is 74% of usable lead normal?

[par0thead151]

of 100# of WW scrap lead i have, i net 74# of ingots.
i do not have much in the ways of zinc WW's just a few of the zinc stick-on's and the occasional zinc standard WW.
i was under the impression that usual yield is 15-20% loss of total weight converting to ingots.
thanks
other than that, my first smelting day went well 141# if ingots, and 52# of scrap.
smelting was much easier than i had anticipated. using a blast furnace sped things up considerably. coal for the fuel, dutch oven sitting on the top, throttle the air to regulate temps taken by my thermometer...
how long does it usually take you guys to smelt 200# of WW?
thanks

[Ole]

I did about 180lbs of clip-ons today and got about 140 lbs of ingots. That's a 77% rate. Usual for me is around 80% for clip ons. It's a little more for stick ons if I sort them well. I did my smelting in about 3 hours. I wasn't rushing.

Sorry i'm not more scientific than that. I got better things to do than lug 5 gallon buckets of WW's onto my bathroom scale. :mrgreen:

[snaggdit]

Small WW = more clips. With little zinc you seem a tad low, but in the park. On my turkey frier, the first 30# takes 15-20 min, then after making some ingots I add to remaining liquid and it melts faster. 20# increments 10 min. About the time it takes for my ingots to cool enough to dump. 100# maybe 2 hours to finish and be cleaned up.

[badgeredd]

Your scrap rate may a little high, but I noticed that mine can be higher if there is a large quantity of small weights. Normally mine runs about 80% to 84% ingots. The shop I get my weights from usually has several truck weights which tend to be quite large. Hope that answers your concerns.

Edd

[par0thead151]

thanks for the info. i did have a good amount of small wheel weights in there...
is it a bad idea to not pull pout the stock on weights? there are not many of them in my batches, so i have just let them melt in with my mix.

[Ole]

thanks for the info. i did have a good amount of small wheel weights in there...
is it a bad idea to not pull pout the stock on weights? there are not many of them in my batches, so i have just let them melt in with my mix.

I cull my stick ons and run them/keep them (as pure lead) in a separate bucket.

I load pure WW's + 2% tin for my SKS bullets.

I mix 1/3 ratio of pure lead to WW's and add 2% tin for my .44 bullets.

It's best to keep your casting ingredients separate, I think. I have one of those letter die sets that I got from harbor freight to label my ingots with.

[Jaybird62]

Here's what I posted 3 weeks ago:

A couple of days ago I paid $35 for a full 5 gal. bucket of WW at a local tire shop. Since I wanted to figure out what my final cost per pound I saved everything and weighed it after smelting the usable scrap. Here's what I learned:

17.04 lbs - Steel clips and Fe stick-on weights
5.96 lbs - Zn
9.63 lbs - Pb from stick-on lead
130.9 lbs - WW aloy
1.4 lbs - tire stems, bolts, other misc. trash


The 140.53 pounds of Pb and WW alloy wound up costing me 24.9 cents per pound. Although not exact, it appears that the 5 gal. bucket had 85% useable material.

[mooman76]

It's been a few years since I've done any but I was yielding about 90%. I did have very little trash in mine and a few years back there weren't allot of zink WWs to contend with or at least I didn't have any except a rare few. I am including the stick-ons though. and probubly had few of them back then too.

[JIMinPHX]

It's best to keep your casting ingredients separate...

+1 on that. It's easy to mix things together. Getting them back apart again is a bit of a trick.

[runfiverun]

i figure about 80% from a bucket.
i leave the little stick-ons in my melt and sometimes re-run some range scrap with my ingots too.
if i need them harder i have lino to bump up the hardness.
i save and scrounge pure also, to soften up the alloy as needed.
but i save the stick-on's separate.
man, how does he get any consistency you ask?
volumne.
that and i have a pot that does over 100 lbs so i make a batch of alloy that size and cast all 100 lbs into a single type of boolit.
i also use a 40 lb pot to cast with so it doesn't really take that long to put 100 ingots into the pot.