I smelt it...

[will-mo]

I've been lurking for a week of so and you convinced me to start casting my own. My first step was to get some ww. Yesterday I started my WW Farm and harvested about 160 pounds. Cost about $35. I grabbed an old cast iron dutch oven, some utensils and a Bass Pro fish fryer (propane) and started at it.

I'm not sure about the Fluxing part, I melted the WW and removed the clips and steel/zinc floaters. Then added about a 1x1x.5 of parrifin wax. it flamed up and I stirred things around. Then skimmed off the little off color stuff that was remaining.

I smelted a little more than half the WW and ended up with 80 pounds of ingots. As I was filling the muffin pans, an amount of skim was forming. I kinda just pushed it aside and kept filling the muffin pan. I don't have a thermometer, so I don't know what the temp was. Was it Tin? Didn't I flux enough?

Thanks for the help guys.

[zuke]

That there look's like a nice day's work!

[RayinNH]

Will-mo, first off welcome to the neighborhood. Some of the dross that you pushed aside may have been tin, but not necessarily. Even if you flux well you will still get a little crud floating on top of the pot. Some of this will be impurities from the lead some will be junk from the pot that gets scraped off when you stir...Ray

[Slow Elk 45/70]

Hullo- Will-Mo, and welcome. Glad to see you jump right in and have at it.

The next purchase you need to make is the thermometer you don't have, as you know, it helps, but not a show stopper by any means.

I skim my pot as soon as the contents liquefy, WW,Lead, Tin, Antimony will mix at this time, skim the clips and zinc steel etc. off as soon as you can and flux and stir.

When you start pouring, you may lose enough temperature that you need to flux again and stir the metal again to keep from have separation, flux and stir often is the rule. Your melt should be around 650*, you have from 650-750* to play with, Zinc melts at +-770* so you need to get the garbage out as soon as possible.

If you suspect that you separated the mix, I would take the skim you have left and add a bit of lead to it and flux and stir to see if it will mix, if it does , pour this and keep it separate, when it hardens you can test it to see how hard it is. You may want to add some of this back to the first ingots you poured . Check them to see how hard they are.

Two quick and easy ways to test hardness, this is by no means going to tell you a lot except that you have high alloy or low. If you can scratch it easily , it has a lot of lead, if not higher alloy.
after the ingots have hardened for a couple of days, you can drop test them on a hard surface from say waist high. if they thud, lots of lead, if they ping, lots of alloy.

This is about all you can do with out a hardness checker, this is the best reason to keep track of what alloy you mix, so you have a good idea of what hardness you have.

This is not rocket science, so don't get flustered. You came a long way in a short time.
Don't waste your WW alloy, remember to flux and stir often, when smelting or casting.

Good luck and good casting.

[Buckshot]

..............will-mo, welcome to the board! When you're rendering down a bunch of WW's, before you remove all the clips and other junk, flux. A lot of lead will stick to them. Once they've been removed I'd flux again. After fluxing you'll have a beautiful brilliant shiny surface for a little bit which will begin to dull. You're seeing oxidation taking place. Once the entire surface is covered, oxidizing ceases as there is no longer anything available for oxygen to react with.

When you dip through the layer to pour another ingot you expose a fresh surface for oxides to form. I use a stainless soup ladle to pour ingots and push it backwards across the surface and then reverse and pull up a load with a bright clean surface. As you continue you'll eventually build up a sizeable bunch of dross. Time to flux again.

I flux twice (before and after skimming clips) and only thereafter when the drools and slobbers of oxides becomes a problem as I'm dipping out lead. Once the pot is down a bit more then halfway I recharge with whatever type lead I'm rendering down.

At the end of the run with maybe an inch of lead in the pot I lift it via the bail (I use a cast iron Dutch oven) and tip it resting one side up on the support ring. You'll be amazed at the amount of black dust and grains of crud that was trapped UNDER the lead. I'll dip out as much more clean lead as possible and then shut it down. Once the pot is cool I'll pull out that cresent of lead and scrape as much crud off it's underside as possible and dump the black dust and sand out of the pot.

..................Buckshot

[Bigjohn]

Will-mo, good to see you have taken the plunge so to speak. Welcome to the forum.
The other posters have beaten me to a response regarding your issue. One other method of hardness comparison is to squeeze a ballbearing between two test samples in a vice. The block with the larger indentation is the softer material.

You only need a small ballbearing for this test.

John

[armyrat1970]

Welcome will-mo. It seems you have caught the addicton. I think there is a clinic around somewhere for it but I haven't given enough time to find it. Some of your ingots have a little dross left in them but that is not a big problem. You can hardly get it all out. A lot of good responses here. The main one would probably be, get a thermometer to keep your temps below the melting point of zinc which off the top of my head I believe is around 768 F. Zinc is a no-no for your casting alloy and it shows up in a lot of the newer wws. When smelting keep your temps around 680 to 700 and remove the dross and sludge on top. Flux and stir often when pouring your ingots to keep the antimony content mixed with the alloy.
Very good job on your first try at smelting and pouring ingots.

[will-mo]

Thanks for the tips guys. Since this was my first try I figure it can only get easier. I'm going to expand my WW farm this week and hit a bunch of Service stations. As I don't have any casting equipment yet, I'm just stocking up on the raw materials..

Any recommendations on the best thermometer? I would assume the RCBS is good, but they are proud of it too.

[Buckshot]

Any recommendations on the best thermometer? I would assume the RCBS is good, but they are proud of it too.

............I've had a Lyman for the past 15 years or so and it's still doing it's job.

.................Buckshot

[armyrat1970]

............I've had a Lyman for the past 15 years or so and it's still doing it's job.

.................Buckshot

Each to his own of course in everything. I skipped over the Lyman after reading some replies on Midway about it. Not saying it is not a good one but I paid the few extra bucks and went with the RCBS.

[captaint]

Will-mo - Welcome to the madness..This can become addictive. That's what my little woman tells me "you're addicted". Yeah well I say - I'm not in the bar and I'm not chasing women, so consider yourself lucky!!! Back to the subject matter - I am quite new here too and I just got a casting thermometer from Rotometals. Cheaper than anybody else and of good quality. Mine is within 50 degrees of my Pro melt. I'm happy with that. Rotometals has info at the bottom of this page. As far as all the other stuff - what the other guys said. As you have probably seen, there are a lot of guys here that really know their stuff. They can help keep y
ou from many blunders. Enjoy pal. Mike Oops - Rotometals is at the top of this page.:bigsmyl2:

[odoh]

captiant ~ did your roto metals them come w/a clip to hold the unit to the side of the pot?

[SciFiJim]

In another thread within the last two weeks, someone mentioned another company that had a thermometer that had a swivel adjustable head with a longer probe (8 instead of 6 inches). I didn't pay that much attention at the time, now I can not find any reference to it. Does anyone know of such a thermometer?

[Fatman]

Looks like you had a really productive day. congrats

Fatman

[will-mo]

Thanks, I'll place the order for a thermometer.. I just scored another 5gal bucket of ww. Looks like another weekend of smelting... ;-)

[Cherokee]

You are doing good will-mo, welcome to the group.

[armyrat1970]

Thanks, I'll place the order for a thermometer.. I just scored another 5gal bucket of ww. Looks like another weekend of smelting... ;-)

Yeah ain't that a bummer?:drinks:

[randyrat]

Put a chunk of pure lead in the pot....If you can prevent that from melting there is no way you'll melt Zinc WWs. pure lead melts at about 621 degs WWs- Molten at 505 degs... of course the bottom of the pot is hotter than the the top. Ref..
http://www.lasc.us/CastBulletNotes.htm