First smelting - couple questions

[goon]

So I finally got enough stuff together to smelt some lead down today. I still don't have everything to cast any bullets, but I'm OK with taking my time.
Anyhow, I got about a hundred and fifty pounds of sheet lead a couple years ago from a retired chiropractor who'd had it in his X-ray room. Now that I have a good cast iron pot and a ladle I picked up a couple weeks ago I figured why not build a fire in the fire pit and see what I could do with it.
Long story short, I did get it hot enough to melt and I poured some muffin-pan ingots out of it.
First, I'm seeing some bluish case-hardening looking pattern on my ingots. I read on here that this coloring is from overheating the lead. This isn't a surprise because I have basically no temperature control at this point. The lead is still easily scratched with my fingernail and I've read the bluish color will go away if I flux at the right temp and mix it back in, so I'm not real worried about it. Should I be?
Second, I'm noticing a lot of dirt. It's kind of reddish and almost looks like rust or something like that. I'm fluxing with old candles I had around, then stirring the flux down into the lead with a piece of thin oak I have, then skimming the dirt off with my ladle before pouring the ingots. But there is an awful lot of it. Is this normal?

[sagacious]

...
The lead is still easily scratched with my fingernail and I've read the bluish color will go away if I flux at the right temp and mix it back in, so I'm not real worried about it. Should I be?
Don't just stir it back in-- that can make remedying it by fluxing more difficult. Melt the ingots and flux with paraffin, but do not stir the melt before fluxing. The blue color is normal with pure lead, and sometimes it's difficult to totally prevent when melting pure lead. SOP is to pour ingots at the lowest practical temp.

Second, I'm noticing a lot of dirt. It's kind of reddish and almost looks like rust or something like that. I'm fluxing with old candles I had around, then stirring the flux down into the lead with a piece of thin oak I have, then skimming the dirt off with my ladle before pouring the ingots. But there is an awful lot of it. Is this normal?
Normal. Just flux, stir, and skim off the powdery dross.

Pay special attention to your heat control. You can get a thermometer, but note that as you gain proficiency, the molten lead itself will tell you what it's doing-- such as the color of the melt, the ingots, etc. Good luck.

[shooterchris]

I may be wrong, but when I started I was getting a lot of the dusty red dross on the top of the pot during casting. I bought a Lee Drip-o-matic with a thermostat on it. I set the thermostat a little over half way and proceeded to start casting. It seemed like every 10 minutes I was getting a thick red dusty dross on the top of the pot. I skimmed it off and kept going. At the time I was only casting for pistol boolits and the shot well so I wasn't concerned. When I started casting rifle bullets I bought a casting thermometer. Turns out that I was getting the lead way too hot. Got the temp under controll and the red dross went away.

[goon]

The too high temp is almost a certainty. I was smelting over an open fire in the back yard stoked with dry hardwood with a couple cinderblocks to reflect most of the heat back on the pot. It actually started to bubble a little at one point. I'm not too concerned with it for now since I'm just smelting to get this stuff from big sheets into manageable ingots, but I'll keep your advice in mind when I get an actual pot and moulds and start making real bullets. FWIW, I'm planning to use this stuff for round balls for a muzzleloader when I get one.

[lwknight]

Don't worry about the blue color. It just means that your lead is the purest of the pure.
Nothing to do with being too hot.
Oxidizing grade pure lead. Ummm mmm.. Lucky you!!

[goon]

Thanks.
I weighed some of my muffin ingots today and am getting an average of about 2 pounds 2 ounces per ingot. I have 42 of them from this run plus about ten pounds left in the pot, so I've easily got 90 pounds with maybe fifty more left to smelt.
Definitely worth the $20 I paid for it in my unschooled opinion.

[dragonrider]

$20 was a bargain, you done good.