cf_coder
02-21-2012, 12:08 AM
Well, I finally went and bought a 6 quart cast iron dutch oven from Harbor Freight this weekend and decided to try melting some of the range scrap I've been collecting for the past month or so...
1) I originally tried smelting over a brick fire pit that I built out of some leftover pavers I had laying around. Quickly found out that feeding that fire is a full time job and that coals are not enough to get the pot hot enough unless it's sitting in them...
2) It's really easy to overfill a 6 quart dutch oven with range scrap. Not from the perspective of it overflowing, but from the perspective of having to dig through 3+ inches of empty bullet casings and dirt.
3) Dirt is a reallllly good insulator! I didn't realize how much dirt was in my buckets of scrap. And these were hand picked out of the berms, not raked up or run through a sieve. Made getting those bullets that were towards the top of the pile to do anything really difficult.
4) A coleman stove is really just a smidge too small to properly heat up a 6 quart dutch oven. It'll do it, but it takes a long time and is a waste of gas.
In the end, I removed about half of what I had put into the pot to melt, dealt with the copius amounts of dirt, casings and dross which seemed to take forever! Fluxed twice with dead leaves from the yard, and then poured some muffin pan ingots. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. :-) I'm going to go buy a turkey fryer this week and give it another run this week. I think a lot of my frustration came from my inability to keep the pot hot enough. I had the lead solidifying around the edges until I was able to get the pot perfectly centered on the burner. It all turned out ok and I'm probably going to add these ingots to another pot later this week just to blend them all together...
Cheers!
1) I originally tried smelting over a brick fire pit that I built out of some leftover pavers I had laying around. Quickly found out that feeding that fire is a full time job and that coals are not enough to get the pot hot enough unless it's sitting in them...
2) It's really easy to overfill a 6 quart dutch oven with range scrap. Not from the perspective of it overflowing, but from the perspective of having to dig through 3+ inches of empty bullet casings and dirt.
3) Dirt is a reallllly good insulator! I didn't realize how much dirt was in my buckets of scrap. And these were hand picked out of the berms, not raked up or run through a sieve. Made getting those bullets that were towards the top of the pile to do anything really difficult.
4) A coleman stove is really just a smidge too small to properly heat up a 6 quart dutch oven. It'll do it, but it takes a long time and is a waste of gas.
In the end, I removed about half of what I had put into the pot to melt, dealt with the copius amounts of dirt, casings and dross which seemed to take forever! Fluxed twice with dead leaves from the yard, and then poured some muffin pan ingots. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated. :-) I'm going to go buy a turkey fryer this week and give it another run this week. I think a lot of my frustration came from my inability to keep the pot hot enough. I had the lead solidifying around the edges until I was able to get the pot perfectly centered on the burner. It all turned out ok and I'm probably going to add these ingots to another pot later this week just to blend them all together...
Cheers!