first time smelting

[mizzouri1]

me and my brother spent sunday smelting coww and outdoor range lead. had about 100lbs of ww, started out slow and low heat and found a few zinc floaters, after cleaning out all trash i raised the temp to around 675 degrees then fluxed 3 times with pine shavings. lead looked clean and shiney so we poured in to muffin pans and they popped out easy and looked good.

the range lead was a different story. poured about 85 lbs in the pot and after an hour looked under the lid and no melting?? after another hour looked again and still no melt?? turned up the heat a little and after a half hour looked and still no melt?? decided to poke around the mix a little and wala! there was about 2-3 inches of trash on top and the lead was all melted underneath where i could not see or tell that it was melting. a lesson learned and will be many more i'm sure.

i felt like a real dumb a$$ lol, because i have poured many of sinkers over the years but never delt with anything that had so much trash as the range scrap did. out of 85 lbs there was 20lbs of trash.

all in all it was a good day and no one got hurt :D

[leeggen]

good job. Yip in 80LB of range scrap there probably was alot of trash, jackets dirt and such. All in all youhad a good day.
CD

[bangerjim]

Remember....."a watched pot never boils".

And you gotta watch your range scrap melts constantly. Those layers of gunk are very common. You gotta stir it frequently or you will have the situation you described above.

Have fun with your new lead.

banger

[NewbieDave007]

Sounds like a good day to me.

[dikman]

I posted recently about my experiences with melting range scrap. I know when the stuff is melting because the pile starts sinking, but once it looks like its melted as soon as I start stirring up comes this incredible mass of black gritty crud!! Quite amazing, really.