Homemade lead dropper?

[leadman]

You can contact shutzen here on the board for a very good price on graphite, or buy it from an art supply store.

I use All Free & Clear laundry detergent to drop my shot in. Makes the most round pellets of anything I tried, and washes off easily with water.

[grages]

Russel,

Thanks for the reply, I still trying to visualize it all.

Shawn

I went to the local welding store/supplier and bought wire welding tips. They are made by Tweeco and have an orifice size of 0.024" .

The drippers themselves are ordinary hardware store bolts. I first started out with 1/2" diameter bolts....meaning that the threaded part of the bolts, the shank, was a 1/2".

The problem with that was that the heads on those bolts was/were only 0.300" thick.

The Tweeco wire welding tips have an outside diameter of a quarter inch, exactly 0.250".

When I would take a center punch to one of the flats, I would just eyeball it...

0.300"

- 0.250"
______
= .050"
divide by 2 = 0.025 worth of wiggle room on each side of the hole.

So I redrilled the "dam" on my laddle to accept 5/8" bolts, which gave me a thicker head to drill through.

The next evolution of drippers will probably get drilled and tapped all the way through or across the flats for a 1/4X28 (fine thread) bolt/screw.

Then I am going to try screwing in the Tweeco wire welding tips. They already have a 1/4X28 thread on one end.

I was just cutting them in half or thirds and inserting them into the 1/4" hole. Then I would take the center punch and pin prick the steel around the copper tip to hold the tip in place.

Then I had a 1/4X20 allen headed bolt/screw up top that would act like a valve.

Opening it up, as you can see in the video, gives more "head pressure" to the top of the Tweeco wire welding tip, and so the lead drips even faster.

Screwing the bolt in, closes off most of the head pressure to the top of the wire welding tip, and in some cases keeps the lead from dripping at all.

What I had noticed was that once lead would stall out on the ramp, then that one spot would become a problem child and would eventually lead to the lead clumping on that same exact spot. So having the screws on the drippers lets me shut off that one problem dripper, and then the rest can keep on dripping.

Until it becomes a big enough aggravation that the majority of the drippers or the spots below the drippers are clumping up. Then I would just rather shut the whole danged thing down.

Then let it cool.

Clean the ramp off completely. Take the scotch brite pad on the right angle grinder to it. Then the buffing wheel.

Then I spray it down with graphite spray.

I wasn't having much luck with soapstone or chalk. When I went to graphite spray, I had much better results.

I still get some clump-age going on, that's why I added the mesh basket into the coolant tank. It lets the good stuff go through, and the bad stuff gets caught in the basket.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that the bolts or drippers have two holes drilled in them. One goes across the flats like I described above. The other goes right down through the shank of the bolt and just barely stops short of going all the way through the face of the bolt.

So basically, the two drilled holes intersect, and the molten lead is made to make this sharp right turn into the top of the Tweeco wire welding tip.

[Russel Nash]

Okay, I will try to explain it a little better.

Since the hole or orifice to drip shot out of needs to be in the 0.020" to 0.024" range, I found it easier to use Tweeco wire welding tips, than to buy really super skinny drill bits and try drilling through the flat of the hex head bolt.

Well, technically, I could drill from the top flat of the bolt with a 1/4" bit almost all the way through to the bottom flat, but stop short by about an 1/8", then start trying to drill from the bottom flat with a #80 or so drill bit.

Then the other hole gets drilled, axially, (like an axle) down through the threaded shaft/shank of the bolt, but that hole stops short, barely, of going out through the top or the face (of the head) of the bolt (ya, know where they stamp those letters and tick marks on them).

In the past when I have drilled this hole through the shank, I have gone with whatever bit was the biggest that would leave the threads intact. Having a metal lathe with a chuck would help, because then the bit or end mill chucked into the tail stock would be perfectly centered on the shank.

I was just eyeballing what I thought was center, taking a punch to it, and then drilling it on the drill press. So, yeah, I ruined a few bolts when the bit took out the root of the threads... you could see through part of the bolt.

I think next time though, I will just go with a 1/4" bit, so that jives up with the 1/4" hole drilled through the flats. When that smaller screw gets screwed down through the flat, maybe it would do a better job of sealing off the lead and keep that bad dripper from dripping when I need it to.

[lka]

Hi, I'm new here, I joined to Continue this, I am too getting ready to mess with making shot, I want to try rigging up something myself before buying a built rig.