Wood Fired Melter

[Fugowii]

Anyone using a wood fired setup to melt WW into ingots?

[fallout4x4]

I've melted hundreds of pounds over a campfire.

[shooter93]

I used a wood and coke fire for years. And a cast iron hog butchering kettle.

[kendall yates]

A butchering kettle would weigh over a 1500 full wouldnt it?

[mrbill2]

Charcoal works also. I've melted aluminum with charcoal. Melts around 1300 degrees.
Mr. Bill2

[bbs70]

I have also used charcoal and wood to melt lead.
What a pain, get the melting pot to set right without tipping over, get wood, and you can't regulate the heat.
I switched over to a turkey fryer burner (That I got at a scrap yard for $5), thanks to the info I got on this forum.
Portable, easy to adjust the heat, less mess, and it seems I can melt more lead in a shorter time.:drinks:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a wood fire to melt lead, I love the smell of a wood fire.
But , with me at least, I find it cheaper to pay $15 for a tank of propane that will last for quite a while, than to drive and get a load of wood then have to store it somewhere in my way.

[KYCaster]

This works well for me.

12343

[Gun Junkie]

Fugowii,

My set up is similar to KyCaster's. I have plenty of wood that's too rotten for the fireplace or the wrong type to burn in the fireplace. Just stuff I pick up around the yard. It has to be cleaned up anyway and this way it serves a purpose. If I could figure out how to concentrate the heat and feed the fire I'd melt wheel weights with leaves. Maybe a hopper of leaves to dispense into a firebox? Anyway, as long as I keep feeding the fire I can melt wheel weights and pour ingots all day. It's a little slow, but I'm outside and get to enjoy a fire....it's better of course when it's chilly. I still wear a mask, but the fumes are well and truely vented.

Glad to know I'm not alone.

[Texasflyboy]

If I could figure out how to concentrate the heat and feed the fire I'd melt wheel weights with leaves. Maybe a hopper of leaves to dispense into a firebox?

We didn't use leaves. But scrap wood works pretty well.

What we did back on one of the ranges I shot at was to re-create out of local clay an oven that I had seen at one of the local Medieval festivals. We molded clay bricks using an old coca cola 4 compartment crate. Fired the bricks in a crude(er) temporary oven to get them set, and then built what I would loosely call a refractory oven to smelt the range lead. The oven was round, with a cleft in one side to feed wood. The top was open to accept a welded steel smelting pot. The wood fireplace inside the oven wasn't that large, probably no more than 2' square. Using an old piece of 2" pipe, we feed blown outside air into the fire with a geared blower assembly we cannibalized from a swap meet. All in all we probably had about $40 in the whole oven. The wood was free as the range was in a heavily wooded area.

When we fired it up, we fed it with pine or other local wood from the range that was dry and ready to burn. Once we had a fire going, we would spin up the geared blower (much like a forge a blacksmith uses) and get the heat up pretty fast. We had a small (about 2 gallon) welded steel pot sitting right over the fire and into that we dumped the range lead (dirt + lead + everything else). It didn't take long (about ~15 mins~ or so) before we had molten lead at the bottom of the pot. Skimmed off the trash on the top and poured out the lead into a rough ingot mould we made out of a 4" pipe cut in half sectioned to make about 6" long ingots. No attempt at temperature control was made. We just got the fire as hot as we could as fast as we could.

We ended up using this contraption twice. We mined about 600 lbs of lead out of the berm.

Hurricane Rita finished the oven and the range so we never put it back together. But it was a worthwhile effort for a time.

[Old Ironsights]

FWIW: A REALLY good way to burn wood for smelting is to use an old Washing Machine Tub (the one with the holes in he side) to act as your fire-pit. IMEX the holes let in just enough air for a proper hot fire and the tub itself contains the ash & debris nicely while remaining sturdy eough to support a 5gal stock pot of melt. Also, the ceramic coating on the inside acts somewhat like a refractory oven too...

If you need more air, it's no trick to open up more of the holes, ad if you need less, it's easy to fab a sheet-metal sleeve to act as a damper.