Jech
08-30-2010, 09:03 PM
Had a bunch of .309" 174gr gas checked boolits in the shed waiting for me to figure out what to do with them...finally got around to melting them down and saw some new (to me) stuff happening.
They were old and had been in the heat a long time, whatever lube their original creator had used was half-melted off. I figured it would just make a convenient flux. Whatever it was, it was enough to form a deep pool on top of the melt and stay lit on fire for a very long time, it also burned very hot (indicated by a blue flame).
When it came time to pour, it filled out my 2" angle iron mold very well, it was the glassiest looking stuff I have seen yet...even after fully cooling. Also, I could pour a second ladle-full of the melt into a mold cavity but it didn't create ripples or observable layers in the final product. The surface tension was very different from the range lead I'm usually smelting.
The most interesting thing though was when I dropped out a set of ingots and one of them looked like it was "bleeding" on one side. There was a small amount of still-liquid alloy leaking out of the ingot like blood from a nasty abrasion on the knee. The ingot as a whole appeared to be fully setup, wasn't frosty or rippled, and didn't warp or bend like others I've dropped from the mold too soon. When I went to "wipe the tear" off with my glove, it disappeared O_O I could only describe it as being "reabsorbed" into the ingot. Bewildering!
Is this "glassy" surface and the unusual surface tension properties indicative of some special alloy? Normally I use significantly less paraffin wax to flux than whatever was on these boolits, did the former boolit lube actually just flux the stuff properly and now I'm seeing good clean alloy?
~ Jech
They were old and had been in the heat a long time, whatever lube their original creator had used was half-melted off. I figured it would just make a convenient flux. Whatever it was, it was enough to form a deep pool on top of the melt and stay lit on fire for a very long time, it also burned very hot (indicated by a blue flame).
When it came time to pour, it filled out my 2" angle iron mold very well, it was the glassiest looking stuff I have seen yet...even after fully cooling. Also, I could pour a second ladle-full of the melt into a mold cavity but it didn't create ripples or observable layers in the final product. The surface tension was very different from the range lead I'm usually smelting.
The most interesting thing though was when I dropped out a set of ingots and one of them looked like it was "bleeding" on one side. There was a small amount of still-liquid alloy leaking out of the ingot like blood from a nasty abrasion on the knee. The ingot as a whole appeared to be fully setup, wasn't frosty or rippled, and didn't warp or bend like others I've dropped from the mold too soon. When I went to "wipe the tear" off with my glove, it disappeared O_O I could only describe it as being "reabsorbed" into the ingot. Bewildering!
Is this "glassy" surface and the unusual surface tension properties indicative of some special alloy? Normally I use significantly less paraffin wax to flux than whatever was on these boolits, did the former boolit lube actually just flux the stuff properly and now I'm seeing good clean alloy?
~ Jech