COWW Smelting 4/5

[Jeff Maney]

Finally got good weather & time to do some COWW smelting on Saturday. Ran 4 pots and made 192 1# ingots cast in Lyman & RCBS molds. I had sorted these WW earlier and removed steel, zinc and SOWW's. Less than 10% loss including clips and the sorted SOWW. I have about 350# COWW & 100# of SOWW I will have to smelt later.
I stamp these ingots with a 3/8" "W" letter stamp. Makes an fast & permanent marking. When I smelt the SOWW, I will stamp those "L" since they are nearly pure lead. I had not done any casting since the late 1970's until last fall when our son got started bringing me WW's he was purchasing in eastern VA for $0.35/pound! Since then, I have smelted 1,224 COWW ingots and 134 ingots from some large isotope cores we bought for $1.00/pound/shipped.

Jeff

[62chevy]

Looking good and the price is right too.

Don't worry I can't spell either but the spell checker catches most of them. :kidding:

[pretzelxx]

Nice! I ended up paying 30 cents a lb of ww, the shop I called agreed via phone for 40 cents and I got there they wanted 60. They didn't have a scale so I low balled the weight. I'm averaging 15% loss from clips and dirt. I had 1/5 total weight steel and Zink. Jealous of your molds, so much easier to stack than muffins.

[Hooker53]

Jeff. Looks like you have a great stock pile going there. Let me ask since you recently have seen this. Through your exp, is most all COWW that are painted grey, Zink? Or are they lead as well? I had one or two float for a while so skimmed them off but have not tried all of them. Thanks for sharing your process.

Roy
Martinsville, Va.

[Jeff Maney]

Jeff. Looks like you have a great stock pile going there. Let me ask since you recently have seen this. Through your exp, is most all COWW that are painted grey, Zink? Or are they lead as well? I had one or two float for a while so skimmed them off but have not tried all of them. Thanks for sharing your process.

Roy
Martinsville, Va.
No, most painted clips have not been zinc but all zinc clips have been painted grey. A lot of lead clips have been painted white or grey. In this group, I saw more steel than zinc and both were a very small percentage.

And some of the zinc clips have 'Zn' molded in the clip and a lot of the steel have 'Fe' molded in also. I sorted with side-cutters, the zinc clips are too hard to mark with the cutters. A magnet on the end of a scribe confirmed the steel clips.



Jeff

[GlocksareGood]

Hooker. Sort by cutting. It is the only real way to be 100% sure(unless you can control pot temp with something like a pid). Cutting takes longer but given I wanted to make sure that I had clean metal I thought it worth the trouble. I ran off a ton of wheel weights this winter cutting every one.

I have a few zinc wheel weights that are not marked Zn.

[RogerDat]

If diagonal cutting pliers can nip a gouge it's lead, else not lead. If you care to sort the zinc from steel use a magnet on the ones the dikes won't cut into easily.
Paint is on WW to prevent corrosion of aluminum rims so it can be on WW of any type of metal.