What might be in my melt?

[madsenshooter]

Long time ago I bought some race car ballast that casts curved bullets, the alloy pulls away from the mold in places as it cools. I can see that it had been against the mold sides at one time, it just pulled away as it cooled.

I just melted some of the alloy down, and it boils at 725 degrees! Just starting to boil, an occasional bubble. Any ideas? Whatever it might be, I'm betting the vapors are not good to play around in.

[JSnover]

Probably Wood's Metal (cerrobend, cerrosafe, lipowitz, etc) or something like it. It's a low-temp metal for casting (not boolits) and bending.

[madsenshooter]

The only element I found with a boiling point anywhere near 725 is mercury, and it's 50 degrees lower! Maybe alloying with another element raised its boiling point?

[bhn22]

You're certain it's boiling, and not just outgassing some sort of impurity? I've had lead based alloys red hot before (oops!), and they never boiled.

[btroj]

I doubt it is boiling.

See what temps it melts at. Let it hardens with a thermometer in it. Bring heat up while checking temp every minute or so. The temp will rise, level off, then rise again. The level portion tells the melt temp. That would help immensely in determining what it is.

[madsenshooter]

I'm not messing with it indoors anymore. Best description I can give is that it's bubbling like Lisa Douglas' hotcake mix, starts that at 725. Project for another day.

[bangerjim]

You did not tell us what temp it MELTS at. I have a Wood's metal-like alloy that melts at 158F and would definitely appear to boil if I ever heated it to 725!!!! That's even too hot for normal cast ing work normally.

Let us know where it STARTS to melt. I use my "banger's alloy" as I call it, to harden my mix. With ~55% Bi and 14% tin, it works very well but DOES bubble slightly when I lower a 2oz ingot into the pot of pure lead. (and to answer those chemists out there...there is NO Cd in there! So it is safe.)

banger

[el34]

I completely understand the curiosity but if it can't make boolits it's really close to moot.

[madsenshooter]

Worse comes to worse, I have a jig mold and was thinking about getting back into fishing. And, I need a new weight for the bottom of my car jack rifle support. But, like I said, it's going to remain a mystery for awhile, it first melts a bit below 600, 5 something I remember.

[WILCO]

I'm not messing with it indoors anymore.

I'd sell it off as scrap and then purchase a known alloy of quality.

[cricco]

You can send it to me. I'll pay shipping to take that evil stuff off your hands. It's for the children. ;)

[madsenshooter]

I have about 80lbs of it! When it gets warmer I'll cook off whatever is in there down in the old garage. It just about has to be a metal, what else would melt but wouldn't vaporize until you reached 725 degrees? Tire rubber could still be decomposing at that temp, according to some research I found online about recycling tires. Whatever it is just needs boiled out.

[JSnover]

How did the boolits look, other than being bent from uneven cooling? And how much did they weigh? If they were about the right size but way off on weight, that would tell you they are something other than lead.

[madsenshooter]

I can't say and they're all gone, Hamish got most of them! I warned him they shoot around corners! When I last tried using this stuff I was likely casting near but slightly below the alloy's bubbling point, but I didn't notice the bubbles at that time. The point is only mute if it can't be salvaged, that's the reason behind trying to discover just what it is. Cooking until it bubbles no more ought to take care of the offending contaminate whatever it might be.

[JSnover]

Just as well. You'd have to buy curved sizing dies and get someone to put a curve in your chamber...

[madsenshooter]

Some of the voids were almost imperceptible, others quite obvious. I was thinking zinc contamination until I noticed the bubbling. I sent off a little piece to get it analyzed.

[fastfire]

http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Bilder/Sturmgewehre/Krummlauf-1.jpg

http://www.sinopa.ee/sor/bo001/bo10sn/bo10sn01/sn018401.jpg

http://www.sinopa.ee/sor/bo001/bo10sn/bo10sn01/sn018402.jpg





I can't say and they're all gone, Hamish got most of them! I warned him they shoot around corners! When I last tried using this stuff I was likely casting near but slightly below the alloy's bubbling point, but I didn't notice the bubbles at that time. The point is only mute if it can't be salvaged, that's the reason behind trying to discover just what it is. Cooking until it bubbles no more ought to take care of the offending contaminate whatever it might be.

[madsenshooter]

If I could just get them consistent, I'd be so much cheaper if the bullet flew in a curve. A lot easier than building the guns linked to above. I should note, most of the bullets I cast with the offending alloy were Eagan designs that shoot very good without the voids.

[madsenshooter]

I had occasion to melt the pot down again. The power went off for awhile last night and the only alternative heat source I have is a propane fish fryer. Luckily, I have a very small house. Nothing gets liquid until the stuff is slightly over 400, so there must not be any low temp alloys in it. I didn't heat it enough to boil and the power came back up, experiment done for now.

[madsenshooter]

Analysis came in and there's .7% Hg in there. Pretty big dutch oven so it would be capable of producing more Hg gas than I want in my little house. I don't think the mercury is all that is bubbling though, there's some other black impurities in it. So when it gets warmer I'll take it and see if I can't get it up around 1000 degrees, keep it there and carbon flux until it stops gassing out. It's otherwise not a bad mix, 87.7%Pb, 6.4%Sn, 4.25%Sb, .5%Cr, .09%Cd. Total 99.69%, I don't care what the remaining .31% is.

[Littleton Shot Maker]

IF it there is much zinc it will look almost like burnt yellow, golden in color.

Temps for melting and boiling change when various type of metals get put in. Pure lead will go liquid at X degrees but add tin at %5 and the temp at which it turns liquid will now be Y degrees.

I have had lead boil, right after it smoked like hell, run, run run. vent that stuff good. If enough vaporized lead get into your air- lungs you won't have to worry about lead poisoning any more, the vapor will remove or bond to the oxygen ( there is a word for that) from the area and you will drop like a fly. don't try and prove this wrong, hate to see some one get hurt or dead. Same as the car in the garage running, warming up in the morning, open the door right??


Cadnium?? Cd spell checkers--- Toxic , give off a bluish hue--- sucks too, it acts just like what you described about how it pulls away in certain parts of the molds. Zinc will turn your mold golden inside, after that even with good lead, the mold will never make another good bullet ever again, they may or may not release, the surface of the bullets will look a little like the surface of the moon. Pock marks, voids, rough, no sharps edges.
Chromium-- Cr can be bad news, it's harmful - toxic- should not be handled at all
Salinium-- can be in that .3% and that no better that the other two.
Mercury too, damn you got it bad now

NONE of these should ever be present in your bullets lead, unless you want to toss it all out.

I know this first hand and had to replace several sets 10-12+ sets of eight molds per caliber, for the big magmas. I tossed out the melting pots, the ingot molds out stir spoons, everything that ever came into contact with that alloy mix up. and scraped out about 4000 pound of junk lead ballast weights.

I'd scrap it, and who knows what else, it came into contact with, pot, molds, all of that can now be replaced.

You got something real close to the **** we got in 1991 in a bad lead deal- if its real cheap, there are reasons. BUT the bubbling is exactly like what we had, plus some of it had water traped in the pores and they would almost explode into the air like a gushing fire hydrate of 725 f molten lead, coming right at you or your hand.

[Magana559]

Sounds like car batteries were used.....but hg ie bad news

[madsenshooter]

I'm pretty sure the pulling away was just gassing out, no harm done to any of my molds, aluminum, brass or iron that I tried casting with the goop. You know Alan B. I have some other alloy, a lead based babbitt, and there's been times that I fired up the pot and wasps starting falling dead from a nest in the ceiling. It wasn't boiling or super hot, nor smoking, but something sure was knocking them down. Probably in too minute a quantity to do me any harm. This ballast has never been in that pot, so it wasn't remnants of anything from it that killed the wasps. Makes one wonder sometimes just what we're fooling with. I'll boil it out first, see how it works, if it don't, we have this pretty orange acidic creek runs through town, coal mine drainage, it eats aluminum quick I've found, I'll see how fast it eats 80lb of race car ballast. I like doing experiments on the nature of things. Oh, yea, a good portion of the .31% is likely copper. Gaschecks and bullet jackets sometimes disappear in my alloys. Don't know why the analysis wouldn't have caught that though.

[Littleton Shot Maker]

When a qualitative and quantitative test is done they are typically done to a set standard, 5 point or 7 point 10 point etc, that is the number of items they are looking for, so if looking at a 5 point test the 5 highest items in that alloy is what comes out and the left lever is that .31% of Other. the more detailed the more it costs to have tested. Some times you have to tell them you are looking for a certain thing like copper.

IF you get bad stuff in the alloy you can't BOIL it out under normal home conditions. Smelters can because they SCRUB the product ( chemical treatments to strip certain things) heat it up and capture the off gassed junk etc.

You can not also just get pure lead and dilute it down, I tried and messed up a ton more good lead trying.
Our rule of thumb, bad lead is bad- turn it into the smelter in trade for good alloy, let them send it to Doe Run, or Seafab, or etc......

been there done that, won't ever do it again , don't need that t-shirt
please be carful wear respirators, they are affordable these days, even small amounts are doing harm, slowly, over time- heavy metal exposure ( kiss- back sabbath-thin lizzie) sorry , a little heavy metal humor.

Bugs don't have lungs like we do, they absorb much of the air they need via the skin, shell, 'exoskeleton' ( i am not an entomologist ) and are way more subject to environmental conditions, and they are displaying the classic symptoms of oxygen starvation or straight out poisoning. Albeit at a much more tiny scale than to yourself.

We can filter some stuff out but if vaporized it goes right to the lungs into the blood. Get tested please, if you can, simple blood draw, have had a couple in my time.

BE safe!

[madsenshooter]

I hear ya, but you know I gotta try. All attempts will be done outdoors. There is arsenic in the lead based babbitt I mentioned, could be that's what got the wasps. Did I mention that I washed my hands in leaded gasoline several times a day during my formative years? I was a garage monkey.

Car batteries, good thought, the casings might be the black stuff I'm seeing in some of the ingots. I did get some good bullets with this stuff out of an iron mold, I would suppose because I was able to cast at a temp lower than the alloy's gassing point. But I don't need 80lbs of Belding and Mull's 311168 despite their good accuracy.

It'll be quite awhile before I do anything with the ballast, I have good alloy to use.

[Littleton Shot Maker]

Arsenic?? yeah that could be it too.
I will have to research that a bit, shot has Arsenic it from the towers, but it is Liquid Metallic arsenic, I have to check if that is "soluble" or if it wants to UN-bond from the lead and at what temp it will do that at .The levels of Arsenic can be a variable and does add some hardness to an alloy when use right but I would not do it - or use it. Knowing how much and what kind it is would be helpful, but that's not a molding issues, that's breathing it in and being dead issue, or long term kidneys problems, liver, pancreas (bad) problems that build in time or lung issues too

- You are not doing tons, not doing it all day - 5 days a week etc....May be so infinitesimal that you may never have any issues. I am not a doctor, nor do I claim to know what I talking about!!
BUT you did see the wasps go down!

[madsenshooter]

Alan, I appreciate your concern, not a lot of arsenic, about the same as in WW. I'm sorry, today is a bad day for me. The Cd should come out with copper sulphate treatment, Sn will come out with that too, but I can replace it. The Hg should mostly vaporize if the temp is high enough. Not sure about a reactant for the Cr, I'll check that out later. I already live in one of the most contaminated lands in the US. Worst acid rain, highest air pollution, acid mine drainage, probably where the most stuff from Fukishima fell if I followed the jet stream right back then, first over WA and OR, dipped down over the bread basket, then here. I'm still going strong at 56 despite being given the original Salk vaccine that was contaminated with a cancer causing monkey virus, unlike about 25% of my kindergarten class who have already succumbed, and unlike my poor old dad who I've watch suffer for over 20yrs from it. Let me tell you, for some people, depending on genetics, that stuff is hard to grow up with (don't think I ever did mentally)! Symptoms are similar to Lyme disease, juvenile arthritis, etc. Some say I'm not all there! I'm not a doctor either, but I was a nutrition w/biological science major in the 90s. That's basically pre-med courses, but the premmies didn't have to take nutrition courses. Some amazing herbals grow in the 10,000 or so acres of woods I live in the midst of.

[Littleton Shot Maker]

I feel you.
Just wanted to put that out there, you know what you have, some guys may read this and have something along those lines and may choose that it might not be worth it to mess with crazy, unknown hunks of strange lead.

Go informed, go prepared, and go all the way.

seriously, take care of your self and any one that reads this, I am not soapboxing just worry for my fellow sportsman.
stay warm too.

[madsenshooter]

It finally got warm enough to boil the mercury out of my alloy. I'd checked around online, and mercury will boil out of a metallic mixture. It didn't take long, the bubbling stopped within 10min of hitting 725. I had a little cadmium in there too, so treated the mix with copper sulphate. Before putting the alloy into ingots I cast a few 316365 bullets, I now have usable stuff. The sulpher really works as a grain refiner! I never did like the grainy texture of bullets cast with WW. This stuff casts more like some of the lead based babbits I use for target bullets, real smooth and they likely have a low friction coefficient like the babbits. They drop .001 smaller and weigh 10gr heavier, so the lead content is still high. Special thanks to the fellow who did the analysis for me! Now on to getting some 316365s cast and a load developed for shooting out of my Krag at Camp Perry this year.