First Melting - How do I start? and finish?

[WRideout]

Welcome Mountain Meadow. When I built my shed in the back forty, I designed it with the specific purpose of being an all-year boolit casting center. That said, I installed an unused bathroom fan over the casting bench (like someone else said) and run the exhaust through a homebuilt HEPA filter. There are two ways you can pick up lead; vapors from lead that is overheated, or dust that is on surfaces you touch. Part of the recommendation for not casting indoors is that no matter how careful you are, some lead will always escape and be deposited in the vicinity. I continue to find lead splatters around my casting bench so I confine my boolit making the that location. Smoke is another matter. If you are rendering scrap lead, some if it can be pretty well contaminated with stuff that smolders rather than burns. Stuff like that I do outside.

Wayne

[BLAHUT]

propane turkey fryer and an old cast iron Duch oven. I use a mushroom can as a dipper on the end of a copper pipe, poured into browney pan for mold, beef tallow for flux.

[uscra112]

Something nobody ever mentions is to have a bucket of cold water within a couple of steps of your casting bench. Pray you never get burned, but if you do, cooling a burn immediately (within seconds) will minimize the damage.

[David2011]

with no intent argue or disparage, but besides the additional off gassing of chemicals, what is the downside of using most any pine based saw dust. From a totally non-technical standpoint those glues or whatever would seem to add the carbons we want for fluxing.

The entire issue IS the offgassing of the noxious compounds created by burning the glues. They can be inert (unlikely), toxic or carcinogenic.

I don’t worry about solid bits of lead lying around the casting area. They clean up easily and have no impact with reasonable hygiene. The white powder, lead oxide, is more problematic. It’s easily inhaled. There’s nothing in my reloading room capable of heating lead to the point of making vapors.