silvery gray, oatmeally mush and then fluxed again. It looked pretty good after a light skimming but a minute later more oatmeal appeared and after skimming that I started seeing dark purple layers and bright yellow to gold layers forming. It was a thick film all over the top that I could skim off into colored clumps.
In the end nothing helped and I wound up making the whole lot of about 5 pounds into decoy weights, since I didn't want to risk polluting my lead supply. It did cast OK but with some minor wrinkles which are common on the decoy weights anyway and it seems really soft now that it is cooled.
Anyone have any ideas what I got into? Would the purple and gold be from the zinc? I know that purple and gold can be from pure lead, but this metal was sure to have some Sn and Sb in it but there was a lot more color than I have ever seen before.
Thanks,
DC-1
Any way, I melted it all as usual with the pot set to a temp of about 700 degrees. It melted fine, then I fluxed with an old candle and cleaned out a few dozen clips and the stick on adhesive. The metal was oatmealy or lumpy on top and I could not get it to flux back in.
I had sorted the wheel weights and thought that I had all of the Zinc out and the temp didn't seem that high, but I still got this mess. I eventually spooned out about 1.5-2 lbs. of silvery gray, oatmeally mush and then fluxed again. It looked pretty good after a light skimming but a minute later more oatmeal appeared and after skimming that I started seeing dark purple layers and bright yellow to gold layers forming. It was a thick film all over the top that I could skim off into colored clumps.
In the end nothing helped and I wound up making the whole lot of about 5 pounds into decoy weights, since I didn't want to risk polluting my lead supply. It did cast OK but with some minor wrinkles which are common on the decoy weights anyway and it seems really soft now that it is cooled.
Anyone have any ideas what I got into? Would the purple and gold be from the zinc? I know that purple and gold can be from pure lead, but this metal was sure to have some Sn and Sb in it but there was a lot more color than I have ever seen before.
Thanks,
DC-1