When Fluxing are Plastic Safety Glasses enough?

[Mal Paso]

Or should I put some sawdust in the lead as well? [smilie=l:




Couldn't help myself. It's raining, perfect casting weather but power went out not likely to be back soon. I blended 125# of alloy this morning getting ready to cast. Guess I'll see if I have enough extension cords to run the pot on the generator.

[DCM]

I much prefer a full face shield to safety glasses for smelting, no tinsel fairy here yet but I would rather have full face protection.

I would not try to run the pot off the generator unless you have some very heavy duty extension cords or you can get it very close to the generator.
Most normal extension cords are of light gauge and will become heating elements themselves, Put the back of your hand against the cord after some use and you will see what I mean.
What you are feeling is the resistance of the cord acting like a heating element, this causes voltage drop to whatever is plugged in to the cord.
Depending on the load this voltage drop can cause damage to the load, the good news is your pot should be a purely resistive load and no harm should be done, it will however not be as efficient as it should be and to work properly it will put more load on the Gen. than if you were right next to it or used a decent cord.

[starmac]

We run a lot bigger draws than a lead pot off of extension cords and generators all the time. If you have a decent cord it should be no problem. If the cord is melting the snow away from it, it is overloaded.

[runfiverun]

my magma pots draw a little under 30 amps at start up, they run on about 15 easily after that.
i'd bet the lee draws less.

[geargnasher]

750 watts draws six and a quarter amps at 120 VAC.

As for the safety glasses, ask yourself if you'd be ok wearing just that if I threw a coffee cup of molten lead right at your face, because that is basically what the Tinsel Faery will do if she gets angry.

Gear

[RED333]

Shield all the way!!!
Tinsel Faery came my way one time, I learned the hard way.

[ErikO]

Face shield. Better to sound like Darth Vader than needing facial surgery.

[blackthorn]

Mal---if you use either full-face shield or just glasses to flux it won't make ANY difference----and YES I would use some sawdust as well!!!
(Could'nt resist either)!

[Mal Paso]

Sorry guys I should have indicated I was joking. It was one of those days you can only laugh about.

I has 125# of freshly mixed Alloy. Just as I went to turn the casting pot on the power went out. The utility said "Be prepared for an Extended Outage" and the local Fire Brigade confirmed. I have 13 KW of batteries to run the computer, TV, etc but facing of 2 days I had to get the generator out anyway. Got the generator connected and running, now what was I doing? I laid out 2 100' 12ga. extension cords. One for the pot, one for hotplate, fan, light. Got the fan going and was just about to plug in the pot and the power came back on. Plugged the pot back in the wall and used the warmup time to put extension cords away and shut the generator down. I did finally cast 500 MP 432640s, what a nice mold, but when I went to check Cast Boolits the DSL was down below 1kbps so I went to bed.