Printable View
being relatively new to casting....i see alot of you make ingots before you cast....
question is:...do most of you smelt the lead and make the ingots for future casting because it is easier then casting right out of the block with lead and tin...just think making the ingots, makes the smelting a secondary operation.....am i right or wrong?
making the ingots then makes it quickier to cast the bullets?
The principle reason we "smelt" is to render dirty, stinkin', wheelweights to bright, shiny, metal that we want to put in our casting pots. We mostly smelt outside where the burning rubber, grease, tobacco chaws, and only God knows what else inhabits our Wheel Weight containers can be carried away by the wind:mrgreen: . Then we can, in comfort in our snug little casting huts (basement, garage, or in my case, my utility barn with dedicated, heated and cooled, casting area) without breathing noxious fumes or passing out:mrgreen: :castmine:
Putting dirty metal in a nice bottom pour pot is an invitation to dripping and clogging bottom draw valve, also. Wheelweights smelted in nice ingots also store in a much smaller space after all of the crap including but not limited to steel clips are removed. Yes, most of us use more wheelweights and recycled metals as opposed to clean metals from a refinery (its the cost, you know[smilie=1:).
Dale53
Some good introductory discussions.
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=6774
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=6520
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=6203
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=6108
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=6059
ALSO IT allows you to alloy....add a little something.... i do 100-120 lbs ww with about 5 lbs of dental lead.......all i know is the mix works well. i also have some lino/ww mix and some pure lead. all are marked. i typically use muffin tins that produce "rounds" which are about 1.1 lbs each....easy to mix an alloy from. preheat on top of the pot to minimize temp drop when adding to the pot.
As has been mentioned, most of us start with absolute crap we don't want in our homes or our casting pots. Dale got most of it, but missed the most noxious of the lot, used toilet seals.
Besides being nasty, a lot of this stuff is of unknown content. Smelt it all together, and you still don't really know what is in it, but you do know that it is the same from bar to bar. Your alloy does not change everytime you top up the pot.
so...if i were to sum up the ingot portion of smelting...it would be to purify the lead to make it castable...am i correct?
Yes, and it also allows you to create an ingot size that fits your needs. Some of us are smelting very large chunks of lead. Some of mine weighed 50 pounds.
Not so much to "purify" the lead, as to 'clean' the metal(s) of all the gunk.
I find it easier to feed another ingot instead of stacking up a bunch of wheelweights and then trying to get slag and clips out of the pot.
Tried that many years ago with a bottom pour and never again.
Also as hardness changes from batch to batch you can test each ingot and stamp its hardness for consistency when casting a batch of boolits.
Most beer cans and posts and etc won't know the difference but it still quiets the mind to know you tried for consistency.
A personal remembrance-KISS* keep it simple s----d.
*Referring to what folks told me about my programming back in the days.
Great information !
As with everything else involved in process, the closer you can stay to uniform, the better the end result will be.
Of course that includes the remaining exercises in cleaning and inspecting cases, priming, dropping powder, and setting boolits precisely.
Being a consistent shooter never hurt, either !
Best
.
I use a mini-muffin pan for a ingot mold, it fits in the lead pot better and is easier to handle.
Marking your cleaned ingots as mentioned here is a necessary step. I even use different ingot molds for different alloys. Example: a Lyman mold is cleaned WW, an RCBS is used for known bullet alloy, and mini muffin pans for pure lead. Just my way of doing it.....
Some of us start with this, or worse,
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f2...g/P1010212.jpg
and end up with this,
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f2...g/P1010215.jpg
I also like the cornbread stick ingots.Quote:
Originally Posted by 41mag
I use 11 dif ingot moulds. Each for a dif kind of lead. I use up to 9 moulds of each kind.
The moulds are just an investment, that makes ingot making faster/easier.
The regular ingot moulds make stacking and storage much easier.
I wash my wheel weights if they are as dirty as the above batch,then sort for zinc, soww, iron weights, tire valves and stems. Any suspicious weights are tested with wire cutters.
I only use a Lee mold then mark my lead with a permanent Sharpie. Wheel Weights-WW Range Lead-RL Pure Lead......etc. This way when I mix an alloy I can mark what it is and what it is for.
I melt a lot of range lead. I agree the that smelting the mess outside makes for a more pleasurable bullet casting experience indoors, but I also like to hardness test (Lee tester) the ingots. It's amazing the BHN variability you get from range lead. I sort the ingots by hardness and blend the ingots to fit the CUP of the loading application. Make sure to let the ingots rest for at least a month or two to age harden and then soften to their long term hardness. Dating the pour date on the ingots with a sharpie helps keep track of the timing.
I like to mix up large batches of alloy. I now have a 20 lb Lee pot. I melt down a pot full of ww's and cast out in ingots. Put these in one stack, Another pot full, another stack. A keep going until I run out of ww's. When I cast I fill the pot with one from each stack. I plan on cutting down a 20 lb propane tank for melting large amounts of lead These will get stacked the same way and when casting I take from each stack to get a pot full. I have large amounts of ingots of ww's, pure lead, linotype, tin and other alloys I know. Each are marked as such. I can mix and match these different alloys to make pretty much what I want.Any specific alloys are marked for hardness Most of my boolits are ww's but mixing up large batches and using a bit from each batch in a casting pot full helps maintain consistent hardness from one casting session to the next. I have just gotten into casting for rifles that are not pistol calibers. I will need to experiment more with harder alloys and will use this system to find a good alloy and to keep it consistent.Leo
I recently bought 450# of lead from an estate sale marked 90-5-5 for 60 cents a pound. the ingots were old and nasty looking. I melted them in three lots of 150# and some of the ingots boiled like a witches cauldren. I start with a pot full of ingots then bring it up to melting temp. I fluxed each batch once with sulfer and 2 - 3 times with pine sawdust to get them clean. Now I have 3 stacks of 150# of ingots which I smelted again in three batches with 50# from each stack per smelt. Now I have 450# of 1 Alloy which I'll have XRF'd so I'll know the alloys as well as the hardness. I use 10 5 cavity molds I made out of 5 1/4 long 1 1/2in angle iron cut at a bevel so they drop out of the molds easilly. these ingots stack and fit in all my pots nicely and also fit tight in a small shipping box.
In my case I cast with a small Lee Dipper pot. So once a year I have put together a batch of alloy to run with. I prefer about half COWW and half range scrap, with some tin added.
I like to leave it a little on the soft side, around that 10 bhn mark. Suitable for Pistol loads, and with the addition of a little more tin rifle.
I don't flux in my casting pot, never really seen the need. I do scrap off scum off the top a couple of times.
For years I did everything on the kitchen stove with a cast iron pan. But the little Lee Dipper pot is perfect for sitting down and casting a hundred whenever I am in the mood.
I just bought a big cast dutch oven and will be smelting a big batch one of these days.
I have 150# of COWW waiting in the wings and some range scrap.
YMMV
In my 20 lb. lee production pot, if the wheel weights are clean, they just go right in. I have about 300 lbs. of ingots right now, and since I am good on homemade shot for awhile, this will last at least 3 years. We deal with 2 big tire shops. One shop gets all kind of garbage (tobacco chew, cigarette butts, valve steps and ?) in the buckets, the other shop is very clean.
I use muffin ingots for wheelweights, corn sticks for Linotype, Lyman ingot mold for rifle alloy and Lee ingot mold for pistol alloy. This way I always know what I'm casting with.
I've been burned by not pre melting into ingots....all kinds of trash. plug a bottom pour with a 100 plus lbs in it just one time.....youll never want to do it again.
Interesting. I've found that Sharpie pretty much wipes right off of the ingots that I've cast?Quote:
Originally Posted by Avenger442
Some benefits to Smelting and or alloying in a large batch before casting are. 1) in larger batches things go faster as to cleaning and fluxing. 2) its easier to get a consistant base from the smelted scrap in large batches to work from. 3) you can alloy a larger batch of metal to what you want and have the same thing longer in the normal size pots. If you do 4 100 -150 lb pots of a given alloy and label them as to pot number and alloy pour 2 lb ingots or slightly bigger. Then when loading your pot 1 ingot from each of the alloy pots together. This makes the alloy supply effectively 400-600lds of the basic same alloy. Another reason to pre melt and smelt is to clean the trash crud and dirt from the metal before putting it in the good casting pot.
I have a 4lb lee pot so I smelt first in a much bigger rig. I make the pucks from muffin tins and they work well in the little lee pot. Also, I use a white-out pen from Dollar Tree (2 for $1) to write on the puck so I know what it consists of.
I sort range lead into cast, jacketed, plated and misc. I stamp ingots with an old screwdriver. WW, cast, jkt, plt. Mix according to how hard you want the bullets to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leftoverdj
Bingo- the homogenous stock pile.
Because this pile of pipe wouldn't fit in my little 20#electric casting pot.
Attachment 199315
For me the same as others, my lead supply is variable and sometimes somewhat cruddy. Making ingots from a batch of scrap leaves me with a cleaner and consistent pile of lead. I often use bread loaf pans to make 10# slab ingots about 1" thick. Good for storage. Those then get mixed in large batches to make the 1 - 2 pound ingots I'm going to cast with. I do generally pour some of the big batches of raw material into muffin tins or angle iron molds, just to have some smaller sized chunks for getting weight right for a recipe. I use the alloy calculator from here to figure out what my mix will yield, and try and get my stuff tested at the scrap yard.
Making a 50 or 100 pound batch of some alloy which I then have gunned makes for a consistent casting process (temp and tempo) as well as consistent results (weight, size, hardness). And if I like it I can use the same mix again. 32# of that and 60# of this plus 3# of that solder is a lot easier than trying to do that as 1/5 those amounts to make a 20# batch in the casting pot. I can be a 1/2 pound off on something and in a 100# batch it doesn't matter much. With 3# of solder if the solder is 30% Sn or 33% Sn won't really change the percentage of Sn in that 100# pot.
I can add a couple of pounds of alloy ingots to the casting pot as I use it up. Beats having to finish a pot and try to mix another small batch that matches the first.
I can pull a couple of bread loaf pans worth of dross and clips out of a 100# batch of COWW's and that would be stuff I don't want in the same pot I cast from. We don't even want to talk about the dross from that pipe. Lime scale was the nice part of it.
This was a very good read for me. Thanks
The Tinsel Fairy can hide in the unsmelted lead and empty a pot of lead all over. I never put anything in my casting pot that I haven't smelted.
I see the corn ingots all over the place where is everyone getting them?
Those were cast in cast iron molds intended for corn bread. You can probably buy them new but I have found them at flee markets and garage sales.
And just like the muffin tins, loaf pans and Dutch ovens we repurpose for our casting needs, never to be used fo food service again.
I just browsed through EBay and found several listed. What with the price with shipping added I would just shop around for the cheapest price and buy several of the Lyman style molds. The few cornbread molds that I used to use were harder to dump than my Lyman molds were. And they stack better.Quote:
Originally Posted by lightman
I have smelted lead in my Lee bottom pour pot. It actually worked ok. It limits your quantity. I poured the lead into a Lee ingot mold. At the end of the session you give the pot a cleaning with steel wool wrapped around a stick. Might have to check the inside spout area for debris and scrape that away, but all-in-all it worked good enough for me. I bought a used pot just for smelting.
I can't smelt large amounts because of where I live, but I can get away with doing it in the Lee bottom pour pot.