salfter
12-17-2017, 02:22 AM
I don't know if I did something wrong, bought some of the wrong stuff, or what, but after looking at the various options for annealing brass (which I wanted to get into since some of my .30-06 brass have cracked at the neck), I decided to give the molten-salt bath method a whirl. After reading what I could find (starting here (http://www.65creedmoor.com/index.php?topic=6019.0) and branching out from there...think there was a thread or two here on the topic), I bought a new Lee 10-lb. lead pot to dedicate to the purpose. As for the salt, I considered ordering the low-temperature mix from here (http://www.hightemptools.com/Salts.html), but it was going to cost nearly twice as much to ship them here as they cost in the first place!
A bit of reading suggested that Spectracide Stump Remover ought to work. It's 100% potassium nitrate in granulated form. It wasn't available locally (not much call for it here in the desert, perhaps?), but Home Depot would send it to one of their stores for pickup, so I ordered two 1-lb. bottles of the stuff.
I poured some into the lead pot, cranked up the heat, and waited for it to melt. Instead of forming the thin yellowish-looking liquid I'd seen in YouTube videos on the subject, it formed a bubbly gray sludge that threatened to overflow the pot. I pulled out some slag-like material floating on top, which quickly solidified into a hard gray material. After unplugging the pot, the rest of it is now a solid puck in the pot that won't come loose. (Firing it up again would probably melt it loose enough that I could tip the entire pot upside down to drop it out.
I had the pot turned up to full power. Did I overheat the potassium nitrate and turn it into something useless? The label on the stump-remover bottle still says "contains potassium nitrate," so I don't think it's changed to something else. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to add water at any point, since it's going to get more than hot enough to boil off all of the water (and adding it to molten salt would produce something akin to the "tinsel fairy" who visits when water gets added to hot lead). Anybody have any idea where I might've gone wrong?
A bit of reading suggested that Spectracide Stump Remover ought to work. It's 100% potassium nitrate in granulated form. It wasn't available locally (not much call for it here in the desert, perhaps?), but Home Depot would send it to one of their stores for pickup, so I ordered two 1-lb. bottles of the stuff.
I poured some into the lead pot, cranked up the heat, and waited for it to melt. Instead of forming the thin yellowish-looking liquid I'd seen in YouTube videos on the subject, it formed a bubbly gray sludge that threatened to overflow the pot. I pulled out some slag-like material floating on top, which quickly solidified into a hard gray material. After unplugging the pot, the rest of it is now a solid puck in the pot that won't come loose. (Firing it up again would probably melt it loose enough that I could tip the entire pot upside down to drop it out.
I had the pot turned up to full power. Did I overheat the potassium nitrate and turn it into something useless? The label on the stump-remover bottle still says "contains potassium nitrate," so I don't think it's changed to something else. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to add water at any point, since it's going to get more than hot enough to boil off all of the water (and adding it to molten salt would produce something akin to the "tinsel fairy" who visits when water gets added to hot lead). Anybody have any idea where I might've gone wrong?