jonk
11-23-2013, 07:14 PM
Well that was interesting.
I smelted some weights together and ran into the usual steel and zinc weights- but something new: a plastic weight. Made good flux though, lol.
When I got all the clips out, the melt oxidized like it might normally with pure lead- very quickly turned gold then blue. Even after fluxing 3 times, once with marvelux, once with saw dust, and once with wax. Yet it is most certainly very hard. And the temp wasn't higher than normal. Very strange.
Stranger still, it had the stink of pickles. Not sure if this smell was some of the residual plastic stuck to the walls of the pot or what.
Pouring it, it was lumpy and gloppy- almost as if it had zinc melted in; but I used a thermometer and never took the temperature high enough to melt zinc. Of course, that was an infrared, tested at the top once things started to melt. if I had the bad luck of getting a zinc one at the bottom before I could check the temp of the melt, and it was right up against the heat, oh well.
Not sure what was in this batch, but very puzzling indeed.
We'll see how it casts later. Fortunately, it was a small batch.
I smelted some weights together and ran into the usual steel and zinc weights- but something new: a plastic weight. Made good flux though, lol.
When I got all the clips out, the melt oxidized like it might normally with pure lead- very quickly turned gold then blue. Even after fluxing 3 times, once with marvelux, once with saw dust, and once with wax. Yet it is most certainly very hard. And the temp wasn't higher than normal. Very strange.
Stranger still, it had the stink of pickles. Not sure if this smell was some of the residual plastic stuck to the walls of the pot or what.
Pouring it, it was lumpy and gloppy- almost as if it had zinc melted in; but I used a thermometer and never took the temperature high enough to melt zinc. Of course, that was an infrared, tested at the top once things started to melt. if I had the bad luck of getting a zinc one at the bottom before I could check the temp of the melt, and it was right up against the heat, oh well.
Not sure what was in this batch, but very puzzling indeed.
We'll see how it casts later. Fortunately, it was a small batch.